Category: Life

I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a while now. With recent events, it seems like there are a lot of people out there that could use some advice about how to work effectively from home for a long period of time.

I’ve been working from home regularly for almost a year and a half now. It’s been a bit of a journey, and I’ve learned a lot about myself and my own work habits. I’d like to share some of the things that I do in my day-to-day to keep me motivated and effective while working at home.

Wake Up At The Same Time You Normally Do

It’s super easy to think to yourself, “I don’t have to drive to work, so I can sleep in!” Don’t. First off, if you’re only working from home temporarily due to the current state of events, you don’t want to re-adjust your waking schedule in order to go back.

Secondly, you don’t want to be rushing through your house 15 minutes before a scheduled call to get a shower and shave in. You have some added time in the mornings now. Let’s appreciate what you can do with that time…

Start the Day With a Win

I still get up pretty early in the morning, even though I work for a remote first company. But instead of rushing out of the door to get into my car and make my commute, I take the time to prepare myself mentally for the day. I take time to grind some fresh coffee from whole beans and the let it steep in my french press. While I’m doing this, I’m going through my mental checklist of things to do. I might also kick off a load of laundry – or even jump on for a quick match or two in my favourite video game before sitting down in my office and getting started.

What does a video game have in common with a load of laundry? It’s really about accomplishment – a small win can go a long way for setting the tone for the day.

Have a Designated Work Space

Maintaining work/life balance is important. Oftentimes, in your mind, where you work from at home becomes associated with work. Keeping your desk in your bedroom where you’re supposed to rest, or in your living room where you relax, can cause stress as time goes on. So if you can, keep a completely separate space for this.

It also helps you to set your mind on work. Going up the hall to your designated office is kind of like commuting to work. As you walk down the hall to your office, your mind starts preparing you for the day’s business.

It’s okay if a room for work doubles as a guest room. As long as that room is not regularly used by you. If you don’t have spare space, try to keep your working area removed from parts of your home that are used the most frequently. Maintain that separation as best as you can.

Dress Appropriately

You don’t wear pajamas to the office. Don’t wear them when you work from home. Getting dressed for work is quite possibly the most important routine to setting your mental tone for the day. You may be able to relax your style of dress a bit. For example – if you wear a full suit to the office, then perhaps you can get away with a button up shirt without a jacket and tie. But stay away from wearing anything too casual. You’re working – not on vacation. I’ll often change out of my work clothes at the end of the day to transition myself out of the working mindset.

Avoid Unnecessary Distractions

Listening to music while you work is fine, but avoid things like television, social media, or any types of activities that will draw your attention from work. A quick check of Facebook or YouTube can quickly devolve into a couple of hours of productivity lost.

The same goes with doing things around the house. It’s not bad to wash a few dishes at lunchtime, or pop in a load of laundry between meetings, but stay away from more time consuming tasks. Vacuuming or mopping can wait until later.

Manage. Your. Time.

I track just about everything in my calendar. Meetings, tasks, follow-ups, etc. The reason why I do this is that it allows me to be able to manage my time effectively through the day. For example, if I have a follow-up email that requires some time to research, I schedule the time I need to do that research and draft the email. If I need to take 45 minutes to do that, I schedule 45-minutes. I may also add some padding in those time estimates so I can take breaks (nature will call), and transition my mindset from one task to another. This provides some additional benefits as well…

First, you can effectively manage your work day. If you run out of time in your allotted work hours, schedule tasks to the next days. This allows you to stay within a reasonable distance of your targeted 40 hours.

Secondly, you can also manage expectations regarding your deliverables. If you have a follow-up promised, you can set an expectation with that person of when they will see it. “I can have an email with all of the information you requested on X day around Y time.”

Third, as current events are forcing companies that may have been adverse to working from home, you may get questions on what you’re doing with your time. Having your calendar populated with these tasks allows you and your manager to review your workload.

Always remember that tasks can be moved, but when you do, make sure that you’re managing your expectations with others effectively when you do.

Avoid Generic Task Windows

Two things I absolutely hate seeing in peoples’ calendars – Focus Time, and Email Follow Ups.

