Since the Covid-19 outbreak, articles are focused on working from home whilst listing ways to make yourself efficient and productive. But what we miss talking about are the side effects of staying home! Stress levels are rocketing, health issues are soaring, and people are becoming stagnant. This will eventually reach the peek point where working from home will ruin our lives.
Working From Home – General
Movements have been encouraging companies to allow remote work as a partial activity and not as a full one. The partial aspect of those movements is what made them attractive. Employees get to stay home once or twice a week, allowing them to do few shores, take care of their loved ones, get to rest a bit from the long commutes and wasted traffic hours. All of this made the weekends more adequate for rest and personal time, thus remediating stress levels in general.
The Plot
Yet, the current situation has a slight twist to it. Being locked at home will worsen the mental health; add to it the work from home, and the global negativity effect of Covid-19. You will have a timed bomb, waiting to explode. So work on yourself.
“To get to where you want to be, you’ll need to pave your own paths”. Procifics
We share 5 tips on how to cope with the stress at home and how to get the best out of this period. Because we all know that this dark cloud will pass and the sun will shine again on humanity. And it is up to us to emerge better and stronger human beings. Let’s check the 5 pillars of an indestructible work-life balance, even when working from home!
The Five Pillars
Incentivize yourself
The most important pillar is YOU. Indulge and incentivize yourself. This concept is mostly associated with spending money e.g. shopping, going out, etc. but it shouldn’t be only this way. So wake up 15 minutes prior to your normal “rise and shine” time, prepare your coffee or tea, sit down on your balcony and contemplate the world around you. Listen to the tiny voices and to the noisiest ones. Do not rush the day; a 5-minute serenity time with yourself is your first big achievement of the day.
This doesn’t stop here, there are numerous ways to incentivize yourself while working from home, and of which self-improvement is the first. The worst thing that can happen to someone is to do the same work every single day, so find a way to improve yourself whether by using a new technology (ideas are flooding the internet), automating a process or planning your work.
Planning is an important thing that you can do. When you plan your work ahead of time, you’ll have visibility over the time span and gaps to fill or work to reschedule. When you plan and you log the actual work, you’ll have a proof of the work you do and the time you spend on specific tasks and the needed improvements you should do, not mentioning the need for logging nowadays because the management needs to know what you are doing.
Incentivizing yourself can also include taking training courses and many other approaches based on the work environment and the life balance you agree to. All courses are discounted nowadays; take for example us at Procifics, we are offering 40% discounts on our PfMP, PgMP, and PMP courses to encourage working from home. So invest in yourself because you can!
Filter Negativity
Negativity shines bright, it stands distinctively in a field of positivity. Take an example of traffic, one angry driver shouting and honking the horn can introduce negativity and stress to a number of nearby drivers. The same happens when working from home, people bring their negativity and try to spread some of it on their colleagues through indirect and direct ways i.e. side talks, tasks, etc.
When you filter negativity, you may still have few noises, however, you will be minimizing it by not taking part of the negative talks, by always smiling to the person having a video conference with you, by answering questions on spot or within a very short period of time. In summary, if you spread positivity and try as much as you can to filter negativity out of your aura, you will be able to do both, increase your productivity and decrease your stress levels; the latter will have a high impact on your personal life and well-being.
Do not forget your body
Your body is your temple, cherish it, indulge it and give it what it needs. Sometimes, it is hard to keep track of your hydration level, so you may use apps to remind you, there are a lot of app to help set hourly reminders to drink water, you can also do the same for eating a snack or grabbing a bite. Your body needs constant attention and when not given, it deteriorates and affects your wellbeing.
When your body is not in a good state, your comfortness, health and happiness levels decrease, thus affecting your entire life. Whether with relation to work or to your personal life. So, keep your body hydrated and well fed at all times!
In addition, your body needs exercise. Most of us park their bodies in their spots in the morning and leave them parked for the entire day. Multiple remedies can be used to minimize this neglection e.g. desk exercising, the latter corresponds to a 30-second stretching performed while sitting on the chair
Never be too busy
It rings a bell yes? We encounter a lot of colleagues who are always busy and claiming that the workload is unbearable. Each time you ask them a question, they’ll rage or push you away for hours or even days. The same people are those who have 200 e-mails in their cluttered inboxes, of which 20 are overdue and urgent matters, 10 are of normal importance and the remaining are informative e-mails that can be easily grouped and read. Cluttering your inbox is a bad habit, when you receive an e-mail, you need to directly classify it and handle it accordingly. Give a 5-minute e-mail reading time every couple of hours, you’ll be amazed with the result.
So never be too busy. If someone asks you a question, answer them immediately. If you really can’t, tell them exactly when you can. Imagine this situation the other way around. If you have a pending endeavor which is dependent on an answer from your colleague, and the latter makes you wait for hours or days, you will have pending or overdue work, and the cycle never ends. So start with yourself, never be too busy, make a change and be the centre of it. This will have a huge impact on your work from home and will definitely have an impact on your colleagues, as working from home can be time consuming and managing that time is crucial.
In the same category, do not overwork yourself! Work your way through the day by giving it the best you can. Manage your time efficiently and log everything so you can target the deficiencies and enhance balance. In addition to having a proof of your work.
Balance your life to the degree you find comfortable
No matter how much you read and listen about the need to balance your life, you may still want to overwork yourself and to silence any personal-life noises. Well, our aim is to let you know that the important thing is that you feel comfortable with your life. Whether you are working extra hours which is more important to you than leverage time for your personal life. You work short on the required level, however, you have a great personal life. Or you have a perfectly balanced life, we suggest that you make the best out of it by:
Incentivizing yourself
Filtering negativity
Always remembering your body
Never being too busy and
Balancing your life to the degree you find comfortable