Working from home and staying sane: What not to do

As mentioned yesterday, I’m going to wrap this series up with a quick overview of the things I would avoid as much as possible. I’ve tried most of them and they did not make me happy; obviously, we’re all different, and you might find that these are the very things that get you through this trying time, so who am I to tell you otherwise? As always with these posts, you know yourself best, and I am only sharing what works for me and how I approach making choices.

I also want to re-state my caveat from the first day, which is to say that I enjoy relatively good mental (and physical) health. Please keep this in mind as you read my thoughts, and where your experiences differ significantly from mine, please don’t feel like you “should” be doing or feeling anything different. This applies double extra plus if you receive treatment for any condition whatsoever, please DO stick to whatever has been prescribed for you!

The first item on my list is binging. Urgh, I know, starting with the tough things!! I am fully aware that we all have displacement activities and we’re all just trying to get through the day and feel okay about ourselves, and sometimes it means doing a good thing a bit too much. I have been there, and I will be there again – but on my good days, I practice moderation even with the things I love. I think that culturally, we have a lot of language around “treating” ourselves, “binging” series and sweets, “deserving” that glass of wine, and being “addicted” to games, shopping or our phones; I am pretty suspicious of such language, I have to say. I’m not talking about actual addictions here; it just strikes me that we collectively appropriate the language of addiction for things we don’t necessarily feel good about doing but give ourselves a pass on anyway. That whole “guilty pleasure” idea is what I mean here. So, let me be clear – I am NOT in favour of denying ourselves pleasure! Quite the opposite! What I think is good practice is to be mindful of our choices, to enjoy the hell out of whatever we have chosen, and not to use displacement activities all the time if what we really need to do is to feel the emotions that we’ve been avoiding. In that sense, binging TV, books, food, drink, games, snacks, etc. etc. is not a thing that makes me feel good about myself when I’ve done it; really deeply enjoying and appreciating a good show, a well-written book, my favourite food, a tasty drink or snack is one of the outstanding pleasures of my life, and I wish that pleasure for you, too!

Next item: spiralling thoughts. To me, this is somewhat related to the topic above, in the sense that we can indulge in certain thoughts without moderation, too. I don’t think that’s confined only to “negative” thoughts, worries, and anxiety; another trap I have found is spinning out on fantasies or happy memories. When things feel a bit tough, or boring, or overwhelming, who hasn’t retreated into their thoughts as an alternative? But in parallel to what I said before, there comes a point when overindulging becomes a net negative, so it’s smart self-management to create boundaries around how long to dwell in thoughts, dreams, feelings, memories, and so on. For example, it can be very effective to set a time limit, to really experience whatever it is within that period and then come out of it again. Maybe it’s a good idea to find a therapist or counsellor to provide an outside boundary, and developing a meditation practice can help with distancing oneself from one’s thoughts (i.e. recognising that thoughts are just thoughts, not reality, and that I can choose to listen to them or not). Freelancers with deadlines also have an externally enforced limit here, one I personally find very helpful because I then have a point at which I simply have to become fully functional and responsive, which in itself can break me out of a funk.

It’s also possible to go the opposite way and attempt to stuff down all feelings, try to be high functioning all the time, and to imagine that there must come that happy day when one no longer has any problems whatsoever. This is a fantasy! Life is a series of problems, and this becomes very obvious once habitual coping mechanisms are removed.

The best strategy I’ve found so far is to be smart about these things and to aim for balance. A useful tactic could be to take some time when things are feeling good to make a list of things that can be helpful in breaking out of a low mood or binging. I’m not sure who said it, but “move a muscle, change a thought” is good advice: go for a walk or a run, or dance around your living room to your favourite uplifting tunes, and see if that changes your mood any. This is one small way in which working from home can actually be a benefit, since in most offices, you aren’t free to do those things when the mood takes you. Ditto, naps! Naps are awesome. Over the years, I’ve learned when to push myself into completing work and when to back off and try again another time – basically by trial and error (aka “messing up”), so I’d encourage you to stay flexible around this idea and not demand perfection of yourself from the start. You will figure out what works for you, of that I’m sure!

As a bonus, here are some other takes on this new situation we find ourselves in:

• The World Health Organizations’s one-pager on “Coping with stress during the 2019-nCoV outbreak” (which I believe is from a longer PDF)
• A Newcomers Guide To Social Distancing And Working Remotely from Wear Your Voice
• Work in the Time of Corona by Alice Goldfuss

If you find more guides that are useful to you, please share them with me!

Back to the overview post.

