Pace Yourself
We’re already months into a hard time, and it may seem no easier or more routine. Some aspect of what we’re experiencing now will be in place for a long time—months at least, and maybe through 2021 in a more limited fashion, if not beyond.
It’s important to your long-term well-being that you treat your current work-from-home situation as the beginning of marathon, not a sprint.
Because that’s the reality of the situation, try to keep tweaking your new working situation. Bosses and employers may have become more understanding—or less. We’ve seen the pressure of social media in forcing companies to change what were initially restrictive policies.
Weeks or months into working from home full-time, you may have settled into a new normal and feel somewhat productive, if not yet back to your old levels. Or you might find remote work freeing, and you’re radically happier and more productive—and may be able to argue for a change for yourself when the global crisis winds down.
Pacing is key across all this, starting with how you manage your day and how you briefly stop working to stretch, eat, or zone out. Or even nap. Your regular work hours have likely turned out to not be ideal for the flow of home life, whether you’re solo or surrounded by people. Have you tried changing hours? Can you still tweak your schedule?
And, vitally, set a line between work and non-work, especially if you regained time by losing a commute.
Structure Your Day
You can find a vast amount of advice in books and on websites about techniques for breaking your work day or projects into approachable pieces, offering you structure that might otherwise have been provided in a work environment. What’s wonderful is that anything you learn at this stage will pay dividends in the future, no matter where you’re physically performing your job.
Set Working Sprints
Many, many people swear by sprints, where you define a period of time and work intently or intensively—depending on the task and your personality—at which point you break.
One of the best-known variants on this is the Pomodoro Technique, named for the tomato (pomodoro in Italian) timer that its developer Francesco Cirillo cited in the early 1990s.
It’s simple: Define a task. Set a timer for 25 minutes. When it goes off, note that (as simply as making a check on a piece of paper), and take a break of around five minutes. After three or four sprints, take a longer break. Do what you can to eliminate distractions during each sprint.
You can use other periods of the time for interruptive activities, like checking email and working across multiple windows and devices. Or you can turn those into sprints, too.
Sprints don’t work for everyone! Some people like to get into a state of flow and carry out a task for hours on end, sometimes forgetting to eat and drink during that period. I know that laying out pages of a magazine or book can put me into that sort of mode, and many writers, artists, and programmers are generally familiar with that kind of productive fugue state. You don’t have to fight it if it works for you.
Turn Off Distractions
You will want to disable distractions to focus during sprints or flows of work. Here are a number of ways to help with that:
Use the “do not disturb” feature common in most operating systems. With this feature, nearly all notifications, pop-ups, bings, pings, and bleeps stop.
Where feasible, stick to one app at a time to avoid context changes that can interrupt your thinking unless it’s part of a workflow that you can use seamlessly and comfortably.
Use the full-screen mode on a window so that it occupies the entire display. If that’s not useful for formatting or puts too much white space in front of you, hide all apps except the one you’re using.
Install software on a desktop computer that can let you set a timer to block all social media or other categories of software or even turn off internet access entirely for a period of time. One of the earliest examples of such software is Freedom, which is available for nearly every operating system and browser.
Several people suggested one change in particular all the time: disable automatic email retrieval, quit your mail app, or disable notifications.
Writer Antony Johnston, whose graphic novel The Coldest City was turned into the movie Atomic Blonde, said: “Unless replying to emails is literally your job (e.g., customer support, etc.) then do not leave your email app open all the time. Open it only when you actually want to check and reply to mails; otherwise close it down. You’ll immediately experience less distraction.”
Co-Work Remotely
Even though you’re apart from your co-workers, you can still have some quiet company. You can certainly use people who you don’t work with, either, who are also now working from home.
App-developer strategic consultant Aleen Simms said that she works with a friend and colleague this way during normal work-from-home periods. They have the video on and microphones muted. They check in at regular intervals, synchronizing sprints and discussing what they’re about to do. This provides accountability to someone else and is a well-liked tactic for people with ADHD.
Various videoconferencing apps can be used either one-on-one or to create a quiet virtual room of people. One person with a paid Zoom account can create an open “room” that people can enter and leave through the day (see Communicate with Video). It also lets you know at a glance if someone’s available or busy if you need to consult with them.
Take Breaks
When you’re working, you should be working all the time, right? That’s what work is? Wrong, wrong, and, for good measure, wrong. While humans seem to be optimized for “occupation”—doing something, anything, for some of the day—we’re also creatures who need rest, a break, and down time. Even a little helps a lot.
If you don’t want to adopt the sprint approach, you can still set a timer so that at a regular interval or after a certain period of time from whenever you start it, you remember to stop what you’re doing.
You have a million options for what to do, but home workers focused on a computer or mobile device in particular need to move around:
Stand up, stretch, and walk around.
It’s safe to be outside with social distancing and a mask (where appropriate or required). Leave the house! Stand on a balcony, take a walk while remaining far from other people, breathe fresh air.
Have solo dance parties.
Engage in brief yoga, aikido, tai chi (and drink chai tea), or other body work, even if it’s just a two-minute or five-minute stretch.
