Working from home - florianschaal.com

How to stay productive during the day and balance work with your personal life to not burn-out quickly.

Most of us started working from home recently, not by choice but by necessity, which can be challenging. Please don't get me wrong, working from home can be a nice thing, but you need to follow some rules to stay productive and have a balanced life. If not there is a chance that work slips into your personal life.

Create a morning routine

Our bodies are habit machines, and habits enable us to automate things in our lives without even thinking about them. The same goes for a morning routine. For example, we set a goal, get ready for work, and then perform an x number of tasks to reach our goal. My morning routine before I started working from home looked like this:

Get up at 5:30 AM
Meditate (headspace)
Reading some news
Shower
Breakfast
Drive to work

Now when working from home, a lot of this becomes unnecessary, or it can feel that way. Work effectively starts at 9:30, so I could now sleep way long if I wanted to. Because our body still expects a morning routine, it sometimes can feel pointless to wake up if it's not needed anymore.

I can not tell you how your morning routine should look like. Still, since our body is used to have one, it is crucial to start the day to get into a working mindset instead of an unstructured morning. Not having a morning routine can lead to a less productive day and even make you feel tired longer because your body is waking up way slower by not having a clear path set on what goal to reach. My current routine looks like this:

Get up at 5:30 AM
Meditate (headspace)
Work on a side project (like this blogpost)
Shower
Breakfast
Work

Mornings are essential for me because they are my most productive time of the day. It's also the time that there is less distraction around me. Suppose you do not have a side project or feel like working extra besides your actual work. That is fine. Replace it, for example, with a learning session or read a book or practice a skill or maybe workout. Let us be clear. You don't have to wake up at 5:30 AM. Just make sure that there is something to wake up for, something you do every morning, something to get out of bed for.

Create a daily plan

Suppose you are used to working from the office. In that case, you know that there is a working vibe in the office that nudges you towards actually working instead of watching YouTube all day. When working from home, this can be tricky. There is always something else to do that can distract you from the tasks you should do.

When you notice that you are starting to do many chores in the house suddenly, you might want to consider a daily plan to keep track of your essential tasks. Having such a list can help you keep track of the most important things during the day and nudge you to complete these items.

It will take some time for your daily plan to be as accurate as you want it to be, but that is ok. Our brains are not good at making time estimations, which will get better over time.

I use an app called hour blocks, which is available for IOS and Android. This app works by the principle of time-boxing. Time-boxing means that you reserve blocks on your calendar for all tasks that need to be completed or worked on that day. Now you do not by any means have to use an app for that. You could just as easily block your calendar with the items you want to work on. But the point here is that you have a clear overview of the day and what you will be working on, helping you prevent procrastination during the workday.

Suppose this is too specific for you and you want to be more flexible. In that case, I recommend creating a task list in the order of importance. I use markers at each task to indicate the type of functions and their importance.

Which system you use is up to you. What I would recommend is that you work on the most difficult or dreaded task first. Like mentioned before, at the office, distractions are limited. Still, at home, you will be surprised how many little things there are to do instead of that one demanding task.

Take regular breaks

Our brains cannot work focused for an extended time. That's why it's essential for success to take regular breaks during the day to take regular breaks.

When you are working with colleagues at the office, these breaks are already there. Think for example at the time you spend at the coffee machine or eating lunch in the cafeteria.

When working at home, we do not have these small breaks build in. This means that we could work beyond our brain's attention span. The result of this is that we are slowly exhausting our brain, resulting in a very effective start of the day but then rapidly losing momentum and feeling distracted and not able to focus later on in the day.

To build in these regular breaks, I use a technique that is called the Pomodoro Technique. This technique was developed in the 1980s and is mend to optimize your day and help you stay focused and mentally fit.

To get started, you need to have a clear view of what needs to be done. As you might have guessed, this technique works best if you have a daily plan and are using time boxing or a task list every day.

The technique works like this:

Decide on the task you want to work on
Set a timer for 25 min
Work on the task
When the timer goes off set another timer for 5 min and take a break
Go back to step 2
After 4 timers of 25 min set a timer for 30 mins and take a break

Now I find myself sometimes in a flow where I will repeat the timer of 25 min and skip the break to take the momentum. Keep in mind that after four timers, you still take a 30 min break and set a timer for every 25 min that pass. This will also remind you of the time that has passed.

