I still wake up with a feeling of dread on Monday mornings, ingrained from my years of going into an office. My office is just in the next room and I can show up to work in my pajamas, but I still get that sinking, nervous feeling whenever emails are coming in from the weekend… why?
I’ve been telecommuting at least part-time since the beginning of the year, and I’ve only been doing this full-time for the past month. I’m also still dealing with some pains that just come with being new in my career, but I am slowly coming to understand what works for me, what helps me be as effective and efficient as possible in my job without burning myself out.
I write this with the disclaimer that telecommuting jobs can be different. For example, I work for a company that has an office-based culture. Many people telecommute one day a week, but doing it full-time is definitely not the norm. Also, I don’t directly deal with customers or clients in my job function. So what works for me might not work for everyone else, and it might not even speak to the general telecommuting experience.
Here are some things I’ve slowly been allowing myself to do:
- Truly unplug from work. I have a dedicated spot at home just for my work station. I am usually available to my coworkers from 6AM to 5PM PST. Not to say that I am steadily churning out work for 11 hours straight (I take a long lunch to pick up Hugga from preschool) but most people come into the office from 8 to 5 and that’s their day. I used to keep my work machine on over the weekend and check emails periodically, but then I’d either start working or just get stressed out over the expanding to-do list waiting for me on Monday. So instead, I shut my computer off and I don’t even like sitting at my desk (even if it’s to work on my writing) over the weekend.
- Keep my day job separate from my life. The app I had that allowed me to check work emails from my iPhone broke when I upgraded (for some reason, it needs a new activation code every time you install it) and I never bothered to fix it. My compulsion to keep checking my work email knowing I couldn’t actually do anything work-related nearly wrecked our family vacation (road tripping to get here). So no more. Now that we’re settled in at home I’m online quite enough, which is to say, usually more available than people in the office. I don’t need to bring my work with me everywhere I go.
- Say no. I’m very used to being at the beck and call of one product team, even though I’ve been moved to the general documentation team a year ago and have been working for other products, on and off. I’ve just been moved part-time to a new product and I’m having a difficult time with the knowledge transfer, primarily because I’ve just come off a really stressful project and I’m still dealing with the fallout. I used to take on more than I could handle, knowing that the process I have to follow would burn me out at some point, but the communication has been open with my boss and she’s been supportive in my pushing back when I feel I can’t get things done within the time frame my product team is asking of me.
Some things I’m still having trouble with:
- Staying on top of administrative tasks. I’d usually take care of these things — logging my hours, sending status emails, etc. — during downtime at the office on a Thursday or Friday. I don’t know if things have really ramped up all crazy or if this is just the nature of working from home (where there’s always something else I could be filling my time with), but I never really seem to have downtime anymore. I’ve been late on a few of these things these past few weeks.
- Digital organization. I’ve always been bad at this. While my desk has always looked pretty clean (my team was mostly paperless), my inbox is a total nightmare. Again, organizing emails and evaluating my to-do list was always something I saved for downtime at the office, and now they’re just tasks I continually put off.
- Not thinking about work when I’m not on the clock. Although staying unplugged over the weekend has been helpful, I still sometimes stress out over things I need to get done, or things I might have forgotten to do, or things that could go wrong. Part of the reason is that we don’t have reliable processes in place.
Anyway, on that note, I think what I really need to do is implement a daily to-do list for all sectors of my life. I tried doing this GTD thing a few months ago but found it really difficult to maintain, what with all the contexts and projects and stuff. I’m probably going to take it back to pen and paper — I really need a dead simple way to get down all the things I need to do as I think of them.
On an unrelated-to-my-day-job note, I just joined a writing accountability group run by a teacher I’ve worked with before, thereby adding yet another monthly deadline to my schedule. As if I didn’t have enough to do. I swear to God, sometimes I do these things impulsively and think immediately after that I must be on crack. But for all the things I’ve taken on this year, I have yet to regret a single one.
{ 0 comments }
