Social distancing and time management
Life has gotten weird in the last few days. It looks like a lot of us will be spending a lot more time at home. While most of us have dreams of working from home, it wasn’t quite the way the dream was supposed to unfold.
Food will become a different animal while home. Snacks will be readily available and the former structure of office life is gone. If we want to better manage our food we will need to better manage our time. Time management is stress mitigation, it’s a cognitive enhancer, it’s emotional regulation. Time management is a force multiplier for your home work environment.
I’ve got a few years of working from home, a 500 sq ft NYC apartment. Now that my wife Sarah and I both are home and she’s running the entirety of North America for a multinational company it can get a little hairy. Luckily she’s given me some great pointers to be more efficient as well as things I have learned from my friends Mark Fisher and Michael Keeler. Here are my top 3.
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Set up success: Each night think about the following day. Plan out your food and your work. Set up your work space. Computer open, any scheduling ready to go, and notepad/paper set up. And get dressed. PJs are cool for a day or so but after that...
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Schedule: I prefer to utilize time blocks. From 7-8 is creative writing time. 8am breakfast. 8:30 begins my work day. I even schedule time for walks and meals. Things come up and it doesn't all go according to plan but the structure will help create normalcy.
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Think like a smoker: Smokers never have a problem with taking a break. For some reason, the rest of us do. Figure most smokers take a 5 minute smoke break every half hour, so should you. I like the pomodoro timer for my iphone. It sets me up for 25 min work blocks followed by a 5 min break.
These are stressful times. We have had the illusion of control ripped from our eyes and the daylight of reality is scorching. Change is hard but we can create a sense of normalcy in our own homes by building structure. Time is the greatest asset we have and the base construct we have of structure. Don’t let that slip away with the reality of the unknown.