How to Stay Productive During the Pandemic | 6 Tips for Working from Home
Adjusting to the work-from-home lifestyle this year has been nothing short of a challenge for many. The separation between the rest and the grind is slim, if existent at all. For people like myself, I live in a one-bedroom apartment where my desk is on the other side of the wall to my bed. If I want to (and this happened on too many occasions,) it’d take only six steps to get from my bed to the desk, and that’s taking into account the sluggish drudge that typically gets me between those two points in the morning.
As someone who finds energy and enjoyment at the prospect of being productive, I thought the work-from-home life would free up so much time and allow me to take on even more with each day. As you might relate, though, working from home turned out to offer its own set of new distractions and mental battles that led to overall fatigue and a backsliding in terms of personal efficiency. While frustrating for a time, this motivated me to seek out ways to resolve these newfound hurdles. Little tweaks in the way I organized my life led to transformations in the level of productivity I found myself able to achieve, along with the energy I had throughout each day. Through trial and error, here are a couple tactics I’ve found helpful.
1. Do something for 20 minutes in the morning before opening your laptop.
With the space between my rest space and work space both physically shrunk, the temptation exists to finish getting myself brushed up in the morning and then head straight from the bathroom to my desk. I find that uncomfortable, and suffocating to the bubble I call my personal life. Instead, I’ve been incorporating routines in the morning that allow myself a bit of time to mentally prepare for the day that’s ahead; something that the walk to class used to provide. Typically, I’ll prepare and eat breakfast or go through my at-home physical therapy regiment from an ankle injury I sustained earlier this year. These serve as substitutes for the walk to class that used to be that buffer between jumping out of bed and pushing my mind straight into the grind. That could also look like going on a quick walk around the block, making a cup of warm coffee, buying one from around the corner (from a local shop that practices safe social distancing guidelines,) or reading a chapter from your book.
Moreover, intentionally setting my alarm 20–30 minutes earlier than what would be needed to get to my first class immediately allows me to wake up with a sense of peace rather than urgency, which only helps to start out the day on the right note. All in all, I feel more collected and in control of my day rather than the events on the calendar controlling my emotional and mental state in every waking second. That peace before the storm of the day hits is unbeatable.
2. Change out of your PJs every day.
In my first few days of the stay-at-home order, I noticed a sluggishness about myself that I seemed unable to whip myself out of. My sister recommended that I try changing out of my PJs and into clothes that I’d wear around school, and the concept has stuck ever since. This reminded me of the power in keeping to the routine that my body’s been so used to experiencing on the daily during a non-COVID semester. This simple act of sticking to that routine on top of making myself feel presentable allowed my body to get those subconscious signals that the day was starting and fully wake up as it’s used to. Candidly, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve left my least comfortable pairs of pants (ie. jeans) on their hangers to chill out for a while; by no means am I forcing myself to feel less comfortable within my own home. The balance between feeling at home and at work at the same time is a unique one that manifests differently between individuals, including between each of my roommates and I. For me, though, it looks like putting on leggings and a basic tee with a rotation through a handful of outerwear, and socks for sure. For me, it’s not about the professionalism of the clothing, but the act of changing out of my sleepwear to help kickstart the day.
I was also recently gifted a Comfy (something I’ve been wanting for ages, shoutout Ev,) and I’ve learned quickly to use it wisely as well. The only downside I’ve encountered to this ingenious creation is that it can quickly make me feel too relaxed and in no state for being productive. If you have a Comfy, Snuggie, or snug blanket, limit your use to when you’re taking a break between classes or working on a task that requires less brain power.
3. Leave your phone on your desk outside the bedroom.
This is another way I’ve been able to achieve the separation between work and rest. Besides the negative effects shown by researchers even before the pandemic of using your phone in bed or right before sleeping, I realized that my phone is a connection to the outside world and all of its chaos that I don’t need to be feeding my mind right before bed. My phone does a remarkable job at its role in tethering me to society (for better or for worse): class, work, and communities are buzzing (literally) through email and messaging platforms. But when it hits bedtime, I’ve fought against the narrative of social media and networking sites to build trust in myself that I’ve done the work for the day and I can step away from it for some deserved rest.
Leaving my phone at my desk was a challenging choice that caused me to intentionally step away from the bustle and bright notifications and get some quiet me-time right before bed. I found that on busy days (of which most were, as college goes,) these few minutes of brushing my teeth in front of the mirror or flossing next to my roomies also getting ready for bed were my first moments of my day when I was truly present. Not worried about what was coming next or the email to attend to, but intentionally setting those things aside to just be—be with myself, be with my roomies, be with the moment—before the day was done.
Plus, putting my phone in the same place consistently helped me never spend time searching for it in the house XD.
4) Schedule in daily tasks.
As a way of planning my time out for the week or coming days and making sure that no assignment gets forgotten, I’ve tried out a number of different tactics to track those tasks and ensure that they get submitted on time. This semester, the most effective method was to put everything in one place: Google Calendar. Since I’ve already been obsessed about laying all of my classes, calls, and club meetings out in color-coded fashion on my cal, it made the most sense for me to also block off time in my calendar to get tasks done that I wanted to for the day within that same platform. This allowed me start thinking about what was needed to get the assignment done, and in turn how much time that would take. From there, I’d schedule that amount of time into the calendar, and be able to realistically assess how much I could get done that day. If tasks I aimed to get done didn’t fit, I’d reprioritize and simply move the moveable events in my calendar around to get things done when they needed to be done.
