#urgent) probably until 3 or 4 days later. If you call me at 3pm then we're talking at 3pm for as long as you want (or as long as is practica

[maryanntorreson]

6 tips to help you manage your day when working from home

Krystal Quiles

When I first began working at home, I couldn’t believe I was getting away with such a racket.

No one told me what to do or where to be! I could work in my bed, go to the grocery store in the middle of the day, and my clients were none the wiser. Even though I was a freelancer, I was constantly looking over my shoulder and expecting to be reprimanded by someone.

But my elation wore away when I realized I wasn’t quite alone at home: my anxiety was there, too.

Now, I’m an anxious person, even in the best of times. But these days, it seems like we’re all anxious. And anxiety is another ingredient — like Zoom calls, overloaded wifi or howling children or pets — that needs to be factored into your days, your productivity and your time management.

Some days my anxiety drives me to perform at an Olympic level, with no task undone and no email unanswered even if I have to work until midnight. That is overwork — a common way that many of us anxious people deal with our feelings — and I’ll return to it later.

Other days, anxiety creates a background buzz in the form of intrusive thoughts and fears about the future. It can also make us distracted and unable to focus, so another common way of dealing with anxiety is avoidance (more later on this one too). For example, while I was writing this piece, I baked banana bread, made a half-hearted attempt at the exercise bike, fed the cats their pre-lunch snack, and wandered around my house looking for things that needed my attention.

Working from home can be wonderful, but when you’re anxious, it can be difficult to concentrate and stay on task. How do you stay accountable to yourself and get work done without driving yourself to exhaustion?

Here are some tips based on what I have learned from 15 years of managing my anxiety while also working from home:

1. Call off the mental fire drill that occurs whenever you get a Slack or email notification

I know I’m not the only one whose heart rate accelerates when I see a new email in my inbox (or a Slack message). It could be a client, a staffer, my accountant or my mother. My anxiety drives me to want to quickly fix what they’re writing me about so I’ll feel better. But before I do, I often spend time worrying and trying to suss out the “true” meaning of their message (a fool’s errand, since emotional nuance is lost in almost any digital communication). Then I’ll force myself to respond no matter what — even if I’m finally eating lunch at 3PM or doing time-sensitive work.

Don’t blame yourself for leaping to reply to every message — much of modern knowledge work is built on this Pavlovian system of instant feedback and urgent response. With so many of us working from home and without the normal in-person interaction, this past year we’ve gotten trained to crave the feedback of a “ping” or a visual notification.

To start to de-program ourselves from the need to always be on, we need to practice being disconnected for small amounts of time. Begin with a time limit. Pick an after-hours moment when you don’t need to be online, and then turn off or hide your devices for an hour. Gradually work towards doing this during a workday. For that, select an hour when you can purposefully avoid checking updates (set up an “away” or “in a meeting” notification so people won’t wonder why you’re not getting back to them).

See how you feel when you can take a break from checking. When I avoid my phone for an hour, I notice that my neck is looser and so are my shoulders! Immediate benefit.

2. Stop waiting to get permission to log off

When work isn’t a place you leave at the end of the day, it can be incredibly difficult to stop. And let’s face it, when the option is to keep working and feel in control or spend more time on the sofa doom-scrolling or with whining kids, overworking might seem even more attractive. But learning to stop work is a discipline that creates good habits and a necessary step to keeping your energy tank filled.

I am an accomplished professional, but unconsciously I still want someone to tell me, “You did a good job today — you’re done.” Well, you need to learn to give yourself that permission.

Psychologist Alice Boyes changed my life when she suggested setting concrete limits around the amount of time I spend on the tasks that make me anxious and tend to overdo. Such shortcuts and hacks that help calm anxiety are called heuristics.

Here’s how you could come up with a heuristic to set boundaries on your work hours. At the beginning of your day (or the day before), create a reasonable to-do list. The key word is reasonable — no writing up a list based upon an imaginary 240-hour day — and based on experience, you’ll probably know how long most of your tasks will take. And if you have to guess time for any, guess upwards. Structure your day based around this list, and when you’re finished, close your computer. You did good.

3. When you get stuck in a worry spiral, ask: “What’s making me anxious right now?”

The flip side of overwork is avoidance — avoiding deadlines and tasks because you’re anxious. Everyone has their greatest hits of coping mechanisms, from trying to worry the fear away to working it away to diving into a bag of cheese doodles. Our brain does this because it’s trying to help us avoid our bad feelings. To understand the motivations and causes behind your anxiety, it helps to take a pause to feel your feelings and monitor how you react to those feelings.

