Why working from home might kill you.

Congratulations. You landed your first job out of college.

After years of slaving away through a vigorous undergraduate curriculum, maybe tacking on an extra year or two for a Masters degree (oh boy, don’t you feel distinguished?), and getting through countless applications and interviews for your dream job, you are finally ready to step into the real world.

First Week: Orientation bullshit and meeting your friendly (maybe?) peers

Second Week: Intro to projects (aka step 1 of stress)

Third Week: Meetings, deadlines, failure, oh my.

Fourth Week: Starting to get the hang of this…..oh wait, no I’m not. I don’t have time to finish this, I need to work on this later tonight at home.

Breathe. Myself and many others have been there. The transition of a procrastination culture and“everything I do only affects me” attitude of college to a productivity culture and “let’s get revenue” attitude of business is hard to grasp at first. Like learning anything, time is key. I don’t preach often, but please, please, please do not fall into the trap of working from home. Finishing up a report at home can easily become rewriting the entire thing. Eventually, doing too much at home can lead to intentionally doing less at work, you know since you have all the time in the world to do things at home, on your comfy couch, with Netflix (who needs sleep anyways….).

Working from home is an addiction and can have significant consequences. For myself, many friendships and relationships have been dampered because of the lack of communication or elimination of social activities. Hell, you could potentially kiss your freetime and personal hobbies goodbye. I remember when I graduated college and made a list of all these things I wanted to try now that I had a steady income and freetime. Salsa dancing, learning to build a website, designing a new coffee maker, working out more, rock climbing, etc. Then, I would start to bring work home and get so mentally (sometimes physically) drained that I would just slouch on the couch and stare at a fucking wall! The worst part was, I felt like I was losing my creativity. All these ideas and thoughts I had were becoming washed away, as I would often find myself thinking solely of work related tasks. The few social interactions I would have during the week would be centered around how our jobs were going and what we like/dislike. How exiciting…..

It is sad when you spend all this effort into getting that first job, or maybe even a new, better one, to soon be burned out after just a year. The enjoyments of the once exciting work, friendly peers, and impacts to society are forgotten. (warning, pessimistic) Day after day seem to have the same monotonous tone. Get in at 8, lunch at noon, leave at 5, make a lackluster dinner (nay, probably pick up some unhealthy food), work more, get minimal amounts of sleep, repeat. Maybe your only source of happiness becomes hitting the bottle on the weekend and trying to forget about such a shitty week you had (might work…..until Sunday when you wake up from that same hangover you get every Sunday). That great job you thought you would stay at for a while becomes history. You get back on the job market, finding another “exiciting” job, only to face the same conditions — with the same mentality that working from home is acceptable.

The brain needs to be respected. Your mental health depends on how you manage the work life balance. Take sometime for yourself and leave that computer at work.

Some tips to limit working from home that seem to be helping me:

1. Set tasks for yourself. Ideally, do this at the start of the day or week and create alarms or times to do them. There are some great productivity apps that can help with this. Create little chunks of work if working for copious amounts of time is not your jam.
2. For repetitive tasks, figure out how long it usually takes you finish. This is extremely useful in the planning phases of projects and for yourself when you allocate time to work on items (because we all know having one project is not plausible)
3. Meetings can sometimes be a waste of time. Try to limit your time in them by being concise, creating an agenda, and sticking on topic (no Jerry, I did not watch Making a Murder)
4. Did you get the hint that I hate meetings sometimes? If you are in a crunch period, focused, or whatever to get shit done, block out your public schedule so people cant invite you to meetings! In addition, maybe hide out in some sort of conference room!
5. Feeling stressed at work? Take a walk. Now.
6. Mindfulless is blissful. Practice yoga and/or meditation to cope with this thing we call “life”.