Focus Time – What are you doing during this time? Do you know? Does your manager know? *Insert shrug emoji here*

Having generic time with no set tasks often time leads to ‘goof off time’, or at least the perception that that’s what is going on during that time. Set meaningful tasks as calendar subjects. Then you have a goal, and your managers know what you’re doing (if they like to micro-manage).

Email Follow Ups – How many emails do you need to follow up on? How much time do you need to make a thoughtful response? How much research effort is needed for a given email? These are the reasons why I don’t like email follow up time.

If you set an hour at the end of the day for follow up emails, and you have 10 emails that you need to follow up on, how much real thought and research can you put into those emails? Furthermore, how can you really track what emails require follow ups, and how can you prioritize. Set a task for anything that requires a meaningful follow up and estimate your time appropriately.

Use Video Messaging…With Video

Remember when I said get dressed for work? Well here’s another part of the why.

When we collaborate, we often rely on a person’s body language and facial expressions as visual cues during a discussion. This is just as important, if not more so, when working collaboratively over distances. Turn the camera on. Zoom Meetings has a really great Virtual Background feature if you’re afraid of your co-workers seeing any messiness in the house.

Diet Is Surprisingly Important

Take time to actually make your lunch. Shy away from junk foods. I have a time every day that I take a few minutes and actually make a sandwich, or sometimes even cook an actual meal. You don’t have to set an hour every day, but at least take 30 minutes to make something. This allows you time to not only eat something healthy, but also gives you a much deserved mental break during the day.

There are plenty of videos on YouTube (I’m a fan of Binging With Babish and Joshua Weissman) for some relatively simple and tasty recipes that you can do in 30 minutes. Stay away from garbage foods.

Get Out Of The House! But Not In A Group!

It looks like we could be engaging in social distancing and self-isolation for a while, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay inside with all of the doors and windows shut. If you have a back yard, go do some landscaping. If you have a balcony, get some fresh air. If your city isn’t under curfew or shelter-in-place orders, it’s okay to go for a walk. Just maintain an acceptable amount of distance from others when doing so.

Obviously, follow any restrictions that your city/state-province/country has set down. But if there’s no restriction to get outside and grab a bit of sunshine and fresh air, take advantage of it now.

Staying cooped up inside of your home for weeks on end is going to take a toll on you if you don’t break up the monotony.

Finally – Go To Bed at a Reasonable Time

This dovetails into my first point about waking up at the same time as you did when you were commuting. Go to bed with enough time to get a sufficient amount of rest.

Driving into work after a late night out can be difficult, but it’s doubly hard to work effectively from home without an appropriate amount of rest. You don’t have co-workers peering over the cubical wall at you in the office to keep you motivated to do work. You need to self motivate, and doing so when you’re at home can be hard enough when you’re not dragging your butt around the house.

One thing that I do is I have a nightly reminder on my phone that goes off 30 minutes before I should be in bed. This gives me sufficient time to turn down for the night to get a full night’s sleep.

In Closing

There are tons of other things that you can do as a company to make the transition to work from home a lot easier. It might be something I can perhaps share in the future. But in the meantime, I hope you find this advice to be valuable. If you have questions, feel free to comment below. And stay safe and healthy!

I was chatting with my personal trainer a couple of days ago and noted how I was surprised that the gym was so empty the day after the biggest resolution making day of the year. He noted to me that a lot of people take this week off, but the next week was going to be overloaded. Fortunately, I’m booked in my time slot for a couple of months out, but it got me thinking about New Year’s resolutions and why they’re such a bad idea.

Everybody does it. At some point in your life you’re going to make some kind of resolution to quit smoking or lose weight or something that feels like a lofty goal. You might go to the gym, or pick up a pack of nicotine gum, do it for a few days. Most often, you have a bad day and pick up a pack of cigarettes, or come home super tired and decide you’ll skip the gym for a day, and then settle into your bad routines again.

I’m not chastising anyone for doing this because I’ve been there. I’ve done it. But if you’ll humour me for a few thousand words, I can share with you what I’ve done, and maybe it’ll help you stick to a program. Programming being the key word.

