Tag: Work

My favorite work from home tip

kate2 Comments

Make your work space nice. 

It seems kind of basic, but it makes a huge difference. This doesn’t mean you need to create a dedicated home office or buy a bunch of fancy notepads and paper clips. I just mean take a few moments before you sit down to work to nest a little. Here’s what that entails for me:

  1. Tidy up the space if needed. Move used coffee cups to the kitchen, put scattered pens in their designated holder, stack those miscellaneous papers into a neat pile. Boom, that’s it. Don’t actually WASH that used mug or start sorting papers—that’s a recipe for procrastination. Just neaten up a bit so you start your day a little more organized.
  2. Accumulate the necessary work comforts. In order to actually get anything done, I need a mug of coffee and a glass of water by my side at all times. I tend to like having my phone nearby, but that’s debateable in its helpfulness. And I need my headphones within arm’s reach in case the neighbor kids start screaming.
  3. Create the right ambiance. Take a minute to sit at your workspace and assess your current mood. Then figure out what kind of atmosphere you need to create in order to make it a successful work day. Feeling sleepy? Cue up the Lizzo playlist to give yourself a boost. Stressing about the work ahead of you? Light a scented candle and put on your comfiest leggings. Starting to feel stir crazy? Open all the windows and blinds in your space, or even consider working outside if you can.

See? Not complicated or time consuming, but SO much better than plopping down in front of your computer amidst a mess of papers and needing to interrupt yourself every 5 minutes to grab coffee, then find a snack, then go down a rabbit hole searching for the right playlist.

A thing I read

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Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

I hope you might consider this: What happened is inexplicably incredible. It’s the greatest gift ever unwrapped. Not the deaths, not the virus, but The Great Pause. It is, in a word, profound. Please don’t recoil from the bright light beaming through the window. I know it hurts your eyes. It hurts mine, too. But the curtain is wide open. What the crisis has given us is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views. At no other time, ever in our lives, have we gotten the opportunity to see what would happen if the world simply stopped. Here it is. We’re in it.

…

What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all of this feels.

…

From one citizen to another, I beg of you: take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud.

I hope we don’t ever go back to normal.

Before this pandemic launched all of us—unwillingly—out of our routines, millions of people were already suffering. From an economy that works only for the very few, from a healthcare industry that can bankrupt you for getting sick, from a housing crisis that leaves hundreds of thousands of people unsheltered.

I hope we don’t rush back to how life was before and keep lying to ourselves that those problems can’t be fixed. We’ve seen that our government and businesses can work harder to support us. We should use this unprecedented opportunity to hold them to that and change our sense of normal to something better.

How to take care

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It’s weird to admit that I’m sort of thriving in quarantine. Normally I have a lot of anxiety about things I should be doing and places I should be going. But when everything becomes limited to what I can do with what I have at home, life becomes a lot simpler and the FOMO disappears.

Five years of working from home has taught me a lot about being a successful homebody. Let me share what works for me to take care of myself, maintain my sanity, and enjoy some quality time at home.

Read that stack of books you’ve been avoiding. Somehow I’ve managed to collect a LOT of books that I never ended up reading. And now that my local library is closed, it’s the perfect time to get into it. It feels great to finally make a dent in that old collection. I’m finding new favorites and clearing out the duds from my shelves (making spaces for new reads!).

Take your vitamins. Yep, I’m another person here to tell you that CBD helps me get through the day. I love the brand Not Pot in particular because their gummies are vegan, they’re woman-owned, and (most importantly!) part of their mission includes criminal justice reform—each month they help pay someone’s bail. I start every day with my CBD gummies and daily vitamins from Ritual to help me feel like a healthy, well-adjusted human.

Spend a little time cleaning every day. Anyone out there recently started cooking at home more and is SHOCKED by the number of dishes you can dirty in a single day? This drove me crazy for a while when I first started working from home, until I instated a rule of cleaning the kitchen for 15 minutes each day. It even functions as a nice break to get you on your feet and move around a bit if you’ve been sitting on the couch or at your desk for too long.

