Work-life balance takes on a new meaning with COVID-19
It’s tempting to think everyone knows how to manage time when working from home. The slew of online articles providing tips, tools and techniques highlights it takes structure and routine. COVID-19 has melded our work and life space making it harder to track the separation.
Stanford University conducted a nine-month-long study that concluded remote workers were more productive than their in-office counterparts. Sitting in a room at home working for hours, not realising how much time has gone by isn’t the productivity solution either.
Many remote workers actually cite work-life balance as a factor for higher levels of focus and productivity. Building an at-home routine and structure, a quiet office space, break time, tracking your hours and activities etc., are important to achieving the right balance.
And yet due to COVID-19 many of us are in forced or voluntary lockdown, and this adds an extra dimension to the problem: the people you live with are also not at work or at school — they are at home with you 24/7.
There are too many distractions, coffee, preparing food, your workspace may also be your living space, and well, there’s Netflix, kids, coffee, Twitch, coffee, Youtube, washing and cleaning, (did I mention coffee?) all vying for your attention in preference to actually — you know — working. Inevitably, your regular routine starts to break down, even if you usually work from home.
When work and life have no clear boundaries either one can suffer from the dominance of the other, and it becomes increasingly important to manage the allotment of time to each.
At Totem we are still in the process of building our product, but the blockchain network is already live and our Activities and Timekeeping modules are being put to good use.
With the family in COVID-19 lockdown, as an interesting experiment one of the team wanted to find out if Totem Activities could be used to incentivise kids’ chores at home. Whilst it didn’t work out as intended, (children are terrible timekeepers!) the feedback helped us realise that a simplified task and incentive module was needed, not just for children, but in business as well.
We started building on this idea and soon you will be able to, for example, assign a simple task to anyone in your ‘partner network’, for a bounty or in a simple marketplace where anyone can take the task. Once the assignee confirms or proves it is complete, you approve, and the bounty is transferred. With the kids option a bounty could be a blockchain collectible or sticker. It’s a whole new twist on the chore board. Take a look at the newly inspired Totem UI issue #140 — Task and Reward module.
Totem Live is in the alpha phase and actively under development. We are at a point where community testing and contribution is extremely valuable. If removing middlemen in accounting software and financial applications is appealing to you — become a contributor or early adopter of Totem Live.
Join our Discord group and shape the Totem Live tooling.
