5 Ways to Work from Home During a Pandemic
Thought it was tough to tune out distractions before? Welcome to the chaos. Here’s how to find sanity (and your flow) from within your four walls.
5 Ways to Work from Home During a Pandemic, Seventeen states and nearly 100 million Americans are now under stay at home orders–and as the Coronavirus crisis continues, that number may only continue to grow.
Those of us who are able to work from home are fortunate. We’re able to stay (mostly) out of harm’s way while those with truly essential jobs–medical professionals, grocery clerks, bus drivers, postal workers, etc.–help keep our nation going.
Working from home is a privilege, to be sure, but it’s also never been harder to get your brain focused on your job..and to keep it there.
If you’re not homeschooling your kids, discussing the headlines with roommates, or walking your dog, you’re picking up your phone or refreshing your browser to get the news (don’t even get me started on the insane amount of Whatsapp chats and Zoom calls happening right now).
Finding focus in the wake so much stimulation and anxiety may be tough, but it’s definitely doable. My team at Masthead Media and I frequently work remotely and from home (we’re 100 percent WFH now), and we’ve developed some strategies for staying productive during the most challenging moments.
Stick to a Single Task
There’s a lot going on right now. You may feel like you need to do five things at once to keep up with it all. Resist the urge: it’s not going to help your workload or your sanity.
On a good day (no international crisis to speak of) the average person spends just three minutes on any given task before switching to something else. While we think of this as multitasking, we’re actually moving quickly and repeatedly between tasks.
This is known as “task switching” and doing it causes you to lose (or never achieve) true focus.
In fact, studies show that you can lose up to 80 percent of productive time due to task switching.
When you sit down to fully focus on work aim to focus on a single project at one time (e.g., don’t attempt to email clients while also teaching your son 2nd-grade math). When it’s time to produce that report, do only that for 45 minutes to an hour. Then switch over to 20 minutes of responding to email. When it’s your turn to watch the kids, aim to be fully present for at least half-hour (and then you can both take a break). You’ll feel a little saner — and get a lot more done.