Start by looking at what’s making you anxious right now and how the anxiety is making you react. Here’s an example from my life. Thinking about money makes me anxious. When the economic news is frightening, I might act out when I’m faced with a work task that has anything to do with money. So if I need to prepare a financial report for my small business, I assume it’s going to reveal negative results, which sends me into a spiral of fear. Cognitive behavioral therapists call this kind of reaction an anxious automatic thought. Consequently, instead of facing the spreadsheet and doing my work, I might avoid it entirely. I might eat that bag of cheese doodles or buy something online that makes me feel good. I’m reacting to my anxiety.

It’s better if I can learn to move from reacting on auto-pilot to knowing what sets me off and then managing how I will respond. I can say to myself: “Looking at my company’s finances is going to set me off right now. Maybe I should ask my business partner to do it. Or maybe I should build in a reward if I face the challenge head on? I could let myself have an extra hour of Netflix if I complete the spreadsheet.” I find that most of the time, doing the work doesn’t feel nearly as bad as what my anxiety anticipates.

4. Follow it up by finding a super-achievable work task and doing it

As you can see from my example above, when you feel anxious, it’s easy to turn a relatively straightforward task into an overwhelming thought exercise that sends your brain into catastrophe mode. When you are mired in anxiety and avoiding your work, the important thing is to do something. Jonathan Baxter, a family therapist, gave me this advice:

“The experience of stress has to do with your body wanting to take action. If there are actions you can take — whether getting some exercise or cleaning the bathroom or teaching your kids something — go ahead and take them. When you take action, give yourself a moment to let yourself feel good about taking a step. Use your mind to give your body the signal that you have agency and are doing what you can. (“There, I did it!”) The goal is to feel active and effective rather than scrambling from one thing to the next.”

I like to take a page from positive psychology and choose a small, meaningful action that will build my motivation for work and to tackle bigger tasks ahead. Have you ever organized a messy spreadsheet and just felt so good? Pick an activity that connects you to your larger purpose and allows you to see yourself as an effective and competent individual, which will ultimately help you move towards doing the thing you’re avoiding.

5. If that seems impossible, pick a non-work task

If tackling work just feels like too much when you’re toiling from home and staring at a messy house or out-of-control kids, pick a non-work action that’s physical and helpful. Since I hunch and clench in my desk chair when I’m stuck, I like to pick a task that gets my body moving and my shoulders open. I might pick a household chore (I like to scrub the bathtub because it’s quick but physically demanding), cook, do some yard work or even run up my stairs a few times. I find that it helps me to get off my screen and into motion.

Notice how you feel after you do your tiny non-work task and whether you’re able to begin the thing you have been avoiding. Then notice: How long can you continue until anxiety hits again? Is there a specific activity that almost always gets you in the mood to tackle a task?

6. Keep adding to your anxiety-taming bag of tricks

Anxiety feels different for everyone. We all have different triggers, and we all react differently. Money, as I mentioned before, is a big anxiety trap for me. When I get unwelcome financial news, my brain immediately goes to a gloomy place: My business will fail, we will go broke, we will lose everything.

As you continue in your career, it’s crucial that you understand specifically what sets you off and how it affects your workday. Once you understand that, you can try to avoid these triggers and — when you can’t avoid them — use specific strategies or tools that can help you move out of anxiety.

Many people I talk to for my podcast “The Anxious Achiever” tell me that they find making to-do lists and detailed schedules helpful, because they help them cut down on ruminating and overwork. Others know that they need to sweat, get outside or run around with their dog to dissolve that knot of anxiety. I like to cook. When I’m anxious and unfocused, I make giant stockpots of broth or chili. Hey … it works for me.

It’s possible for you to create a remote workday that minimizes your anxiety, creates real connection and engagement with your coworkers, allows you to get your work done, and lets you feel OK about unplugging at night. But like all skills, learning how to manage your workday anxiety takes practice, time, and above all compassion for yourself. We all succumb to the cheese doodles at times, and that’s OK too.

