A 411 on the WFH.
Three steps to keep your sh*t together while getting sh*t done in your PJs.
Even us unicorns got to pay the bills, whether we’re wearing pants or not. (Illustration by Jeremy Enecio for Fortune)
I’m fortunate. On March 13, when my wife was diagnosed with Covid-19 and our family was forced into medical isolation, my agency reacted quickly. We already had a work-from-home (WFH) policy in place and our teams were adept with many of the remote-collaboration tools that have become so ubiquitous during this pandemic.
Like so many Americans, we didn’t know we’d be working from home this long! Fortunately, a few of us have experience working from home. Our Director of Technology and Integration spent years working remotely from across the state and I used to run a boutique UX agency with my wife. So, as weeks turn into months, it’s time to put some best practices into effect to preserve our productivity and our sanity.
Working from home wisely isn’t difficult. It just requires discipline and introspection.
Here are a few tips to help you optimize your WFH experience…
Step 1: Know your hats. And how to change them.
Working with your spouse from home adds just a little complexity. (Photo by Brandy Porter)
Know your hats.
We each wear lots of different hats: work hats, play hats, parenting and relationship and gig hats. Each of these hats represents a different mindset in ourselves and our expectations of others. Acknowledging these differences is helpful when considering how to proactively approach balancing your work and home lives. Especially when they’re in the same space!
Years ago, when my wife and I operated a boutique UX agency while working from home, we took this metaphor very literally. She’d tell me, “I’m wearing my work hat right now to remind you the deadline is tomorrow. And I’m wearing my wife hat to tell you I need a cup of coffee.” Silly as it may seem, these simple cues were profoundly helpful in helping us maintain clear communications when things got busy or stressful.
Why was it helpful? Typically, external changes in context help us reframe our mindsets—they help us put on our different hats. For instance, when we commute to the office our brains are trained to orient us to our work hat. Then, when we’re on our way home, we reorient back to our family or relationship hats. But in the absence of a commute or the regular trappings of “going to work,” we have to create new triggers for these mindset changes. We have to be more conscious and more deliberate about changing our hats. Otherwise we’ll sit at our computers in the wrong mindset and wonder why we’re not getting anything done. Or worse—why we can’t seem to stop working since the pandemic made us bring all our work home.
Create new prompts to change your hats.
So, what do you need to do to change your hat? Especially since we typically use our computers for work and play. Sadly, there’s no one tactic that works for everyone. But there is always a trigger we can employ—and it’s always something more involved than just rolling out of bed or walking down the stairs.
When I talk to my colleagues, I hear lots of different methods for getting into a work mindset. For putting on the work hat:
Get dressed for work. At least from the waist up. Trim the beard, put on makeup, throw on a collar. Mirror how you dressed for the office.
Dedicate different spaces for work and non-work activities. Even if you use the same computer for work and play, try using a desk for work and the couch for games.
Use different devices or desktops. Many devices let you swap desktops. You can even use different desktop themes to establish a work or home aesthetic.
What about verbal cues? Do you work with friends or family? Include verbal reminders when you switch modes so they know what hat you’re wearing.
I use a combination of these techniques. As a UX designer, getting dressed for work has never been much of a concern (outside my uniform Converses and graphic tees, of course). But I still dress nicer for client calls, even if they’re just on the phone. I change my desktop themes, too: sci-fi themes for when I’m writing or playing and unicorns for work. And I try to signal with verbal cues for colleagues who are also friends. More than anything, though, I use the activities and tools to differentiate my work hat from my play hat—to keep me focused and productive where I need to be:
Existential dread about the coronavirus is part of my insomnia hat. (Icons by Henry Ryder from the Noun Project)
Step 2: Define + defend your routine.
Setting boundaries between bacon and glitter is essential to good unicorning. (Illustration by Muddybeats for Threadless)
Keep a routine.
It’s tempting to abandon your previous schedule and let the waters of work and life mingle in our new WFH reality. But don’t. For the sake of your sanity and your productivity, define regular work hours and keep to them.
Start by critically assessing your work- and home-life demands and design a routine that suits your current reality: the challenges of co-working in a home with children, spices and spouses also working from home alongside you, and the needs of your co-workers—wherever they may be. Your work hours don’t need to exactly mirror your former or in-office hours, excepting, of course, when they need to align with the expectations of colleagues and clients (they still pay the bills, after all).
Here are some tips to help you create a good work from home routine:
Start and end at the same time every day. And over communicate these times to your colleagues and family.
Build in breaks—however often you or your home situation needs them to keep your productivity flowing.
Leave your desk to eat lunch and snack. These are the easiest natural breaks in the day and will get your body moving and refueled, especially if you’ve been trapped on Zoom.
Build in heads-down time. Work from home routines offer greater opportunities for focused, heads-down productivity than most in-office environments.
Use organic timers. Laundry, show breaks, or taking the dogs for a walk can help you keep track of your day in the absence of workplace events.
Protect your routine from your new coworkers.
Now that you’ve got a routine, you need to protect it from those who might disrupt it. Many of us are working from home with children and partners. I’m thrilled to spend more time with the wife, even if we’re no longer working on the same projects like when we were in business together. But it’s more difficult working alongside my kids—the IT demands of elementary- and middle-school tele-education can be a drain on my attention and productivity.
Have a frank conversation with your housemates—whoever they are—about your routine’s needs and their WFH challenges. Some boundaries you might discuss include:
Set rules around when you’re down to socialize and when you need to focus. Closing doors or wearing headphones works great in our house.