Get some fresh air and take a nap. These are my two favorite self-care activities right now. I feel like it’s kind of a no-brainer that taking a walk or sitting outside for a few minutes each day can make you feel like a different person. Naps, however, seem to have a little bit of a bad reputation. Naps are for lazy, depressed people and babies, not healthy, functioning adults. I’d like to reclaim the nap for us all. A good nap can feel so luxurious and restorative. It can reset a bad day or be a healing mental break if you’re feeling scattered. When you nap, you’re exclusively focused on comfort and rest. I can’t think of a more complete act of self-care than that.

Oddly normal

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I feel oddly normal for how weird things are in the world right now.

My life as a from-home worker hasn’t really changed much. I’m still working from my couch, still wearing my daily uniform of leggings and hoodies, still spending my free moments with my usual hobbies of cooking and reading, still taking care of my health with yoga and walks around the block.

I even think my anxiety levels have lowered. Most of the items on my list of Things I Should Be Doing have been erased for me. No mundane errands, no social events to stress about and cancel at the last minute, no family get-togethers that I’d really rather not attend.

I am worried about family and friends. I am worried about the huge numbers of people who will get sick and die. I am worried about everyone who works at grocery stores and restaurants and small businesses. I am worried about everyone who is facing dire financial circumstances. But it all feels so big and out of my control that it’s not worth spending the energy to actively worry about it, so instead, I go about my regular day.

I’m focused on the very simple things that I can do. Stay home. Check in with my friends and family. Support my favorite local businesses when I can. Take care of my own health and wellbeing.

I’m even a little hopeful that just maybe, the chaos of these moments will push us toward something better. We’re all experiencing how horrible a capitalist system is at dealing with this problem. And we’re seeing how we actually can have nice things like paid sick leave, work from home days, and universal basic income.

I truly hope we don’t go back to business as usual once this is all over. I’d much rather create a new normal.

A thing I read

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You’re Not Lazy, Bored, or Unmotivated

“Just Do It” is the best advice because it’s the only advice that works.

When I started writing, I gave lots of specific tips in my articles: how to set goals, have a morning routine, be productive. But specifics are full of hindsight bias. I’m only giving you the final 10% that worked, and that worked for me in particular. The messy 90% of the journey that led me there? I left that out completely.

I struggle a lot with motivation and feeling disconnected from my work and goals. Up until recently I spent a lot of time reading articles about “productivity hacks” and defeating procrastination.

Eventually it occurred to me that most advice is garbage. Everyone lives in different circumstances and definitive instructions for your work schedule or morning routine make no sense. The only way to succeed is to try a bunch of tactics for yourself and mix and match until something feels right.

I keep my phone next to my bed and check Instagram every morning, first thing when I wake up. In the world of morning routine advice, this is a cardinal sin. But it works for me.

Since puberty, waking up has been a unique form of torture. I’ve snoozed and slept through countless alarms. I’ve even tried putting my alarm across the room, only to discover that I can turn it off, get back in bed, and easily fall asleep again. My preferred wake up style is lying in bed for at least 10 minutes, getting myself accustomed to the idea of consciousness before I’m ready to throw off the covers and rise from my pillow nest. The trouble is actually staying awake for those 10 minutes, which is where Instagram comes in. It’s readily available and mindless enough that I don’t really need to be awake to scroll, but it’s just engaging enough that it won’t put me back to sleep.

Waking up has become much easier since starting my morning Instagram routine. But it’s clearly not for everyone. I’ve got solid enough boundaries that I don’t check anything else while in bed—no work email or news. And I’ve made sure to curate my feed so that I’m only seeing stuff I actually like and that makes me feel good (here are a few that bring me the most joy: cute foxes, bird comics, happiness + food).

For a while I felt bad about my morning Insta habit, because EVERYONE was talking about how bad it was to look at your phone upon waking up. But now I’m comfortable with the obvious realization that (duh) everyone is different, and I just need to do what works for me (after going through a lot of trial and error to figure that out) and forget the other advice.