Routines Are Hard, Horrible, and Necessary

Humans are creatures of routine, not habit. Interrupt our routines and we might as well be wearing a blue screen of death on our foreheads. We can have a small panic attack if our routine has been interrupted. Habits are things that we do in our established routine. Habits can be exceptionally easy for usto pick up, but are also easy to change.

Why do we eat too much food, or things that are bad for us? Habit. When are you eating the food? That’s routine. Why do we have to have that coffee at exactly 9AM with a particular co-worker? Routine. Why do we need to have a cigarette at a certain time of day? Routine.

Are you seeing my point here?

How do we change this? Change the habit, but keep the routine. How? Well this is a longer answer.

Smoking

I used to smoke about three packs of cigarettes a day back in my aircraft mechanic days. Back then, of course, smoking laws were a little bit more lax, and so were our managers. As long as we weren’t having a smoke while we were leaning on a bottle of oxygen, or while refueling a plane, our supervisors didn’t really care. If we could work and smoke at the same time and not blow anything up, we were golden.

Times changed and I started working in the office, but I still had the habit. I’d sneak out between meetings for a quick smoke. Feed the beast, and get right back to work. I quit when I got married, a thing by necessity, but I still quietly yearned for a cigarette, having one occasionally during a night of drinking. When I separated, the first thing I did was head to the local store and pick up a pack of smokes. The habit restarted.

When I started dating again, this of course became problematic. The musky smell of burnt tobacco apparently has the same appeal to someone in their late 30’s as Axe Body Spray. I knew from my previous experience that I couldn’t just quit cold turkey. I needed an alternative. So I took up vaping.

There’s a lot of conflicting information out there about it, and I highly encourage you to read on what you can. I’m not here to push my opinion on what study is valid and what the news is saying. What we can all agree on is this – if you’re smoking, you are doing irreparable harm to your body. My take is essentially this: If you’re going to kill yourself slowly, you might as well at least smell better doing it.

If you decide that it’s time to put away the cigarettes, then vaping is a good way to go about doing it. Why? Because you’re replacing the habit while keeping the same routine. I went to a vape shop and consulted with a sales rep. Told them what my daily habits were and they recommended a nicotine strength. That was about four years ago.

Now? I still vape, but I don’t use nicotine in my liquids. It was a long road of whittling it down, but I was able to get to zero. I still vape out of habit and have my routine set accordingly, but at least I’ve managed to knock at least one (and probably a ton more) toxins out of my body and smell a lot more appealing to my partner.

Truth be told, I feel a lot better doing it too. I don’t cough up a lung full of greenish, brownish stuff first thing in the morning while I shower. I can take a brisk jog up a flight of stairs without wishing I was dead at the top. Overall, I would call that a win. I actually find myself vaping less now that I work almost exclusively from home too, but that’s a blog for another time.

Weight Loss

Listen, I know what it’s like to gain massive amounts of weight. Let me share with you a little graphic of my journey.

Drastic, eh? In high school I was about 165, and while I wore a lot of loose fitting clothing, I was pretty well built. At my worst, I had ballooned up to 280 lbs. And that picture of me on the far right is right about where I’m at now. Probably about 15lbs heavier actually than my current weight. I’m at about 197 right now, and I fully intend on getting to 165 with the final goal of settling on about 185.

I can make excuses all day long about why I got so heavy, but none of it matters. What does matter is that I was that size, and I hate it. Hate is actually a very powerful motivator in fact. So what did I do about it? I changed the habit, but kept my routine. I added some things, like tools to the mix to help track and fix what I was doing. But more importantly I fixed what I was putting in my body. So what did I do?