Working from home and staying sane: Staying Connected

So far this week, I’ve talked about how to be productive when working from home and how to keep your body and your mind in good nick. Now we come to the next area: social life, or the “social” in “social distancing”. I want to preface this post by saying that I’m a fairly introverted person, as should be obvious by my choice of career and working style. I was introverted when I was a child, too, much more content sticking my nose into a book than dealing with groups of people. My parents strongly encouraged me to at least try to interact, though, so I had to develop social skills and ended up with a very large social network by my 20s. And because that was the 1990s, it was all in-person – in other words, I have experienced both large-group, in-person socialising (including working in large offices) and being by myself about 90% of the time, with very limited in-person meet-ups with one or maybe two people at a time, and various configurations in between. They all work, and they all require slightly different skills. Speaking to the extroverts here: I know you may find it difficult and unsettling not to have large groups to surround yourself with for a while, but it doesn’t have to be distressing, lonely, isolated, or negative.

We live in the age of social media, so that may seem like the obvious solution here: but I want to point out some problems and areas worth considering carefully. Hopefully, everyone knows about the many options for managing who you are in contact with, from unfriending and blocking people who are actively harming you, to unfollowing those you don’t want to confront but also don’t want to interact with too much. I will say as well that, as things change, it’s always worth paying careful attention to how you feel about what you see on your social media feed: do you feel uplifted or stressed? Do you experience FOMO, envy, jealousy, bullying? If so, here is your permission slip to stop reading anything and everything that makes you feel awful about yourself. I am not talking about creating only echo bubbles of people who agree with you – it’s not a good move for your mental development, but you do you! If you need this for a while, go for it! – but I do think it’s a good idea to remove people from your circle who always leave you feeling depleted. Curate your online spaces to inspire and support you. Ideally, stay away from people who peddle misinformation, especially if it’s being used to sell stuff or create an overall feeling of fear and anxiety. Be extra careful about following celebrities and realise they are only human beings, too: they aren’t more special than you just because a lot of people look at them.

The second thing I want to say about social media is that it’s good to be aware that everything is heavily edited there. Of course people post only/mainly their highlights and/or carefully stage what they want others to see, we know this. Consider all things to be types of marketing and propaganda, especially when people receive monetary rewards for their posts. The other part of this point is that the media we ingest via our screens lack aspects of in-person interaction: if we are social animals, we are primarily geared towards having our bodies in the same meatspace (to use an old cyberpunk term), and this aspect bears careful consideration in times of social distancing. There isn’t an awful lot that can replace a hug or a kiss! So consider how and with whom you might meet those needs, and when and how you can separate them from verbal and visual social contact. The latter falls under a broad category of human need I’d call sense-making: we are (also) story-telling organisms, our brains are very much geared towards narrating our lives as a way of making sense of and to ourselves, and this includes aspects like (the passage of) time and cause-and-effect chains. Social media are largely storytelling spaces, and their success is partly due to their capacity to meet this deep human need. Can you instrumentalise your social media channels in the service of storytelling? And/or what aspects of your friendships can you adequately experience without meeting in person?

A kind of halfway house – or “uncanny valley”, depending on your view – is telephone calls. The benefit to them is that they are spontaneous and less heavily edited than written communication, and they add the nuances of voice back into the equation. My personal preference is video calls: I find it easier to understand people when I can see their faces, partly because I augment my hearing with lip-reading. I’ve already mentioned virtual co-working as a productivity hack: I also like video chats as a way of being mostly physically present with someone without breathing the same air… or being in the same country.

Given that in-person hangouts with large groups of people are pretty much the worst when it comes to containing viral epidemics, the question is, how can we still share group experiences? I’m seeing a lot of interesting things pop up these days, from broadcast concerts (many for free) to heavier use of Discord, video conferencing and webinars, online learning, and so on. If you do find yourself with a lot more time these days, switch off Netflix for a hot second and think: What do you want to learn? What could you teach? Where might you find people who share your interests, and how might you hang out with them if you no longer need to be in the same physical location? I gotta tell you, as an early adopter of internet socialising from about 1995 onwards, there are a LOT of weird and wonderful people out there who are interested in the same things as you! I know that many online spaces can be toxic, but it is always worth seeking out those that are well-moderated. If you did not have to expend your social energy on irritating colleagues, what kinds of people could you find and befriend?

The last point I want to make in this post is to be very, very careful about the media you consume. If it wasn’t clear from everything I’ve said above, I strongly advocate for curating your input in every way you can, ideally by checking in with your emotions and your body whenever you consume anything. I would make this point doubly and triply when it comes to (mainstream / broadcast) media. It’s one thing to spend time listening to your friends share their lived experiences; it’s quite another to give your attention to professional communicators whose motivations for sharing information may not be transparent. This is the age of “fake news”, memes and misinformation: be critical of what you read, pull people up when they spread misinformation, and keep your wits about you. If you feel a compulsion to keep watching the news, consider reflecting on that and deciding whether this habit makes your life better or worse.

