Don’t work until you break!
By TRISOFT team
Working remotely is the number one prerogative of the modern employee and why not, of every modern employer. Remote offices, telecommuting or telework has become the new black in the business environment. But is it really all butterflies and rainbows or does it also have a dark side to it? And if it does, what can we do to control it and only benefit from the advantages it brings?
You know what I want to do today? Commute to the office! Said no one. Ever.
Here’s a joke that’s been going round the block ever since telework has become a second nature for some companies (though it has proven to be funny only to people who have the alternative ☺).
Working remotely allows you to work according to your own schedule, this way perpetuating a relaxed, out of the box state of mind, which will help the employer be more productive and make his/her colleagues and managers happier with his/her work.
But hey, no good things come without flaws. In this case, one of the downsides is the tendency to work more while being in your own environment. When your own home, for instance, is your office, when it gets difficult to separate your personal life from your work, and you always end up doing some more work, that’s when it gets dangerous.
5 signs that you’ve been exhausting yourself
1. You find yourself working until the break of dawn more and more often, up to the point where you take your dog out for walks at 4 a.m., because he has to go, it’s his before-going-to-bed walk.
2. You go out with your friends once a month and even then you cannot wait to get back home to finish your work.
3. You don’t have time to cook and you always order in. Your desk and room look like they’ve been devastated by a terrorist attack and all sorts of living and inanimate objects got caught in the way — food on the floor, a few dead plants, books and post-its all over the place.
4. You become easily irritable and have a hard time controlling your emotions. When you have the tendency to lash out at people that are undeserving of the outburst, then you know it is time to take a break.
5. You become alienated and start to feel lonely, since all your friends have got tired of inviting you out and always getting “no” for an answer.
It’s all fun and games, until it’s not anymore. Exhaustion can lead to serious health problems — you can’t rest or eat normally anymore, you gain weight and have trouble losing it, you loose your concentration instead or start to suffer from insomnia. Some start chasing people away with their unwillingness to invest time and energy into relationships. So it’s tricky if you don’t know how to cope with it.
Here are a few ways to organize better while working from a remote location:
1. Keep organized and try to establish a routine in your daily activities.
As easy as task organization might be when you work in an office — especially when someone else does it for you — when you work remotely your time isn’t your own anymore. Try to separate your personal routine — morning exercise, breakfast, evening walk — from your work routine — answering emails, working on projects according to their urgency, accomplishing the tasks you have set for the day. Without a clever way to sort through your daily affairs, you are in danger of feeling overwhelmed and losing yourself into the details.
2. Keep track of your input/output balance.
When you work very hard and start draining your batteries, you also start getting poorer results for the same amount of work. So if you get to that point where as much as you try you can see very little evidence that the time you’re spending working is worth it, it’s time to take a step back. Remember that in order to be productive you need to work efficiently and effectively and produce more than you invest, so keep track of your results constantly.
3. Make a list of priorities and stick to it.
When organizing your work you should know upfront what is top priority and what can wait another day. There is no use to exhaust yourself trying to get it all done today. Work will never stop coming and when you work remotely you are the one who should say STOP. It might help to make a list of your most important tasks for the next day in the evening before, so that when you wake up and turn on your computer you don’t get lost instantly in the piles and piles of work waiting to be done.
4. Experience the usefulness of boundaries.
When you manage to set out priorities and bend your schedule according to them you may see you’ve conquered an important milestone. However, there might still be days when no matter how well organized you are, things will get out of control. In order to make your peace with these situations, try to establish some boundaries, some hypothetical situations in which you will always stop and take a break. Breaks are meant to give us energy for another round of productive work.
5. Give yourself breaks.
When working in an office, you have scheduled daily breaks, weekends, shorter or longer holidays. When you’re working remotely, nothing is planned anymore. If you are too extreme about work, your day becomes your night and your night becomes your day, you spend days not getting up from your chair but to go to sleep. That is why you need to manage your breaks in the same way you would manage work tasks: with diligence. To succeed in this equation, you have to be your own boss — for both the work part and the fun part of the game.
6. Make time for human interaction
Now this one is crucial. If you still want people to like you and spend time with you, you have to make time for them. This is again closely connected to the way you organize your time and prioritize your activities. Allocating time for human interaction is investing in your mental health.
7. Remember: Working should be fun!
Another sign that you are on a wrong track is when you start hating what you’re doing. Take a minute to remind yourself why you chose that job, that type of activity in the first place. Remind yourself how much you loved doing it. If you go through this short introspection you will learn that the fact that you’re always tired is why you feel that way about your work. Compare it to the time when it didn’t feel exhausted all the time and you will find your answers right there. So start looking for a break in order to get back the passion, the energy and the fun.
After all, tomorrow is another day.
In closing, the most important thing you need to remember is that the key to a balanced workstyle is not a scheme you can apply and wait for it to work perfectly. What you need to do is find your own program, one that fits your rules and your rhythm and integrate it into your life.
And it is essential that you keep a realistic eye on your way of working, especially when you’re doing it remotely. Everyone who has ever experienced burnout will admit that they didn’t see it coming and that looking back, they wore their workaholism like a badge of honor.
It’s great to have an awesome job that you feel like doing 24/7, but don’t go off to dangerous roads. Breath and reboot, there’s always tomorrow to do what’s left.
At TRISOFT, we are proud to have an extremely committed and dedicated team of professionals. We also encourage our people to prioritize their work and communicate efficiently with their colleagues and the management to get the help they need, when they need it, in order to avoid exhaustion and burnout. And every now and then we organize an awesome team building, just to make sure those who are less willing to take breaks won’t have a choice ☺
