Why working from home can feel so exhausting and what to do about it.
Being productive when working from home might have made for a good joke in the not so distant past.
Yet, people constantly prove there is no need to worry about our ability to deliver from anywhere. Personally, it’s the opposite I worry about. Exhaustion from working from home sounds like an oxymoron, but for many is a reality — because we might be delivering too much.
Being at work vs working
Being at work for 8 hours is different from actually working for 8 hours. It might have seemed obvious but wasn’t.
Up until recently, pauses were built into a traditional day at work, hidden in more or less subtle ways as coffee chats, physically going from one meeting to another (bonus for cardio). We even could have been fighting distractions to get more work done. Now, it seems we’re in another extreme.
Working remotely by design means almost no wasted time at all. I.e. you get up and you’re technically at work. No commute, more brain time, less buffer time. Meetings are one click away. We don’t lose as much time.
The result is the same working hours, but more things done, and much more energy burned (which may offer at least some justification for a remote work diet).
For working parents out there it might also mean cramming two jobs into a single day, which proves two things:
a) we can deliver a whole day work in half the time
b) parenting is a full-time job.
Such an operating mode can be cognitively and physically exhaustive in the long run.
When dealing with creative tasks:
- Everyone needs a period of unproductive time to regenerate.
- We can get a couple of sharp thinking hours a day, but being super productive on a cognitively challenging task for 8 hours is unrealistic.
This isn’t new but made more clear now:
- The Case for the 6-Hour Workday
- The 8-Hour Workday Is a Counterproductive Lie
- The CEO of $48 billion Shopify says long hours aren’t necessary for success: ‘I’m home at 5:30pm every evening’
What can we do?
- Start with the inputs — if you could accomplish only one thing today/this week what would it be? Don’t overcommit, separate what’s essential from the noise. More on Essentialism
- Manage your energy, not just your time
- Build the breaks in — 1) create solo/group/family rituals at the fixed schedule, e.g. coffee breaks, dining. 2) Design for a pause in e.g. with a pomodoro technique
- Block your calendar for deep work sessions — and optimize your calendar entirely
- Spend these extra hours saved on a personal project or family projects — How to spend a bonus of 100h
- Sleep well
- For parents — 7 Tips for Working From Home With Kids
Take care everyone.
