The Most Annoying (Persistent) Work From Home Problems

A few tips to make the most of your new at-home schedule 

Some people are glad to be able to work from home - others, not so much. Whatever your feelings about it are, working from home is here to stay in some form or another. If you're one of the millions whose work has been transferred from office to bedside table during the pandemic, you can certainly relate to the vastly different environment – along with all its blessings and challenges. To discuss this highly relevant topic- I sat down with Adam Schroeder, the Founder of LoneStar Multimedia, a web design and audio editing company, who has been doing his job from home for a decade now.

Time + Space… A Gift from the Pandemic

For those of you who just recently started working from home, maybe it felt great at first and now it’s turned into you and your dog staring at one another out of complete boredom. Or maybe the extended pajama time was a dream at first, but now you miss your clothes, but don’t feel you have a great reason to put them on. The struggle is real. On the other side of that, plenty of us felt appreciation for the extra time at home, for the forced slowdown, and the quieter mornings. If you are on the side of this where your frustration overrides your gratitude, it’s important that you establish some healthy outlets and routines. Whether that’s an early morning or mid-day walk, or yoga on your patio to break up the screen time, you decide, you choose, and you put it on your calendar every single day so it becomes a ritual. 

Fun Fact: Thomas Malone wrote a book called The Future of Work around 2000, where he predicted decentralization in organizational structures and for a number of reasons related to communication and the speed of communication that it would become the norm work from remote locations.

Distractions: More or Less

It’s so easy, in an office setting, for anyone to grab your attention and take your time, anytime really. At home, they have to schedule a Zoom or call. Which makes me wonder… are there more distractions at home or in an office setting? Does starting that load of laundry, midway through a presentation prep actually make you less productive? As Adam put it, “Studies are showing us now that we are much more productive working from home.” Stanford says by 13%. So if we can slot the laundry in before we start the presentation prep, we are much more likely to get in more uninterrupted time than we would in our office setting. 

Can we really schedule our distractions to keep them from distracting us? I say YES! A daily routine that leaves committed time for your “distractions”, the laundry, the night-before dishes, the dog walk, the emails for the school PTO… if we put those on the calendar as a bonus hour, we get them done, we get to our work, and we get on with our day. 

Speaking of Filling In Your Time

How many of you have felt guilt for not filling the full 8-hours of your day? And further, have you found yourself doing unnecessary things just to fill that time? 

Adam and I agree, you don’t need to do this. “You have to get over the mindset and you have to realize if you can do your job in twenty hours, your boss doesn't have to know you finished in twenty hours. They're paying you a salary for your expertise.”

Now is the best time I’ve ever seen to adopt a performance mentality. You are worthy of that pay if you are successfully completing your job. If you’re a team lead or a manager or CEO reading this, make sure you’re making that known to your staff. Have honest conversations about their importance, their abilities, and even their time. Establish clear expectations with an open floor for communication. That's a big mindset shift. It’s, “I'm allowed to sit on my couch and read a book for 30 to 45 minutes if I want to because that's what I want to do. I'm done with what I need to do.” 

And Speaking of Balance

I think it’s important to stop the creep. Email, texts, phone calls, all hours of the day and night. They creep into your regular life, and you are more than a job. Now that email is on our phones, it goes everywhere with us. So how do we fight the urge to constantly respond in real time 24/7? “It seems like you set the expectation, so if you are responding at 10 pm within a few minutes of an email coming in, the next time you don’t do that, there might be a disappointment on the other end. So this is something to think about,” says Adam, whose decade long experience working from home has taught him plenty about establishing boundaries. 

How do you establish these boundaries with your boss? Ask the questions. 

If you know you’re more productive in the morning, and you want your hours to be 7 am to 3 or 4 pm, ask if this is a possibility. And if those 4:30 pm emails keep rolling in, and you’re feeling stressed about answering those that day or the next morning, ask your boss what their expectation is. Transparency and communication is so (very) important. This might be uncomfortable at first, but I promise you it’s less uncomfortable than wondering day-in and day-out what the expectation actually is. 

Finding freedom, leveraging uncertainty, and establishing the boundaries and schedule that works for you is so important right now. If you loved this topic, you can listen to the full conversation here.