How To Work From Home, And Not Go Crazy
Methods on staying sane stuck at home, that I learned the hard way.
At the end of 2015 I left a great job at YouTube to start my own business from home. I was shooting and editing videos with Vsauce, a science & education channel. At the end of that, I didn’t want to apply for something else. I wanted to start a small company that gave me more time to create projects of my own. I didn’t have kids or a mortgage that would scare me from trying to make it happen. I set up my own video production business. The next six months were unexpectedly hard.
On the first day I started Penny4 it felt like I’d just been spewed out of a huge chimney. I wasn’t on the ride anymore — at least not the ride I’d been on until that point. I’d gone from school, to university, to full time jobs. Now I was at home, feeling like a naughty kid playing truant. What happens if I just… don’t work?! My day was free to allocate to whatever I wanted to do. I get how complaining about this looks like self-pity. It could look like I had no personal drive, or that I was always spoon-fed, or even that I was ungrateful that I got to work from home every day. I believed too that if I had the chance to work from home, I would love managing my own time. I could spend my days doing what I really wanted to do with my life. That is why working from home is such an overlooked and simple trip hazard to the slope of depression.
At my lowest moment, I realised that nobody teaches you how to structure your own day. It was a fundamental skill that was missing from my education. For most of our young lives, it was somebody else’s job to manage our time, not teach us how to do it. You go to school, where your lessons, breaks and lunchtimes are all dictated to you. You relish your free time as a child in empty bliss, being a child. After education you’re pushed to get a full time job, where - again - the hours are set and you know where to be. You don’t have to think about how best to optimise your time as a child. You’re six. Presuming nothing goes wrong, from the age of four or five, you’ve been lifted in a consistent updraft to get you a well paid job doing something respectable. But nothing more. Doing anything different feels like you’re going against the system. What happens if you go freelance? Or start your own business? Or go on maternity leave? Or even… have a bit of time off? I wasn’t told there were any other ways to work other than in a full time job. So of course, I was not prepared.
Working from home was not the type of freedom I expected it to be. It was a feeling of being so free that I was unanchored. Work days were slipping past and blending. I felt inefficient. Tasks were getting done but projects never seemed to get completed. Finishing anything felt intangible and endless. I procrastinated, and was easily distracted by YouTube. It wasn’t my job to keep up with this platform anymore, and I was using it as an excuse to not work. I’d take extended lunches… just to finish that episode of Game of Thrones. This cycle made me feel unemployed and low, which increased the likelihood that I would procrastinate and be distracted, which made me feel unemployed and low. A negative feedback loop. At a loss of what was going on and feeling a bit pathetic, I went to the doctors.
The intervention of CBT
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a scary, jargonistic and clinical term. Treatment is shielded behind several tall firewalls of GPs, psychiatrists and waiting lists. The term sounds specific and vague at the same time. It sounds brain-zappy. Are my thoughts going to be altered? Do I have a behavioural problem? I’m not mad, I’m just getting depressed at home. My doctor sent me here because she didn’t believe in throwing me pills, and that was only because she told me she had a daughter my age. She could empathise. Sending me to CBT sounded like a radical, alternative and unproven trial. What should I expect from this? Should I be getting paid for this? Am I going to grow ears on my back?
Once I was through the letters, waiting lists and appointments, I was sat in my first CBT session with the Wizard of Oz, whose name was Richard, from Ealing. He was about my age and had an affable polite tone, and was a trainee. He explained that CBT was about teaching ourselves to spot patterns of thought and behaviours that cause negative responses and consequences we don’t desire. CBT is used to treat a wide range of conditions like Obsessive-compulsive Disorder or insomnia, and supposedly didn’t involve any brain zapping whatsoever.
The treatment I had specifically was called ‘Behavioural Activation’. He quietly asked questions about my situation at home and where I was feeling low, building up a correlation between how I was behaving and how that was affecting me, causing me to behave in a certain way, causing an effect that causes a certain behaviour that causes … a spiral to the bottom.
I had to write it out and everything. This is exactly what I wrote down:
My main problem is low mood and motivation. It is made worse by the lack of structure. I feel physically tired and lethargic, I get distracted and procrastinate. I think I’m not going to make any progress. This makes me feel sad and as a consequence I am not making as much progress as I’d like.
Goals: To establish a stable work life balance.
How to establish a stable work life balance
I could see the dry, flaky echo of a crude drawing that Richard had attempted to rub out on his whiteboard. “That looks like a seat?”, I sort of semi-asked. Richard laughed. “I’m not an artist”, he said, “but I draw stools a lot. I can draw stools really well now.”
