What They Don’t Tell You About Working from Home
By: Rachel Wayne
Tags: Work, Remote Working, Work Life Balance, Workplace, Remote Work

Many of us consider getting away from the workplace a vacation. The farther away, the better! So when we’re faced with a pandemic that requires us to work from home, it can initially seem like an enormous silver lining.

No more frustrating train commutes, waiting in line at Starbucks, or freezing to death in your office. No more long stares from your creepy coworker or awkward small talk with that colleague who’s about three generations away from you.

Most importantly, no more suits or pantyhose.

However, the challenges of working from home arise just as quickly as the novelty fades, and you find yourself itching for human companionship, the normalcy of your cubicle, and even the crappy coffee in the break room.

Change is hard, and productivity is even harder when you’re working from the place that’s supposed to be relaxing.

Here are the most common challenges in working from home and how to address them.

Inability to Focus

When you’re at home working, you enable your working mode, but you’re surrounded by triggers of other things you could be doing.

You can’t help but notice that lingering pile of laundry or pile of dusty photographs waiting to be framed and hung up.

It’s easy to ignore these things when you’re vegging after work, but when you’re working from home, it’s near impossible.

Next thing you know, you’re knee-deep reorganizing your closet rather than getting your work done.

Here’s What to Do:

Use the Pomodoro method. This approach to work entails working in 25- to 30-minute blasts of deep focus, called Pomodoros. Defining a set time in which to work is a great psychological trick to keep yourself on task. Tell yourself that you will work on the task at hand — and only that — for the entire Pomodoro. Then, you’ll get a 5-minute break!

In your 5-minute break, you can put the laundry away, check Facebook, hang a picture, whatever you need to do. When you come back to work, you’ll feel refreshed and ready to tackle the next Pomodoro.

Create a dedicated workspace. As great as it sounds to work from your couch in your PJs, it’s (gasp!) not conducive to your productivity. Once again, psychology is at play. Your brain strongly associates your physical environment with your mental state. Just like you associate that remote island location with rest and relaxation, you associate your office with work. And that means wearing proper clothing and being in a work environment.

You can approximate that at home by developing a dedicated work space. Don’t have a home office? Take over a corner of the dining table, set up a card table in the garage, whatever it takes to have a place where you can feel like you’ve gotten away from home.

Then, get ready for work just like you would if you were leaving the house. These rituals can help you get into the mindset to work. You can skip the suit and pantyhose, but at least change out of your PJs.

Loneliness

Who’d have ever imagined that you’d miss your annoying coworkers?

Turns out that we humans are very social creatures, which makes this pandemic extremely distressing.

Combine your general anxiety about Covid-19 with the shock of working from home, and you might face increased stress or even depression.

Here’s What to Do:

Keep in touch. A free platform like Slack or Brief can help you and your team keep in touch. If you were already using Slack, great! It’s a great way to keep in touch when working remotely.

When you’re at the workplace, you’re typically chatting with people who work nearby and saying hello in the hallways, and gossiping at the water cooler. All that goes away with remote work. Use Slack or your preferred messaging app to set up a daily check-in to help fill those gaps. You’ll feel less lonely, and therefore be more productive.

Avoid social media. I don’t advise hopping on Facebook every few minutes in any situation, but especially not when you’re working remotely. Research has suggested that checking social media can amplify the effects of loneliness, perhaps because you’re seeing content from outside your regular social circles. And now, bad news fills our feeds.

Prioritize conversations with family, friends, and coworkers, and set designated times to check social media. That has the bonus effect of promoting your productivity.

Overworking

Working from home can actually boost productivity by eliminating certain work-related stresses and distractions. Not to mention that you save time on your commute. However, as we discussed above, you might find yourself distracted by chores, home projects, or, yes, certain streaming services.

Assuming that you’ve followed the above steps, you might find yourself facing an unexpected challenge: working too hard and too long. It’s easier than you might think to pull longer hours when working remotely.

Unfortunately, that way leads to burnout, not to mention potential trouble with your boss. The limited ability to supervise hours is a major reason that many workplaces haven’t implemented remote work. With the virus making its round, their hand was forced. Make it easy on them by not incurring overtime or otherwise working over your normal hours.

Here’s What to Do:

Set working hours and stick to them, just like you were at work. It’s important to maintain normalcy in your routine. Imagine that you are psychologically “leaving the office,” even if that office is less than 50 feet away. Set a firm start and end time for yourself.

If you regularly pulled extra nights, that’s something to start fixing now that you work remotely. I recommend using your phone’s reminder app to tell you when to start and stop working hours. Go ahead and schedule a lunch break in addition to your Pomodoro breaks.

Then, shut off all work-related stuff. If possible, keep separate devices for work and personal projects. If that’s not an option, log out of your work email, Slack, and any other apps so that you’re not sucked back in. If you lack the willpower to shut off work stuff, use app-blocking software that kicks in certain times of day. I recommend RescueTime.