• Before you diet, get an app.
  • I use an app called Lose It! (#NoSponsor #NotAnAd). At first, I just used it to track what I was eating and more importantly, how many calories I was taking in. There are a lot of apps that will have assigned calories for foods, including dishes you get at major restaurants. The app I use can actually read barcodes and let you set the serving size you consumed.
• Get the 2500 calorie “recommendation” out of your mind.
  • Everyone is different. Every body is different. Even if you’re taking in 2500 calories a day, can still gain weight, or maintain an overweight state. If you’re in an office job, more than likely you aren’t moving around very much and therefore aren’t burning the calories. After you’ve tracked your diet in the app for a couple of weeks,
  • Talk to your doctor about what an appropriate amount of weight loss per week looks like. They might direct you to a dietitian. That’s fine, go with it. With your data in hand and a plan, you can appropriately set the amount of calories per week a healthy weight loss will be.
  • Example – I used to sit on my butt all day at a desk and not moving around. Furthermore, my caloric intake was closer to 3000 calories a day. My doctor and I were able to plot out my caloric intake needed to maintain a weight of 185 lbs. And then figure out what would be needed to lose a pound a week from that point. Have doubts on the process? Refer to picture above.
• Don’t set a weekly loss goal – set an overall goal. Make it a year or two out.
  • You are going to lose a ton of weight fast – in the beginning. As you lose the fat, and your caloric intake starts to line up closer to what you should be getting at your target weight, you’ll taper off. That’s fine as long as you’re losing it. If you set too aggressive you won’t follow it.
• If you have a spouse/family, get their support and participation.
  • This is going to be crucial. If you have family members that insist on keeping things like cookies, candy, or ice cream in the kitchen, it’s going to be that much harder on you.
• Go to the fridge and throw everything out.
  • Seriously. Having food available to eat means you’re going to eat it. Consider going grocery shopping twice or three times a week. I realize this is an addition to the routine, but having a large mass of food at the beginning of the week means you’ll have more temptations to snack on when you do. Maintaining a lower amount of food in the fridge with fewer snacking options goes a long way to keeping your hands off.
  • I’m single, so this makes things exceptionally easy. I only have a few meals worth of food at a given time. I actually caught myself just last night getting up and rummaging through the cupboards looking for something to munch on. I was a little unhappy last night that I didn’t, but much happier this morning when I weighed in.
  • You can also replace certain foods with other lower calorie options. There are ice creams out there now where you can eat the entire pint and it’s only about 340 calories. I myself enjoy a nice Cherry Coke Zero on occasion. We can talk about aspartame later. If something sweet is in your routine, replace it with that.
• Get a scale. Weigh in twice a week.
  • Weighing in daily is also going to frustrate you. Some days you might lose a pound, others you’ll gain a half a pound. Let the averages take over. Also, weigh in first thing in the morning before you take a shower or consume anything.

Going to the Gym

Everybody talks about going to the gym. Truth be told, I’m one of those people. Why doesn’t it work? It’s because it introduces a major impact to our daily routines. Taking an hour or two a day to go someplace new and do more work can create a lot of stress in our lives. Moreover, humans work better in daily routines, and who has time for that noise?

If you’re going to make the commitment, you need to put a carrot on it. I did with a personal trainer. Paying to have someone yell at you if you don’t show up for your scheduled workout might sound dumb, but it works – and a good personal trainer will do exactly that. They’re being paid not just to show you how the machines work and what routines you should be doing; but they are also there to encourage you, and help you establish your routine.

So how did I get started? Here goes.

• Find the right time.
  • I am not a nice person at 4AM. So getting up that early to workout doesn’t work for me. Likewise, at the end of the day, I sometimes just want to be a vegetable. Since I’ve started working from home exclusively, I’ve scheduled a time in the middle of the day to head to my local gym and workout with a personal trainer. It provides a good break between tasks in my day, helps me clear my head, and prepares me for my afternoon work. If you have the flexibility to do this, I highly recommend it.
• Pay the money for a personal trainer.
  • Yes, there’s a cost to that. But having someone to call you up and yell at you can be beneficial. If you can’t afford to have a trainer long term, at least get a short term package deal. They can at least get you started on the right path to do what you need to.
• Go every day.
  • You don’t have to lift every day. As a matter of fact, a lot of trainers will tell you to do your training two or three times a week. On the off days, go to the gym and get on a bike or an elliptical or something to solidify the gym as a daily routine. If you’re skipping days, it’s way too easy to just stop going.

Again, these are things that worked for me. Your body is different. You have different needs. The important thing is that you recognize that habits can be changed far easier when you maintain your established routine. Experiment!

New Year’s resolutions aren’t important, and most oftentimes are made with quite a bit of cynicism. If you really want to change, you need to plan, and that’s probably best done without consuming mass quantities of alcohol first.