The three-legged stool represents a stable work life balance. The three legs of the stool are:
- Work (earning money)
- Admin (bills, hoovering, dishes)
- Leisure (friends, reading)
If any of those three legs is not the same length as the others, the stool is wobbly and the work life balance is disturbed.
The stool visualisation was annoyingly simple, but I’d never dissected my life into these categories before.
Every day has to be split evenly into these three categories of Work, Admin and Leisure, which has to be written down as three to-do lists and treated with equal priority. The mind needs all three equally to stay in harmony. I began using a blank notepad doubled up as a mousepad, ripping out a new sheet every morning that I add and strike through as I worked.
A typical day’s to-do list looks a bit like this:
I was asked to track my week as it was on a weekly calendar, then begin tweaking it to work for me. When should you start? When do you do emails? When do you get too hungry to be efficient doing work? I tried taking lunch half an hour earlier than that point, so my energy levels didn’t drop through the floor before I considered cooking and was too hungry to bother. Plan out the day like a formula to be balanced and then stick to it.
A weekly calendar that has the seven days of the week across the top, and hours down the left hand side is essential. This is the free downloadable PDF I print out each week of 2018 from Calendarpedia. At the beginning of the week, I usually know the days that I’ll be working from my office at home, so on Monday mornings I spend a bit of time with a pen and a ruler scribbling out hours for work, breaks, lunch hour, admin time, and leisure time. I follow the hours of my day like a child follows a school lesson timetable, except I’ve filled it out myself to optimise the efficiency of my time, instead of mindlessly following a teacher’s, or worse, not having structure at all.
As I’ve learned when is best to start work and eat lunch, I now use Google Calendar. It has a visual, very similar weekly view that I leave open in a tab all the time that I can flick to and adjust. That said, printing a real calendar off at the beginning of the week and sitting there with a pen is a tactile way of planning time in my mind. It is always best for solidifying a week’s plan and sticking to it, especially at the beginning of CBT.
What I’m describing at this stage is my form of journaling. This behavioural activation technique is exactly what journaling is, which is why so many of my friends that are freelancers, students or parents spend a lot of time elaborately decorating their planners with colours and patterned tape. It isn’t a waste of time at all. It is a dictating and reinforcing of time, and it means you’re much more likely to work efficiently to stick to the routine you’ve set yourself. The sole missing component I needed was proper structure.
I had two thoughts that I took away from CBT. The first was how amazed I was that there was such a specific treatment available to me from the National Health Service in England. It’s a treasure here we often neglect.
The second was this — why are we teaching time management as treatment for feeling low, and not as a fundamental life skill at school level? I’m not saying kids should stroll into school and decide which lessons they do and don’t want that day. If I’d done that, I would have avoided Maths every day and my accountant would quit. But the real basics of how to prioritise one activity before another could be covered in a simple and playful way, and could be taught more directly to secondary school students in preparing them for leaving school life.
I released a video on my YouTube channel talking about my experience with CBT and working from home. I uploaded it to my personal Facebook page too so I could see if any of my friends felt the same way. The brutally honest responses made me realise very quickly that the problem wasn’t limited to the self-employed:
- Mothers who work as real world organisers, assisting the lives of their young children and elderly relatives, are working from home.
- Students who are thrown huge amounts of coursework with dwindling contact time on campus are increasingly becoming self-educators working from home and are taking on huge debt to do so.
- The sick who are signed off work for medical reasons, working to better themselves, improve their wellbeing and get back on their feet, are working on themselves from home — 24 hours a day.
I’m certain there are more examples than just these three. Let me know if there are. I felt frustrated at myself for not including anyone else but freelancers as examples in the video. I realised that I was just one subcategory of “home worker” that had never properly been taught the fundamentals of structuring a day to stay mentally healthy.
A friend who is a mother and works from home asked me to send her a website or article with the management techniques I’d learned from CBT. When I couldn’t find anything easily online, I decided to write this up here. The skills of structuring a day should not be hidden behind castle walls under a strange and intimidating medical banner. They should be taught in school, as part of basic training for children on how to be free-thinking and critical adults. Setting up a child to pass a memory test and get a decent job is not enough anymore when a new wave of contract culture, freelance lifestyle and internet-enabled remote working means young adults are now in charge of their working lives. They’re freer than their parents and grandparents ever were. I’m proud of what my business is doing, and grateful that I can make a living being creative, allocating myself time to work in a way that works for me, remembering that I also have to give myself time not to.