Watch her The Way We Work video here: 

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Morra Aarons-Mele is a (mostly) happy, successful person. She also identifies as an extremely anxious overachiever. To normalize anxiety and help others manage theirs, Aarons-Mele launched and hosts The Anxious Achiever podcast for HBR Presents, which was a 2020 Webby Awards Honoree and is a top 10 management podcast. She’s passionate about helping people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. Aarons-Mele is also the founder of the award-winning social impact agency Women Online, which created a database of female influencers, the Mission List. She was named 2020 Entrepreneur of the Year at the Iris Awards, recognizing excellence in digital parenting media. Aarons-Mele is also a prolific writer. Since 2004 she has covered the campaign trail, the White House, the lactation room and the office cubicle. Her book, Hiding in the Bathroom: How To Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home), was published in 2017, and she has written for the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Slate, InStyle, O, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the Guardian.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

6 tips to help you manage your day when working from home published first on https://premiumedusite.tumblr.com/rss

[blue-fawkes]

Personal

Here’s another long-ish super super long rant that you can definitely skip over ^_^

So this has been the worst weekend I’ve had in a while. Starting from Thursday through to Sunday night and spilling into Monday as well I guess based on the fact that I’m writing this now.

It was a LARP weekend this weekend - which should have meant it was great fun and a great opportunity to de-stress and hang out with friends I don’t see very often. Instead it turned out to be a non stop stress and anxiety dump with a smattering of fury thrown on top for good measure.

I’ll break it down so I can vent about this fully and hopefully get it out of my system, devil’s in the details and all that.

Thursday - 

Had arranged to drop new dog off at friends so they can watch for the weekend. It was decided the original drop off time of 6pm wouldn’t leave us anytime to get the dog settled before we left and so we attempted to change to an earlier time. Unfortunately this wasn’t possible. Then the drop off time ended up being slightly later as friend 1 had other things they were dealing with and friend 2 had went to run an errand. This resulted in the worst possible most rushed drop off of dog.

Approximately 4 hours after dropping off dog I receive a phone call from friend 1 - they had called to inform me dog had peed on their bed and wanted to know how to scold the dog. This in itself is fine. Dog had done something bad and should be made aware that it shouldn’t do the thing. However the thing to know about our dog is that he hates being left alone, can’t handle being left alone for any length of time. The only time dog has peed indoors was when he had been shut in the living room for over half an hour. So when I enquired as to how it happened friend 1 said they didn’t know but had just realised the dog had peed on the bed. They claim the dog wasn’t shut in the room but I’m struggling to believe that. I believe that the dog has somehow been shut in the room - it’s probably been an accident - dog’s then been trapped in the room for more than 15 minutes on its own which resulted in dog getting scared/nervous and peeing on the bed. Friend 1 claims the dog wasn’t and that dog just peed on the bed. But I don’t understand how it’s possible for the dog to have peed on the bed without them noticing. Dog doesn’t leave people alone, dog will follow you everywhere and sit near you at all times. Dog will wait outside the door of the toilet for you or whatever. We all agreed to see how the dog was overnight and to check in in the morning before we left to make sure the friends could handle dog. So after this phone call my partner and I are extra anxious about leaving dog with friends and begin to make backup plans.

Backup plan B was to call in friend 3 who fortunately was available and backup plan C was for me to return home and for my partner to go on without me.

Friday - 

We attempt to call friends in the morning to check in and get no answer - which is slightly worrying as we call around the time the dog is usually taken for it’s morning walk. However we get a message eventually saying their fine and that dog seems more settled now so we leave them with the phone number for friend 3 and continue with our plans. Departing at roughly 9:30am to get to our LARP event location for approximately 3pm.

We have not heard from our friends at all since the morning check in and as new dog owners my partner and I are quite anxious.This anxiety results in both of us fretting and ranting to anyone that will listen about how anxious we are to have not heard anything from our friends.

At 18:47 friend 3 sends me a picture of dog asleep on our couch which I was unable to see until 19:02. So from this picture I realise friends 1 and 2 have called friend 3 to take over. They have done all of this without contacting my partner or I to let us know what they are doing and what’s happening with our dog. (after getting back to dog and talking to friend 3 directly I discovered that friends 1 and 2 had called in friend 3 around 1pm)

So with zero communication our dog has been handed over within the first 24 hours of being dropped off. To be clear I’m not mad that they were unable to handle dog, I’m mad at the lack of communication regarding my dog.

At first I’m confused and furious that our dog is suddenly not where we thought it was and not with who we thought had it. However friend 3 kept in touch and helped to ease off some of that tension.

So now that dog is mostly sorted and anxiety has been lessened somewhat we return focus to the LARP event. Event begins with me being left to carry out a substantial amount of unpacking by myself due to lack of people. This irritates me a little but mostly I don’t mind and I’m happy to help. It does however mean I’ve started the weekend with expending a fair amount of energy and the game hasn’t even started yet. More people arrive however I discover that the team I’m on consists of 4 people (myself included) with 3 refs - later that night it grows to 6 people and 3 refs - however initially hearing that terrified me. It was 4 monsters against 24 players. For reference I was used to a minimum of 10 monsters but had in recent events had a lot more to the point that monsters to players was almost 1 to 1. This increases my stress as I begin to prepare myself to run myself past exhaustion in order to provide a fun and exciting game experience for the players.

