I don’t want to give you the perfect tip or let you know that I have figured it out - take from this what might help you and leave the rest
Hi there,
two, not three things I hope are true for you:
You’re
* still healthy
* at home
* still working
like me.
How many emails did you get giving you lists of the best resources for online learning, the best tipps for working from home, the best free offers in these weird times?
If your inbox looks just a bit like mine, you don’t want any more lists.
So I won’t give you another list - because I don’t know the “best” of anything anyway. It depends so much on who you are and how you tick. So now I’ll do what I was told not to: I’ll use this newsletter to talk about me :-)
For me not a lot has changed: I work from home all the time, I live alone and since I have to be careful with money I haven’t a lot of activities outside my home. I meet with my friends and family living in the same city - and that’s the only things which changed for me. Now it’s messaging and video-calling and regular calling on the landline (yes, I still have one of those).
It helps me a lot to know my biological rhythm. I’m not a morning person at all but I don’t have a problem working in the evenings. Depending on how much work I have, some days are not really filled up and I have to be careful not to get the holiday feeling, going to bed later and later - which means getting up later and later as well.
But I’ll always keep to my own rhythm - what is the worth of working for yourself, if you can’t do it on your terms?
I have a routine in place: My alarm is set (not too early) and while I air my flat, I can go back to bed and check messages or do my language course, then I’ll get up and do some exercising. I need to have it done for the day quite early in my day because otherwise I won’t do it. And I do need a low threshold to start it, so I do it at home. It doesn’t take too much time this way. After that breakfast, emails and deciding what needs to be done that day.
Work organisation: As I work on patterns in the order they arrive in my inbox, I have a list for the week and then decide how many to do on a given day. I can always move things around but I never put too much on a day, so I’ll be able to check off everything I planned for that day. If I see I have time left and wouldn’t mind doing more, I’ll do that.
For me, the key is to avoid making my day look like I wouldn’t have time for the things I enjoy - knitting, reading, talking to friends. If I get the feeling it’s all work and no fun, I won’t want to start with work at all. So I let my days look like there is a lot of time for those enjoyable things. That’s what I “have” to do - but I end up doing more anyway - because nobody expects me to, I enjoy work and have fun checking things off my…
….Lists: I love to do - lists. No, that’s not the whole truth: I love to check off things from my to do list.
I have a weekly to do list from which I will move items to daily to do lists. The items are always small enough to finish them quite quickly. I even started a habit tracker with the smaller things I want to do daily. Having them written down means I don’t have to think whether I’m in the mood to do them. I decided to do them beforehand and it’s very satisfying to cross them off.
A few weeks ago I started a cleaning routine as well. I found one with daily tasks which I put on my habit tracker (or they were already there) and weekly tasks each of which is assigned to one day, so you never have to do a lot. It works great.
I’m very generous with breaks: Most days I have a nice lunch break with included knitting time.
Working from home means I might have put laundry on, so when the washing machine starts to shout about being finished, I take a break and hang it up.
If I need to get groceries or go to the post office, I’ll do that in the afternoon. And I might go back to work afterwards. Sometimes when something is difficult, I’ll just have a break and then continue to work after some knitting or reading a chapter in one of my current books.
It’s important for me to do things I want to do but I won’t particularly enjoy (like exercising) early in the day, so they are done, are crossed off and I can do the fun stuff for the rest of the day. And yes, my work as a tech editor totally counts as fun stuff.
I mentioned low thresholds before but I want to elaborate on those a bit: For me, working from home is ideal. I know people who need to go somewhere else to get the work done. For me it’s the opposite: I need to be able to start work whenever I want to - if I would need to get dressed and go somewhere else first, I know I would work less.
Another example for my system of low thresholds: To avoid being overwhelmed on Mondays, I decided very early on that Mondays are my administration days. I write my invoices only on Mondays, I do my filing on Mondays, pay invoices on Mondays - you get the picture. And if it’s a slow Monday with my motivation doing something else, that’s enough. I worked and I am “allowed” to stop working after that. But most Mondays I do some other stuff as well - because I don’t have to ;-)
Unlike other people I don’t have to wear office clothes to feel like working. Actually, I started to call my launch clothes work clothes because that’s what happened :-) It’s important that I’m comfy and I’m always wearing clean clothes - you never know, there might arrive a package or someone might Skype without asking beforehand :-)
I follow my own rules. I hate rules given to me by other people but my own rules are totally okay. And even though I call them rules, the only rule I never break is that I never *have* to do anything, I can do everything but I don’t have to do it. This increases the probability of me doing it :-)
I think the most important thing is to know how you tick and work around that. These things are what works for me. In April, I’ll be turning 40 (no celebrations then, sadly - but I’ll celebrate later) and I started to work when I was 19. There was a break for university in my 20s. And the only time I was able to work in my own rhythm was when I was able to write my diploma thesis from home. I discovered many of the above tricks then.
And now I can do it again and that makes me very happy and well-balanced.
Do you know what works best for you? Do you have a great tip to share?
Stay healthy and talk soon
Frauke xx