Working from home can be an immense challenge with a thousand distractions to deal with. From kids, to animals, or snacks, or realising how dirty your home is and needing to clean it right away, there are so many things that can take you off task and it can leave you feeling down and unproductive. Below, we outline a few tips that can make working from home a bit easier and keep you mindful whilst you do so.
- Get dressed. While it may sound nice to stay in your pyjamas all day to work, it can leave you feeling sleepy and unmotivated. If you want to be productive, the best way is to act like you’re still going into the office. Don’t worry about getting dressed up, like you would if you were going into the office. Stay comfortable, but get out of your pyjamas. Shower, eat breakfast, drink coffee, etc, all before beginning your work. It will help you to likely be more productive and stay that way throughout the day.
- Communicate, communicate, communicate. The key to working together from afar is communication. If you are keeping in close contact with the other members of your team, it makes it easier to accomplish tasks and have grace for one another if something does come up.
- Create a workspace. Don’t work where you sleep. By moving your workspace away from your bed, you’ll be more likely to remain productive and avoid that midday nap that’s calling your name.
- Create a schedule. Allow yourself to take breaks and refresh your mind, just like you might at the office. Set yourself boundaries to be productive in and allow yourself time to be wildly silly and unproductive. It will help maintain your mental health and keep your days from blurring together.
- Turn off your work. Just as you would put your work away before commuting home, put your work away and make the transition into home life. Whether that means turning off your computer, or just shutting down the work applications (or tabs even!), make the concerted effort to turn off your work. You’re already in a new situation and being stretched in a new direction with your work, you don’t need to push yourself too far.
- Take care of yourself. Make sure you are taking the time to meet your emotional, physical, and mental needs. Practice your favourite form of self-care, take a bath, do an at-home workout, practice some mindfulness meditation, do whatever you need to do to maintain your mental health and break away from the stress. We don’t need stress and anxiety to be another pandemic that comes out of this. Take the time to find calm and balance within your life and yourself.
By following these tips, we can’t guarantee that working from home will be your new favourite thing, but hopefully it’ll be a little easier. We’re all stretching ourselves to adapt to the changing situation. Be gentle with yourself and communicate with your coworkers on how you are doing. If you need a break, take it. Don’t push yourself too far while in the midst of this. We don’t know how long it will last or what is going to happen, so pace yourself and take care of your physical and mental health first and foremost. In order to further help you to find some calm and mindfulness in this season, we’ve outlined how to practice mindfulness meditation and some apps that can help you do so in this blog post.