My stress then increases as we begin to look over the document which explains what the monsters are doing for the weekend and realise that due to event writer’s life being hectic the document is very simple and seeming to lack information. This leads to monsters and refs and players having almost constant questions for event writer, which of course is very stressful and taxing for event writer. It also means that monsters and players end up with some conflicting information as they are told one thing by one person then another by somebody else.

Myself and a monster with more experience of the game try to step up to help run the monsters more smoothly sometimes adjusting things to make game play better for everyone however this still ends with a lot of people asking questions of the event writer because as monsters we simply don’t have the information.

The game runs on until very late and I don’t get to bed until roughly 3am - usually Friday night ends at 1am. And our start time for Saturday was supposed to be 9am so I was getting up at 8am to get ready.

Safe to say I was tired, stressed and had been venting a lot the entire night.

Saturday -

So waking up on the Saturday morning a little tense as to how the day is going to go. I make the decision to have a few drinks starting around 11am. My partner begins to express concerns regarding their experience of the game so far - they were feeling anxious about playing before we had arrived and had mostly decided to play as the event writer had asked them to specifically. However due to in game mechanics they weren’t having a great time and felt left out of a lot of information.

Seeing how anxious my partner was getting resulted in my own anxiety/stress increasing. I tried to provide information they could use to have a better in game experience and tried to ensure everyone was extra nice when dealing with them. However they began to feel as though every decision they made in game was wrong or had terrible consequences regardless of their actions.

Now as a monster I get to see the full picture and get behind the scenes info so I know pretty much everything that’s going on and what all the right/best decisions are for the players (at least most of the time anyway). So I agree with my partner’s assessment of the game play so far. In my opinion there had not been enough done to provide the players with hints/clues as to what the best decisions were. The players ended up trusting and working alongside the main bad guy of the plot due to a few different things. Firstly the players failed to interrogate/gain info from a captured monster (although it was unclear if they would even have been able to get the info if they had tried), the event writer was the person playing the main bad guy as it was the most important character and required the most knowledge of the plot (which of course only the event writer had) however the way in which they played the character lead people to believe they were harmless. Again in my personal opinion I feel it should have been made more obvious that the character was sketchy.

The players also failed to interact with 3 npcs (non player characters) which were supposed to be a significant part in the entire plot until roughly 2 hours before the game finished on Sunday - it had been the plan for the players to begin interacting with these npcs from almost start of play on Saturday. Obviously the players have no way of knowing which characters are the most important however again in my personal opinion I feel as though the event writer should have done more to highlight the importance of these npcs.

However whilst the issue with dog is mostly taken care of and we’re dealing with the game issues I also receive a message and missed call from friend 4 (Saturday 16:09) asking me urgently to talk to them as they have some very heavy stuff that’s really affecting them. Unfortunately by this point I’m expending so much energy both physically and emotionally that I’m ready to just throw my phone in the bin and walk off into the woods and disappear for the rest of the weekend.

What I do instead is re-focus my energy into monstering and do my best to keep everything running smoothly, support my partner and help other players/monsters/people when I can. I haven’t stopped drinking at any point throughout the day but I’m perfectly sober.

At some point on Saturday we lost one of our refs due to medical reasons. One of our monsters pushed themselves too much and ended up having to tap out early. Which left the monster team a little more strained but we managed and it was mostly ok. It was just unfortunate timing as when the monster team began to crack and needed extra care and some time out I was starting to struggle to hold myself together. But I’m the kind of person that pushes past my own issues and puts everyone else first so I put my issues to the side as best I could and did my best to help everyone else.

Saturday has another very late finish. Most of the players had gone to bed and we were back to just 4 monsters and the event writer. Usually on the Saturday night there would be time set aside to socialise and drink. This turned into 4 players trying to tie up loose ends whilst the monsters sat in and tried not to give the game away. By the end of the day I had drank about 10 ciders but was still sober. Everyone went to bed and it was just myself, 1 monster and the event writer left awake. We sat and chatted for a while before eventually going to bed around I would guess 3:30am.

As I’m trying to get to sleep it’s really starting to dawn on me how exhausted I am but I try to ignore the thought and remind myself that tomorrow is the end of the game and there won’t be much I need to do (I was super wrong).