If you want to take the timeboxing and Pomodoro Technique to the next level, you could create tasks of 25 min. I do not do this, but it can give you an immense boost. When you are working, completing a task feels like a win for your brain, stimulating us to continue on the next task.

Balance work and personal life

Usually, when working from the office, you close your laptop and commute home at the end of the day. This means there are clear lines on when the working day is done. When working from home, this line can get blurry. At the start of my working from home adventure, I found myself continuing to work even after my girlfriend got home from her job, just because I was still in the flow. Working longer on some days should not be a problem. Nevertheless, if this becomes a habit, it could lead to mental fatigue and eventually result in degraded family life.

To maintain a healthy workday, it's best to create a space purely designed for work. I have a separate room in my house that I use for my work. I set the lights (Philips Hue lights) in the room to a cold blue light to get into an energetic work mindset. I also set a time at which my workday ends. This does not mean that I stop at precisely that time, but it gives me a waypoint on which I can react. After my workday is done, I change the room's lights to a warm and relaxing color to indicate that it's time to relax.

Now you might not have space in your home to create an office as I did. Still, you could efficiently work on a folding table, for example, and create a ritual around storing away the table at the end of the working day to indicate that it is now time to stop working.

Because you are working from home, there is a good chance that more people in the house could potentially distract you during the day, resulting in you getting behind on work, resulting in overworking, etc. Communication is vital here. I've set precise times where I will have a break during the day and when I expect to finish my workday. This means that I can say focused during the time that I should dedicate to work and relax when I should not work. I've also seen some fancy solutions like an "On Air" sign or using a color light to indicate that you are currently in working mode. Whatever you choose is up to you, but setting something like this up and talking to your family about your workday schedule will lead you to check out from work better and check-in in mentally with your family instead of work.

Stay fit

When working from home, there is by definition less movement in your day. Your commute is gone, and there are no colleagues to have a chat with at the coffee machine. I don't do much fitness, and when I started from home, most of my day's activity was suddenly gone. This resulted in me getting less productive during the day and feeling like my brain was trapped in some cloud.

When I say stay fit, I mean, of course, physically, but you should not underestimate the power of staying mentally fit during these challenging times. Something I was doing every morning is that I would sit down in a quiet space and listen to a headspace session, which is a guided meditation app. This takes only 10 min of my time at most but has a significant effect on my day. Now you do not have to use this specific app. Still, meditation can help you recharge mentally and clear your head from all the distractions and focus on what is most important today.

Staying physically fit is also essential. For me, I sit behind the computer for most of the day and even when relaxing at times. Adding some extra movement can help you to get more done. Newton’s First Law Of Motion (The Law Of Inertia) – This law suggests that objects have a natural tendency to keep doing what they’re doing. So an object will remain at rest unless it is forced into action by another force. Likewise, an object in motion will continue to move at the same speed (and direction) unless it is stopped or acted upon by another object/force.

By adding just a 30 min walk to my day around lunch, I was set in motion to do more during the afternoon. Usually, I would start feeling tired around 3-4 pm, but now this feeling was disappearing.

If you are sitting a lot during the day, I recommend just walking a round in the room a couple of times during the day. You can do this by buying a standing desk or change for a meeting to space where you can stand and work at the same time. This will help you stay fitter and help with back pain from sitting for too long.

Of course, the best thing to do is to plan regular exercise into your day. For some people, this is easier than for others, and if you are not used to doing this, it can be hard to start now. That is why taking a walk or standing more during the day can be an excellent start to move more.

Summary

In summary, it is essential to have a clear intention on what you want to achieve on a day. This should be free from distraction and with some much-needed breaks during the day to maintain that focus. Communication with other people around the house is key to letting them know when working or taking a break. Staying fit helps your brain process and, in the end, results in a more sustainable routine.

If you want to learn more about staying focused during the day, I recommend the book Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day. It's a fantastic book that does not force you into a system but instead gives you tips for specific scenarios during the day. This so that you can create your system, a system that works for you.