Optimize your Home Office habits (Coronavirus edition)
It is quite likely that you are one of the many people who suddenly had their daily work routine replaced by home office, as part of the measures to contain the spread of the current Coronavirus pandemic. You might feel not prepared and ironically a little out of place when working at home, if you are not used to it.
Where to start? How not to get distracted? How to keep yourself in shape?
Even if you are a more experienced home-based professional, the additional social distancing measures possibly adopted in your area could heavily interfere with your usual free-time and recreational activities.
How to adapt at best to manage both professional and personal life?
The goal of this article is to share with you some useful tips for an optimal and positive home office experience, in particular during the especially restrictive circumstances of the Coronavirus.
Main takeaways
Since you might have to work right now and I want to respect your time, I will start from the main takeaways. This is how you rock home office:
- Plan your time in advance. Keep work and free time well distinct, so that you’ll enjoy both of them better. Coronavirus bonus: take the chance to try, read or learn something new!
- Listen to your body. Do not collapse on a random desk. Counteract the deleterious effects of prolonged sitting. Coronavirus bonus: exercise daily to boost your immune system!
- Stay hydrated, eat healthy. And not too frequently. Do not overload yourself with unnecessary snacks and sugar. Coronavirus bonus: try out new recipies and have fun in the kitchen!
Many of these suggestions might sound obvious, but in their simplicity they can really make the difference when implemented properly. If you are curious, I invite you to find some inspiration in the following.
Time management is happiness management
Let’s make it clear: you are probably going to spend almost the totality of your time at home in the upcoming weeks. During this period, it is fundamental that not only your job but you, as an individual, will keep functioning successfully.
Staying at home might give you the impression to actually have more time than usual. This is in part true, for instance because you do not need anymore to commute between home and office. But in reality, this feeling mostly comes as a result that you have suddenly lost many time references along your day.
And when people feel to be rich in some resources, they typically allocate them inefficiently. It’s straightforward to enter in a random-routine mode, where you just do things as they pop up in your mind. Unfortunately, this strategy is quite poor because it will bring you to be rather inconclusive or to overdo.
That’s why establishing soon a new effective routine is fundamental. Pay attention: the goal is not just to plan your work, but especially to be sure that your work and your wellbeing do not mess up with each other. This can be very challenging while being surrounded by the same 4 walls. Even more if you are recommended not to escape those 4 walls.
One great solution: create your happiness plan! Make sure to schedule in a calendar the work-related tasks and the free-time activities that are important to you, such as hobbies, play time or physical exercise. It doesn’t need to be fancy or detailed. In principle, you just need a concrete visual reference to guide you along your days.
You might ask yourself, why “happiness”? Because having this plan set up right will allow you to:
- Perform well at your job, avoid missing deadlines, avoid being lazy but also working too long.
- Dedicate the right amount of time to take care of your mind, your body and your family (or possible people around you).
- Keep a positive mindset and feel in control of your home office experience, rather than “restricted” by it.
All this will have a great impact on your happiness, especially in the long run. A plan also prevents you from losing the cognition of time, because days won’t feel all equal to each other.
For example, here below you can see more or less how my “happiness plan” looks like for this week (the true version is actually on paper, but it is too messy to show it here). If your style is more digital, clearly a calendar app works fine too. However, sometimes it’s nice to visualize your routine concretely and easily add arrows and all sort of modifications by hand.
Importantly, in the meantime you might have received invitations for tens of new work chats, video-conference apps and WhatsApp groups with your colleagues. This is definitely helpful to keep your social connections alive and to get work done. However, your job might require prolonged focus on a given activity (such as coding, studying, writing, etc.). In this case, you might find convenient to deactivate some notifications to avoid unnecessary distractions. Just be sure to check all your notifications regularly and intentionally.
Last tip about time management: if your get very serious about it, you might want to monitor how much time you spend on your different tasks. There are several free apps to help you keep track of your time efficiently.
Do not let your chair take the best of you
Social distancing is one of the most effective practices to slow down the spread of the Coronavirus. On the other hand, it might expose you to another equally spread pandemic: sedentarism. Never in the history of mankind people have sit as long and as often as nowadays. Unfortunately, home office can easily add further hours of physical inactivity in your routine. Not only you won’t leave the house anymore to go to office, but even your trusted gym or sport center might have shut down, depending on the restrictions enforced in your geographical area. All of this could represent the scary end of any daily movement.
Sitting might seem not as aggressive as a virus, but when in excess it can degrade your general health pretty quickly too. Our bodies are meant to move and each of us performs at best also mentally when movement is part of one’s life. After all, it’s not by chance that the latin proverb “mens sana in corpore sano” (healthy mind in a healthy body) resisted two millennia.