Sunday -

Again wake up at 8am to get ready, treat myself to a shower. Cook all of the remaining breakfast food and leave the extra for anyone to have. It’s nice to be nice after all. Plus there wasn’t really space in the car to bring anything extra back.

I have my first drink by about 9:30am.

We get briefed for a special mission which is the one that was written specifically with my partner in mind. it involves 4 monsters that can only be seen and interacted with by 3 players. The monsters get told that we do a special damage call to the players but that we wont be able to actually kill the characters because it’s some special weird brain link and not actually happening to the players. However what my partner was told was that they take the damage we call and react as normal, they were told they were the only ones that could see us and were lead to believe they were unable to interact with the monsters. This resulted in my partner seeing 3 monsters that they thought only they could see and then being attacked by one and thinking they couldn’t defend themself. So they took the damage and when it reached the point where they believed their character had been killed it got too much and they snapped and had to leave the game.

Whilst this was happening I was being the 4th monster and targeting a different player out of sight of this. As soon as my partner left the game I was immediately pulled away by a ref and replaced by a different monster.

It took probably 20-30 minutes to calm my partner down and then get them back to the game. During this time period I had ran out of energy and couldn’t keep up the happy, calm and in control facade I’d been attempting to maintain. I was really really angry. I had just had to deal with my partner have a mini breakdown, balling their eyes out and telling me that their worthless and there’s nothing good about them. So I returned to the monster room to speak to the monster that was driving us all home and said that I wanted to make arrangements so that at least my partner wouldn’t have to be in the same car (we had been in the car with the event writer and the monster that had been the one to “kill” my partner’s character). Now I feel it’s important to explain at this point in time I’m dressed head to toe in black leather with a black stripe across my eyes, furious with my hands on my hips and tension so high I’m practically buzzing.

Monster asks to speak to me alone and after clarifying that I’m furious but it’s mostly undirected rage and it’s not them specifically I’m mad with more likely the event writer we begin working on a way to sort transport so that myself and my partner wont be in the same car as the event writer for 4 hours. Luckily it worked out that someone was able to take the event writer and my partner and I got to stay in the original car we had arrived in.

Still furious but trying to keep myself under control I return to play and manage to get through the rest of the game without causing a scene. Game ends without any further drama and clean up is carried out without issue. The entire time I’m doing my best to avoid the event writer as I didn’t feel I could deal with them without causing a scene.

Skip forward to when we’re packed and saying goodbye to everyone. Event writer comes over to say bye and seeing my reaction asks if I want to talk about it, I say we’re about to leave, they say that’s why phones are great and I reply my phone is dead. Little bit of context - event writer and I are very close friends and the way I acted was entirely out of character for me and very cold towards them. Driver thankfully says we’re heading off now and we say goodbye and get going. As soon as we’re out of ear shot of event writer everyone checks I’m ok and makes sure that was the right way to react to that. I reassure them and say it’s fine.

For the first probably hour of the trip I’m almost completely silent, sometimes crying silently and trying to hide it (failing). It takes about 3 hours for me to settle back into a form of stable where I can talk and relax again.

Get home, partner grabs clean socks from the house and gives dog quick attention before leaving as they have to go and dog sit their parent’s dog for the week. I thank friend 3 and send them home then spend the rest of the night cuddled up with my dog and eventually messaging event writer to give at least some explanation as to my behaviour. I knew it wasn’t fair to leave them in the dark. After all if they don’t know what’s wrong then they can’t do anything to fix it. Eventually passed out and slept without dreaming.

Which brings us to today, Monday -

Wake up feeling exhausted. Feed and walk dog. Decide to message friend 4 and deal with that. 

Friend 4 talks me through the issue explaining that it has been dealt with but that they have went through some very heavy emotional stuff. Then asks how my weekend was - expecting me to be happy/excited - to which I reply completely deadpan that it was awful and probably the most stressful weekend I’ve had all year. After I explain they apologise and try to comfort me but I tell them I’ll be fine - which I will.

I then reply to another friend that had messaged me at midnight that I didn’t see until this morning. They explain they’re fine then ramble on about their life and how things hadn’t been great but they’re on the mend. I get tired of the conversation being about them and tell them I’m emotionally and physically exhausted to which they give a half hearted attempt at comforting and the conversation tails off.

I go for a nice long shower but can’t seem to clear my head so decide to vent about it on the internet.

So here we are... I am not okay. I will be. But I am not just now.

#personal #don't mind me #don't reblog #long post #feel free to ignore