“Vacationing at home” – recharging the batteries while working from home

What a shift in our lives! COVID-19 has changed everything and turned our lives upside-down. So many people have lost their lives to the virus, gone through severe illness or are just in the middle of doing so. Many people are facing an existential crisis due to unforeseeable personal and economic losses – either by having lost their job, their business or other sources of income. Others are part of those industries and professions that keep us all going, such as healthcare, food retail, transport and many more.

Some of us, like myself, are lucky to be in the privileged and comfortable situation of being able to work from home. I am not travelling around the globe anymore to meet customers or employees, nor am I going to the office. Instead, I am working from my home supported by technology, doing my part to keep things going.

Sounds easy enough. Is it really? Again, I can’t overstate how very grateful I am to be able to work in a full-time job during these times. However, working from home under the current circumstances does not mean I am working the same way as I would normally do in the office or during business trips. From one day to the next, my work life moved into my home – and started taking over.

I am used to spending a lot of my daily time on work. Admittedly, I was never a big fan of the term “work-life-balance”, as I consider work as a part of life and always preferred the term “work-life-integration”. Truth be told: I realized the integration of work into my day-to-day life somehow made me lose my balance. After the first weeks working from home had passed, I really felt like I needed a break. My whole body and mind were craving for a rest. But let’s start at the beginning.

I usually work from the office and have very few days in a year where I work from home. I spend most of the day in meetings, typically with people physically present, plus some dialed in through video conference. The first and most important thing I discovered in the new work-from-home-everyday mode was that any type of border between work and private life seemed to disappear. I cancelled the upcoming vacation with my family as the planned trip was not feasible. What did I do instead? Exactly – I worked.

What else did I notice? I typically have around a 30-minute commute to and from the office. I often use this time to reflect and think, sometimes I would call a friend or colleague to discuss something that was at the front of my mind. Nowadays I start my working day right after getting out of bed and keep going until late at night. Instead of enjoying refreshing conversations with colleagues in the canteen, I barely manage to get a lunch break, often eating in my study during a call. I was close to turning into a 24/7 worker with no real breaks or time to recover – sometimes even finding it hard to find the time to go to the bathroom. My mind kept circling around work, and there were entire days where I didn’t even bump into members of my family living in the same household.

Usually, even after long working days in the office with back-to-back meetings, I still finish my days with a lot of energy. I enjoy interacting with my team and having good and inspiring discussions with colleagues. I always mention that I “get energy out of being with people”. Working from home, I am still having the same discussions on the same topics, using multiple collaboration platforms that SAP provides (kudos to our IT teams – you rock!). We even managed to conduct a strategy planning session with my new leadership team in a virtual setup last month. A meeting that was planned for 3 straight days of face-to-face interaction in Pittsburgh at the site of our SAP Ariba team was spread across six days of part-time virtual meetings (4-6 hours each day) across 13.5 hours of time zone distance. It worked really well and went much better than I had expected. But at the end of each day I felt totally exhausted. Instead of being energized by the discussions they completely drained my batteries. In addition, I missed the kind of social interactions I would normally have had, like a chat at the coffee machine or a quick discussion with colleagues during breaks and so on.

Two weeks into working from home from early morning to late night, I started to get weird dreams related to work every single night and I generally felt that my quality of sleep had deteriorated. My wife told me that I started to talk a lot in my sleep (luckily, she wasn’t even able to recognize the language). I realized that there were more and more days where I was really moody.

Four weeks into working from home, we were approaching the Easter weekend where Good Friday and Easter Monday meant an extended 4-day weekend in Germany. By Thursday I felt more exhausted than I had felt in years. My energy levels were at an absolute low and I barely managed to carry myself through the day. Starting Friday, I stayed away from my laptop and used the time for extended walks with my wife and some relaxing tasks around the house. By Monday I felt like I was reborn with my batteries running high again.

When sharing this experience with some close friends I was astonished to get a consistent reply from them: “You too? I thought it was just me”. I started to talk to colleagues about it and found out that almost all of them experienced exactly the same thing. It became apparent that something had to change.

We need to establish a framework for relaxation, rejuvenation, recreation – however you want to call it. It is also clear that this cannot only be about taking time off but also how we spend this time and what we should avoid. I am convinced that only a set of straight ground rules will allow us to recover to the extent we have to. No touching the corporate laptop, no checking mails on the phone or tablet are essential steps in my opinion.

I have already taken action and scheduled days that I will take off from work despite the travel restrictions COVID-19 still causes.

In addition, let me share a few things which I have also implemented in my daily routine to support my energy levels during the new workday rhythm at home – to stay mindful and resilient during such times like now.

·        Extended lunch breaks: I decided to allow more time around lunch time and extend it to at least 90 minutes. This gives me an opportunity to eat and go for a walk to re-energize. I blocked this time in my calendar.

·        Physical exercise: I usually play badminton some evenings during the week or on the weekend. Since this isn’t possible at the moment, I am going for walks during lunch time or in the evening to clear my head. On weekends we go on extended hikes.

·        Awareness of time saving: Realizing that I am saving about one hour every day by not commuting to and from the office, I decided to consider this as a win and to reinvest it into my lunch break without having a bad conscience about it.

·        End of business is end of business: Working from home it’s easy to let the barriers between private life and work life become blurred. Being aware of this helps to not return to my desk once I have finished.

These are small changes that work for me and help me to keep going in my daily routine. However, I strongly feel that real rejuvenation can only happen when we learn how to “vacation at home”. I believe that the current working model is not sustainable for many people working from home. As the home office setup looks like to be around for quite a while longer – why not take vacation at home as well?

Looking forward to hearing from you about how you recharge at home!

Please, do take care of yourself.

Andreas