In summary, then, here are some aspects of social contact I think about:

• socialising for making meaning: how can you narrate your life now?
• socialising in the form of bodies sharing space: what are your needs for physical contact, and how can you meet them without the risks of group situations?
• socialising as input: how can you give space to your friends’ needs to narrate their lives? How will you curate the input you receive from all forms of media?
• balancing input and output: what do you want to learn? What could you teach? What do you want to create?

In my first two blog posts, I shared mostly recommendations for things I find helpful and useful; this third post has featured more of a mix of stuff I recommend and aspects I’m wary of; the fourth and final post will be entirely about things I think are worth limiting, removing, and otherwise not engaging with at all. See you for that tomorrow!

Back to the overview post.

Working from home and staying sane: Staying Well

Today is about the other side of the work-life balance scales: staying well. As mentioned before, a radical change in routines can be hard to deal with, so how can you make it easier on yourself when you’re suddenly home all the time?

First, a note of caution: if like me you start by thinking “haha, now I can do ALL THE THINGS!”, please stop now. Yes, you may, given enough time, be able to tackle those projects you always think you might like to do, from decluttering or redecorating your home to finally doing that art / craft project or reading that giant pile of books. But it won’t happen today, or even tomorrow: you are better off planning to do it in small stages. And, most of all, not punishing yourself if you don’t get it all done right away!

What can you do if you wake up in a funk, can’t make yourself do much of anything at all, then get super stressed later on because you’re feeling unproductive?

Routines to the rescue! Especially and explicitly, morning routines. You already have one – whatever it looks like, from a calm hour with meditation and breakfast, to a mad dash to catch that bus – so now is a good time to think about whether you want to change anything about it. However long your office will be closed is how long you have to settle into a new routine! Again, with caution: changing every aspect at once may be a bit much to cope with… or just the change you need.

Everybody – from Marie Claire to Forbes and Buffer – has already published articles on morning routines, and it really cannot be overstated how effective they are in getting you started on the things that are most important to you. So, by all means take some inspiration from others, but also don’t get stuck in planning the “perfect” one: better to add one small thing and do it consistently, than try for too many hard things at once. You will give up and feel bad about yourself if you’re anything like me. That said, before I got serious about my meditation practice again, I got a lot out of Gala Darling’s approach to Sacred Mornings (or check out the Girlboss version) – good if you’re an entrepreneur and/or into the Law of Attraction / manifesting your dream life.

My personal morning routine doesn’t happen at a fixed time – lots of people like regular slots, it drives me utterly batty – but I do have a sequence that I stick to most of the time:

1. feed my cat and make coffee
2. toilette/ablutions/purifications… whatever you want to call it
3. meditation, 30-60 minutes
4. dress, make my bed

The second tool that helps me with routines is Habitica, which is… well, your life as an RPG:

“Habitica is a video game to help you improve real life habits. It “gamifies” your life by turning all your tasks (habits, dailies, and to-dos) into little monsters you have to conquer. The better you are at this, the more you progress in the game. If you slip up in life, your character starts backsliding in the game.”

For some reason I am unable to fully explain, making sure I drink my water and eat proper meals and check my bank accounts every so often is something I struggle to do for myself, but as soon as a little cartoon avatar is involved that receives imaginary damage when I don’t do what I’ve decided I want to do, it’s a whole different game. Anyway, if RPGs are your thing and you’re the sort of person who enjoyed getting gold stars for menial tasks, check it out.

I’ve touched a little on what kinds of things I construct routines around, so let’s go more into that:

• Water: everyone knows you must drink your water, there are apps, go do the thing.
• Food: I am gonna guess we all know about food, and it’s too contentious an issue for me to get into specific recommendations here. Do your thing. I will add, though, that those ideals I had of three home-made meals a day? Yeah, nope, ain’t nobody got time for that! If you know how to pre-cook in batches and all that, I salute you, pls teach me yr ways. I use Huel for one or two meals a day and then really look forward to the other one/s. And yes, I do give myself a gold star every day I manage the full three meals… this is genuinely hard for me!
• Exercise: the main thing I do is walk! No cost, little effort, no extra gear… I’m in. If you have a dog, you’re streets ahead already! That said, if you usually go to the gym and now need to self-isolate, I have recommendations of what to try: my favourite place to go for exercise plans and community, and which BTW is FREE (and takes donations), is Darebee: every level from totally inactive to Super Saiyan, a lot of bodyweight-only plans, video instruction, gamified exercise,… and all for FREE, did I mention that? Amazing resource!
  Adriene from Yoga with Adriene (YouTube channel) is well-known for beginner and intermediate yoga, if that’s something you want to try; “pop Pilates” and HIIT at Blogilates (YouTube) or in their app. There’s a stack of other options because online training is the New Hot Thing in exercise.
• Sleep and rest: very important!! I’ve had bouts of insomnia all my life and am perhaps not the best person to advise here, so let me just ask this: if your working life to date has featured too little sleep and too much stress, could not going to the office for a few weeks maybe offer an opportunity to catch up and settle into a lower-stress, more restful life? Also: naps are great!
• Mental health: changes in routine + pandemic anxiety sounds like they could impact anyone’s mental health, so perhaps this is a good time to see what virtual support options are available to you. When I moved from the UK to Germany, I had weekly Skype sessions with my therapist to ease me through the transition and found it massively helpful. Other practices that are good for me: journaling; gratitude practices, art or craft practices, spiritual practices. I enjoy good mental health generally, so I probably don’t know much about your specific situation, which you are of course best placed to manage. I would only suggest that you consider what sort of support you need and how to get it when you’re staying home.
• Leisure: let’s not forget that being at home might mean more time to re-engage with your hobbies! Again, you know yourself best – my only tip is to balance online working with things that are off-line, physical, possibly creative. Maybe if you’re staring at screens all day, you could aim for something different than Netflix in your relaxation time?

Phew. I hope this is somewhat useful! Today is honestly a bit of a struggle around here, which is also why this post is up much later than I’d intended. If you want more info on anything I mentioned, let me know in the comments or on social media… and the “social” in social media is also my next topic, which I plan to publish tomorrow.

Back to the overview post.

Working from home and staying sane: Productivity

This post is especially for those who have been asked to work from home, and who are wondering how to keep up productivity without the benefit of being in your regular space, e.g. an office or desk, that tends to put you into “work mode”.

Obviously, I don’t know your home set-up: do you have a dedicated office or desk just for work? That can be immensely helpful here. While it’s entirely possible to run whole companies from the Boffice (bed + office) and in your pyjamas, for some, this can lead to a hellish spiral of low productivity (because you’re in a leisure space) + negative impact on sleep (because your bed is no longer associated purely with sleep). By all means, give it a go, but look for alternatives if you find yourself spiralling. And one tiny hack I use is to keep a separate Windows user profile for my work: different desktop wallpaper, different apps, passwords for social media sites not saved and hard to access. Even if it doesn’t work in the first five minutes, now that I’ve used it over and over, it affects my head space and therefore my self-discipline.

Similarly, how are you scheduling your work time? The risks here are being “always on”, i.e. working all the time with no rest, and being “never on”, i.e. frittering away the whole day with distractions. Most people’s brains cannot focus for more than around 25 minutes at a time, and even that may be a push for you if you’re used to an extremely interactive environment. One thing you might try is the Pomodoro Technique: the very bare bones of it is a cycle of 25 minutes of work + 5 minutes break, with longer breaks after 3-4 “Poms”, and accompanied by a ticking timer (originally a tomato kitchen timer, hence the name). Naturally, there are a plethora of other timers around: even a basic search for “Pomodoro” brings up a bunch of sites, ditto Android and Apple apps. I use Cuckoo, because it allows me to work solo or with others – you can share the session with as many people as you like.

Speaking of working with others: a truly marvellous strategy when I’m feeling unfocused and demotivated is virtual co-working. The basic format is to start a video call with your co-worker(s), state briefly what you’re going to work on during the session and how long the session will be, switch off audio but keep video on while you work, and report on progress at the end. It’s a little hard to imagine this being at all effective until you try it – or that’s what I found: why would this change anything, you still have to do your work, right? Well, the simple process of stating a goal, working on it, and reporting afterwards is MUCH more effective than just trying to hammer away at something without a stated goal. In addition, you get some accountability: if all you did was twiddle your thumbs, you will have to admit that at the end, so you might choose differently. And it’s just plain encouraging to tell a friend (or even a stranger!) what you’re trying to achieve. If you have a willing friend to try this with, you can just jump on Skype, Facetime, or whatever video call option you already use. For groups, Zoom is a good option: just keep groups small-ish or you won’t even get everyone to state their goals before the time is up. Two to three people are ideal, and you can now conference on Skype, too. If none of your people are into this idea, you could always give it a go with like-minded strangers: FocusMate is free up to 3 sessions a week, and an extremely reasonable $5/month for unlimited sessions. They also have really good explainers for this idea.