Just to give you an idea of what inactivity does on your body, consider this non-comprehensive list:
- Weakened immune system (!!!)
- Muscle imbalances, and resulting postural compensations
- Articular and muscular stiffness
- Reduced cognitive performance
- Slowered metabolism
The full list is much longer (and maybe unbounded), but these points are probably the most relevant here. For instance, you do not want to stop your work flow because of back pain or because you feel tensed up. Nor you want a weakened immune system, especially during a viral pandemic. This is why it is so important to explicitly schedule physical exercise in your happiness plan. This external reminder is useful to switch off your mind from work and let your room become your gym for the next hour.
But what to do to keep fit? There are two equally effective strategies: prevention and compensation.
Prevention
Be sure that your desk, your chair and your computer are optimized in terms of ergonomicity and your personal needs. In simple words, check that how you sit preserves as much as possible the natural curvature of your spine and that your head and shoulders do not lean too much forwards. Especially if you suffer from chronic back pain, like myself, I can assure you that the correct working posture can improve your life astoundingly.
Additionally, the more often you change position, the better it feels. A standing desk is wounderful in this regard. There are affordable models with simple mechanical tuning. If you cannot procure one, just take small breaks time to time to stretch and relax.
Last but not least: your eyes might feel a bit “oppressed” when reducing the time spent outside. They deserve some breaks too, for instance by looking at the sky or somewhere far away out of your window. This is especially important if you already wear glasses.
Compensation
Movement is the best medicine. The first goal of exercising should be to maintain your health level and counteract the hours spent sitting. And no, it is not necessary to own a personal gym in your house or any particular equipement. Most of what you need is probably a yoga mat. On YouTube there are endless suggestions for free-body exercises to train your lower and upper body.
But what kind of exercises are most effective to counteract sitting?
- In general, anything that strengthens and activates your posterior chain. For instance, great exercises are lunges, supermans and hip lifts. Yoga offers plenty of examples: downward facing dog, cobra and arched bow.
- You might want to stretch your psoas, gluteus medius and piriformis muscles. These are definitely not famous muscles, nor something to show off in the gym, but they are key for your posture and have important influence on your back. Check them out!
- Yoga, indeed. You can get all of these benefits in one single package if you actually use the yoga mat for what it’s meant for. Practising yoga can be beneficial not only to loosen stiff joints, but also for your mental wellbeing. Breathing exercises work truly wonderful for stress reduction. And starting the day with a Sun Salutation sequence feels simply amazing.
All what mentioned above regarded exercising exclusively inside your house. Clearly, doing some simple activity outside in the fresh air would be much more regenerating for your wellbeing, for instance a walk or some jogging in a nearby park. However, this option should be considered if and only if it complies with the social distancing norms adopted in your area. Safety first!
Eat smart, stay strong
“Let food be your medicine.” — Hippocrates.
Wait, wasn’t movement to be the best medicine? Well, both of them are essential. As much as sitting is the number one enemy of good posture, the number one enemy of good nutrition is the food excess that characterizes the western culture.
Interestingly, most of us exceed with food even in three ways at the same time: amount, frequency and content. Yes, too much, too often, too much sugar. Next to the recommendations for the virus pandemic, it’s maybe worth practising some self discipline also for what concerns our nutrition.
Despite I am not a doctor and suggesting a diet is out of the purposes of this post, enriching your meals with fresh, plant-based, seasonal food does have improvements on your health and your immune system. And helps the climate, too. That’s a great win-win!
And guess what? This extended period of time at home is just the perfect opportunity to experiment new recipies. Find ispiration on the internet or from friends and have fun cooking fancy recipies in your kitchen. You might discover how nice it feels to bake and eat your own pizza or to reproduce that amazing dish of your favourite restaurant. And do not worry: the supply chains will keep functioning fine, so you do not need to hoard anything at the supermarket!
Learn and explore
A part from food, what about all those things you’d love to do but rarely have time for? A musical instrument, or a foreign language? Add these entries in your happiness plan. In the next weeks, you might even discover a new passion or become proficient in a new skill, maybe something useful for your professional career. After all, they say it takes 20 hours to learn anything.
In summary, this exceptional period of home office can be a great self-improvement opportunity in your work and personal life. Learn to know yourself better and to show gratidude for the simple things in your life, that maybe you usually take for granted. Reach out to some old friends and stay in touch with family members that maybe live far away. It will make the day for all.
Stay safe!
If you find this content inspiring, leave a comment below! What did you find useful? What are you going to try? Do you have other important suggestions? I’d be happy to hear your voice :)
