You are not “working from home” – you are “at your home, during a crisis, trying to work”
You are at your home, during a crisis, trying to work.
As a result of this long-running crisis, your focus may have waned.
As you worry about protecting your family, your focus is there.
As you figure out how to shop safely, your focus is there.
As you try to home-school, or decide whether to send your children back to school, your focus is there.
As you wonder how long this will last, your focus is there.
As you try to decipher the new “rules”, your focus is there.
We can’t switch those worries off when we sit down at our desk. They are there, in the back of our mind, all of the time.
Your focus is in so many places that concentrating on work can be hard. We’re tired. And not just of Zoom calls. From the adrenaline rush that keeps on giving. Maybe this has got easier since the lock-down first started. Maybe you are getting used to this whole thing, worrying less. But if you are anything like me, I imagine that you still have stressors that were not part of life before. We aren’t going back to that life, so now is the time to figure out how to deal with those stressors.
You may not have ever imagined that you would need to work from home for this amount of time. You may have thought you could manage for 4 weeks, 6 weeks, 2 months. So you will have made compromises about where you work in the house, the kind of chair you sit on all day, the way you have yourself set up. Now, after so many weeks, that may have become a drain to your body, to your brain, to your relationships. So what do you need to change about your “home office” so that you can sit comfortably without getting repetitive strain over the long-haul?
What other short-term compromises have you made to try to keep this show on the road? What do you need to stop, start and continue doing to keep the show on the road over time?
For example, what boundaries do you need to set? For yourself and for others? Like how many hours you will work? Notice I don’t say how many hours you can work, as that could be many more, but your body will not thank you for that and we need to be making conscious choices right now about our own boundaries so that we can manage our energy. What about how people can contact you? Do you find people instant messaging you when you are trying to get your head down to do some crucial thinking? Those interruptions take us at least 7 minutes to recover from and get our head back into the game of the important stuff we were working on. So you may instigate the boundary of a Do Not Disturb, just for those times when you need to focus on something important.
What do you need to ask for? From whom? Are you trying not to ask, for fear of looking weak? Being strong, holding it all in, doing it all and suffering the consequences? So I ask again, what do you need to ask for? From whom?
Please feel free to comment below, i’d love to know your views.
Further posts in this mini-series can be found here.