So that’s the framework for productivity: but what should you be doing during these work sessions? If you are continuing in your usual job, you will likely have stuff already assigned to work on. Don’t be surprised if you get through it all much quicker without the distractions of the office! Equally, you may be in a position of needing to set boundaries and maybe redefine tasks so that you don’t work yourself into the ground. Either way, I assume you have some methods in place already to manage your workload in the office, so just continue those at home. If you’re embarking on a larger project, here are some small tips to help:

• if your to-do list is plain overwhelming, start a “done” list alongside: write down what you got done as a mental boost. Also, break down tasks to the smallest possible steps and do those. Tiny progress is MUCH better than none, and you will build momentum as you go.
• if you find yourself doing a lot of busywork and not touching your important tasks, get better at setting goals: for every period (e.g. a day or a week, or both. A month is too long though), define one priority goal that you must achieve no matter what, and up to three “nice to have” goals that you can work towards if you have time and energy for them. Shove your busywork to the back of that queue.
• MUSIC! I find music hella motivating, but it does need to be different from my usual fare if I’m working with words (translating, proofreading, writing), because otherwise I am liable to get distracted (I have even been known to write down lyrics in the middle of my work, oops). I find classical, ambient and jazz most useful. Spotify is full of good playlists: search for “Focus” in the Browse tab. I imagine YouTube is similar. Another good tip is Music For Programming, which hits the right blend of active but not stressful beats and no words.
• BREAKS! Do not fall into the trap of thinking you can work without break for hours! You cannot. In the office, breaks are built-in in the form of meetings, phone calls, colleagues and their questions, and so on. You’ll notice in the tips mentioned above, you always alternate between work periods and breaks. Honour both, really commit to only working in work periods and taking proper breaks, or you will max out your willpower within a very short period and stop wanting to get anything done at all.

Back to the overview post.

Working from home and staying sane – the Coronavirus Edition

The ongoing novel corona virus / Covid-19 pandemic has far-reaching consequences for everyone’s behaviour; although quarantines haven’t yet been implemented in many countries, there is at least a grass-roots movement towards “social distancing”, which means not attending events with groups of people, avoiding public spaces and crowds, and working from home where possible (on top of practising good hygiene, of course!). For many of you, this will be the first time you are at home, with or without things to do, while neither sick nor unemployed, and you may find this change in circumstances hard to deal with.

I’ve been freelancing as a translator since 2008, so I’ve been working from home for 11.5 years now. And while the stress of being self-employed does not compare to the potential anxiety over a global pandemic that will cause many deaths, including those of people you know and love, I have nevertheless developed some skills and techniques for keeping myself sane and productive while being alone and stressed. I’m going to share what I know here.

I am not a medical expert, I know nothing about public health or pandemic responses beyond what others have written and published in places I hang out (e.g. Approaching the pandemic with a systems-thinking lens), I am not a prepper and cannot advise on how to cope if you needed to self-isolate / quarantine for even a week (but see Half-Assed Disabled Prepper Tips for a Coronavirus Quarantine). I am assuming here that a) you are reasonably well; b) you have access to food; c) you have access to at least some money; d) you are in circumstances where you can have some time to yourself if you want it.

 

Whenever one of us makes the jump from employment (regular salary, benefits like holiday and sick pay, working in an office, dealing with colleagues and office politics, reporting to a boss) to self-employment / freelancing (irregular earnings, no security, working alone, reporting to customers), we both congratulate and commiserate: the first little while can seem heady, like being on holiday forever, or miserable, like sick leave or unemployment or any number of things that keep us home and worried. What do we do all day? How do we fill all that endless time that would be taken up with our normal routines, like commuting and coffee and chats by the water cooler and meetings we both want to get out of and find comforting on slow days? When the usual external pressure goes away, how do we find our inner discipline to do what we need to do?

Because I have A Lot of Thoughts on self-management, I’m going to break this down into a series of articles. My overall outline looks like this, and links to each article will be added as I write them:

 

1. Productivity: Pomodoro technique, virtual co-working, “Done” lists, goal setting
2. Staying well: morning routine, meditation, gamifying tasks, exercise, food, sleep and rest, mental wellness, leisure
3. Staying connected: social media, friends & family, media
4. What not to do: binging, anxiety, mood, feelings

 

Places to stay connected with me:

• on Twitter, I am sharing public health info and updates, as well as longer-term systems thinking;
• I have a Facebook post where I am linking the most useful web sites I find;
• if you’re a friend and have my contact details, I’m very available on chat, Skype, etc.;

I can always be reached by email: skorpionuk at gmail.