Weekly assignments or quizzes were logged in as repeating events in my cal, and I’d move around the event according to what worked best for the given week; the recurring events helped me always remember to get those pesky assignments in (as it is, new assignments tend to overshadow old ones, so these weekly’s were easy to forget about otherwise.) When new assignments came out, the first thing I’d do was to set a placeholder in my calendar—which looked like a one hour event block—in the week leading up to the due date to remind myself to plan for the assignment when the week did come.
As mentioned, this method is not the only one I’ve tested out. If busy calendars aren’t your vibe (totally understand,) here are a few others I’ve bounced in between:
- I love Notion, and used it religiously over the summer to plan out my weeks, beginning on Sundays. This is the template I copied over from week-to-week, allowing the easy transfer of ongoing tasks and ones that were moved to the following days. Feel free to use, duplicate as your own, and begin planning! The only reason I left this system was in order to consolidate everything into one platform that I was constantly checking (Google Calendar.) I still use Notion for journaling and organizing documents of all kinds, though. (+1 to Notion also for the most aesthetically pleasing workspace organization tool I’ve seen.)
- The good ol’ fashioned paper planner is hard to go wrong with. The satisfaction of crossing off tasks from the checklist of to-do’s is unbeatable and yet to be emulated in the digital world. I used this method growing up, and still used it occasionally throughout the semester when small backlog (ie. no due date) items would pop up that I wanted to get done sometime throughout the week but didn’t have a pressing deadline for. Sometimes, I also used my planner as a quick way to jot down the breakdown of tasks within an overarching project or assignment (if I wasn’t using the description feature within Google Cal events already.) Post-it notes also worked for inconsistent and quick jotting down of things that pop into my mind (although I’ve also found the Google Keep feature within Google Calendar on the right side bar really helpful for this as well.)
5) Schedule in daily rest.
With my calendar typically filled up by not only the concrete meetings and classes but also assignments and blocks for work, I knew the looming possibility of burnout if I didn’t make a habit of leaving chunks of white space for rest. What helped was also the habit that my roomies and I made to eat dinner together every day and to rotate who made each meal. Thus, I did my best to leave at least an hour every evening for dinner time, and a few days with availability earlier on to make lunch for the fam.
In the calendar above, you can see the 1-hour chunks of white space on even one of my busiest weeks of the semester on every evening except Friday, when I had two papers due (and roomie Carrie delivered food to me at the cafe I was working at, and I just about stopped and cried right there ❤.)
I came to look forward to those dinnertimes and use them as motivation to keep on the grind until then. During those one hour blocks were also some of the best conversations and memories I had as I now look back on the semester. Schedule in rest. It’s so worth it.
6) Respect the rhythm.
Lastly, one thing I came to acknowledge this semester was the need for a balance between work and rest. I experienced hardcore burnout just a year ago during the sophomore struggle, and I knew I didn’t want to be in that place again.
Understand that your body needs both the work and the rest in order to feel energetic and at full functioning capacity. And within the concept ‘rest’ includes both physical and mental rest. For me, I began taking my sleep schedule more seriously and made an effort to get 7+ hours of sleep per night. The dinners at our apartment and the moments before and after work were vital spaces of mental relaxation, and absolutely necessary for my overall well-being this semester.
We see this at play when we’re working out: you can’t build your muscle by squeezing it nonstop—it’ll snap. In the same way, we’ll inevitably find ourselves in mental strain and potential burnout if we don’t allow our minds adequate rest in between the grinding.
Respect the rhythm with the lifestyle choices you make and the priorities you set. It’s an investment into your holistic well-being for the long run.
In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s book, Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me & You, he writes (absolutely witty and uplifting) greetings for each morning and night. One of those for the day went like this:
Gmorning!
Before you let the world in, make
a little space for yourself.
Cup of coffee, tidy te counter,
morning quiet.
Savor the best part of that dream
you had for one more second.
Woo! Okay. Have at it, world!Gnight!
Before you turn the world down,
make a little space for yourself.
Brush your teeth, tidy the
counter, put down the phone.
Savor the best part of the day for one more second.
Woo! Okay. Have at it, dreams!
Manuel captured the cycle of work and rest that we often forget to make room for, and the tranquil beauty of allowing rest in at its right time. Soaking in the “morning quiet” and enjoying a “little space for yourself” are beautiful things that reel us back into the present moment — something we forget to do when the world is constantly rushing and notifications are so easily distracting us.
This exists especially so in the work-from-home environment; an unfortunate circumstance when ‘home’ is typically meant to be the sanctuary of rest for the body and mind. As technology and remote work intrude on that rest space, it’s easy to lose sight of the rhythm that we humans need in order to be most productive. Luckily, the small lifestyle choices we make now can lead to habits that turn into sustainable functioning and increased well-being. Together with an appreciation for rest, we can develop at-home lifestyles that keep us productive for the long-run.