Discuss how and where people should have Zoom calls. My wife and I and our kids all have our own spots so we don’t distract each other, and minimize the noise-pollution we cause one another.
Set rules for how and when to enter each other’s work spaces. I have five kids participating in a variety of synchronous and asynchronous tele-schooling. So we have a standing rule about wearing clothes so client meetings don’t get too awkward (parents get it — #thestruggleisreal).
Discuss rules for emergencies and interruptions. If my kids are having an IT emergency, they know to approach from an angle that keeps them out of camera frame so I can mute and help them as I’m able.
Figure out how to manage your fur babies. Not everyone loves barking in the background or kitties parading across the screen. Those people have their own WFH issues. But you need a plan for when too cute is too much.
It’s not always easy. And your home may start to resemble a co-working space. But if you set boundaries and stick to them, new habits can keep a household sane.
Protect your routine from your old coworkers.
I love my team—they’re the most talented group of folks I’ve ever worked with—but I don’t need them reaching out at all hours, no matter how much I love them. Part of establishing a good routine is communicating it to your co-workers so they know when and how to contact and collaborate.
To help signal your routine to your coworkers, some things you can try include:
Use your communication tools to limit access. I set a notification schedule in Slack to cut down on the number of messages I get after the end of each day.
Close work apps outside your regular hours. You won’t miss them.
Don’t check email on weekends and evenings. Let folks know you don’t check email or messaging apps after hours and you’ll train them to respect your boundaries. This isn’t a joke. This is totally doable and the best thing you’ll ever do for yourself.
Keep a back door open in case of emergencies. I may not be on email but my team knows they can always reach me by text if they need to.
Over communicate. You can’t establish healthy boundaries if you keep them to yourself.
Protect your routine from yourself.
One of the least discussed but most difficult challenges we face when we work from home is managing our thoughts. Because even if you’re disciplined enough to step away from your computer and phone, you never step away from yourself.
This warning isn’t a condemnation of creative thinking about work-related problems. I do some of my best figurin’ with a cocktail in the pool or while watching Cosmos with the kids. But there’s a difference between creative thinking and destructive navel-gazing.
Guy Winch does an excellent job breaking down the danger of rumination in his TED Talk, How to turn off work thoughts during your free time. And my colleague Lisa Plato has some excellent advice about shutting down negative self-talk. But whatever your negative thoughts, you need to train yourself to avoid navel-gazing on issues you can’t control, don’t have good inputs for, and which don’t advance your productivity or self-actualization. There’s enough going on in the world right now without adding additional emotional distress, damaging your mood, or inhibiting your executive function.
When you catch yourself spiraling, try changing the context of your situation to change the context of your mind:
Ask for help from a family-member or coworker. Your best interests are in their best interests, after all.
Interact with non-work adults. They’ll fill your head with totally new distractions!
Binge something you love on Netflix. Wasting time isn’t time wasted if it restores you.
Get out of your house or apartment. Do something physical like walk the dog, garden for 15 minutes, take or short bike ride, or go for a run.
Use an Eisenhower matrix to remind yourself what’s important. Focus on using your time, not just filling it.
Step 3: Keep perspective.
Check in often. And don’t blame your parents unless they live with you. (Illustration from snorgtees.com)
Acknowledge the perks.
None of what’s said above is meant to suggest you can’t or shouldn’t enjoy the flexibility working from home allows. The absence of commutes, the increase in heads-down time, the flexibility we have for breaks afford us the opportunities to:
No commuting. I go to the office a few times a month for socially-distanced meetings, but this is probably working from home’s greatest perk.
Sleep in. No civilized person gets up before the sun!
Work out. Instead of 45 minutes in the car, I go for a jog some mornings. I’ve always had trouble finding time to work out, but finally — two years after gaining 20 pounds from chemotherapy — I’m shedding pounds!
More time for family. IT issues aside, I really do love seeing the wife and kids all the time. I ❤️ my tribe.
Be flexible.
The world is changing so fast and so frequently, you’ll benefit from scheduling a regular time — once a week, ideally — to assess your hats and routine and iterate on them.
Why? Because no process is perfect and the immediate needs of your job and family change all the time. And whenever we get “back to normal” I’ll want to hear all about how you got so much done when the pandemic forced you to work from home.
Give yourself grace.
These are difficult times, at home and at work. And as anyone with kids can tell you, work-from-home challenges aren’t limited to those of us with jobs. Human beings weren’t meant to operate and collaborate this way for this long.
Molly Jong-Fast wrote a great piece in The Atlantic about how AA prepared her for the pandemic. How it helped her shorten the focus so many of us struggle with about how long life will be this way:
All any of us have is right now. The only time we can possibly occupy is this moment of this day, and today I can drink my coffee, not my vodka, try to get my teenagers to talk to me, and do the next right thing.
So, focus on today or this week. You’ve been mindful about your hats, your routine, your coworkers, and yourself. You can do it.
Rock the WFH with Sharpen.
We’re excited to show you how Sharpen’s premier team of creative problem solvers (with their fingers on design thinking, technology, architecture, and more) is the right team to help you. Because we do a lot more than just create beautiful, functional solutions—and that “lot more” informs how we approach every problem.
Contact us for a free remote consultation with our innovation leaders to see how we can help you and your company bring your visions to life and be more innovative than ever.