Meditate.
Read a few pages of something for pleasure.
Make lunch or have a snack.
Make coffee, tea, or another beverage.
Author Jeff Carlson said that his wife, who prior to this period only worked a day a week at home, found she moves substantially less than in the office. He relates, “If you work in an office with people, you’re likely to be in motion more: going to other people’s desks and meeting rooms, getting coffee in the break room, etc. When you’re at home, those actions aren’t available, so you may need to be mindful about moving around, even if you have to remind yourself to do it.”
With a wireless headset, you might be able walk around while on conference calls or speaking with colleagues and clients. If you have a cat, you can devote time to playing with it (if it will be awake at the time you need, which of course it never will be). Own a dog? It’s time for a walk.
Tonya Engst, co-founder of TidBITS Publishing, reminds us that instead of eating from a food truck or grabbing sandwiches for lunch, we can prepare a meal. “Many people will still want to eat fast,” she notes, “But think how much time you’ll save by not commuting—then use that time to cook.”
Revel in Flexibility
Despite all the downside and stress, the upside is that you may be able to reshape your work to fit you better. You might be more productive, happier, and develop a better balance of work and personal time, even with—really, because of—an enforced change in your routine and greater flexibility that your employer really has to cope with.
Mix Business and Personal Activities
Didn’t I say in an earlier chapter to set boundaries? Isn’t that chapter named Set Boundaries and Preserve Professionalism? Yes, but that chapter and the upcoming section, Preserve Time Outside of Work, are about defining a place and time to work and keeping your life protected against employer demands.
The flip side is that with more and different time to chop up across a working day or period, you can sometimes kill two birds with one stone.
Christopher Phin offered this advice: “Do the things you can’t do when you’re in an office. That might be sticking a load of laundry on to save you the work later in the evening, or it might be taking an hour-long cycle at 9 A.M. and making up the time later.”
Perhaps you want to buy a cut of meat that requires a long time to roast, because it’s the only thing in the shop, it’s affordable, and you can feed the whole family with it? You can set it going and leave it largely unattended with a timer (or perhaps multiple ones) as you work through the day and get to enjoy the smell.
Or perhaps you want to prepare an Instant Pot dish full of veggies for part of a lunch or evening repast. In a break, you could clean and process them, and stick them in the pot—or in the fridge to pull out and drop in later.
You don’t have to feel as if you’re shortchanging your work day when you move time around or use breaks. You can also try a bigger change in the time you work, as discussed next.
Shift Hours
If your workplace is amenable, you may try to split up your work or shift hours. You may have found by now that your old routine needs a spiff-up, and weeks in may be the time to ask for it if you haven’t yet.
Some businesses thrive on live access to coworkers; others are task-based or driven by independent initiative. If you can work far better by starting work at 5 P.M. and working until 1 A.M.—by sleeping later with the support of your partner, family, nanny, or kids who can take care of their own morning—why not?
You might also be able to use an adjusted daily schedule to go for a long walk, a run, or a bike ride at a time that’s ideal when working from home but otherwise infeasible.
Some people might thrive with “four 10s” (four 10-hour days a week) to mesh with other people’s or home schedules. Others might want “three 13s,” in which you do long 13-hour days, but work just six days in any 14-day period. (It’s common in some professions, like nursing.)
You might also want to trade weekend days for weekdays, since the distinction between the two may be blurred right now. Figure out what might work best, and talk to your employer about whether it’s possible.
Preserve Time Outside of Work
Two unique situations arise from suddenly becoming a remote worker. First, if you had a commute of more than a few minutes, the time you regain can be significant. I know many people who have a 90- or 120-minute round-trip commute every day—if all the buses, ferries, and trains run on time.
Some people do enjoy their commute: they bike or walk part of it, they like listening to podcasts or music or reading while en route, or they use some of the time to get a start on the day on email or other work so they feel less harried when they arrive at their place of business. They lose those benefits, and will have to adjust.
Other folks—I think most—have a commute longer than they want or they don’t want a commute at all. The time returned is a gift. Don’t let work turn that time into more work time, or erode all your time at home as “work time.”
Dylan Wilbanks advises, “Use the extra time to do things you wouldn’t be able to do with your commute. Make yourself breakfast. Make coffee or tea. Take a walk. Do yoga. Read a book. You have the time now.”
Second, and partly as a consequence, your work might be even more likely to try to erode the space between work and non-work. With the loss of a commute, your company or boss might decide that’s time that you “owe back” to working hours.
Poppycock!
As I advise throughout the book, it’s more important than ever to set boundaries with your employer, though I know that it can be fraught to fight back, especially when companies will be under extraordinary stress and layoffs may be common. Nonetheless, you have a right to your well being, even in complicated times.
A boss may decide that in a two-worker household, each partner can lean on the other. Kimberly Holst, who works for her state government, recalled, “I once said I needed to go pick up and stay home with a sick kid. My boss wanted to know why my husband couldn’t deal with it since he was home. I had to remind him that while he was at home—he was also at work.”