Happy working from home!

Working from home has become commonplace since the start of the COVID pandemic. COVID pandemic just didn't bring in the physical health problems, but also psychological problems.

At the turn of the century, people mostly worked on PCs. So if we left office, we went home and relaxed. There was clear separation of work and home. Then came the laptops. We started taking our work home. But we worked, answered emails and closed the work. Then came the smartphones. And with smart phones came the Instant Messages. With this we not just took home the work, but we allowed ourselves to be disturbed by our colleagues any time of the day.

Its important to understand the effect of the smart phone notifications. Imagine you are living in the stone age. You are living in caves. When you heard some noise, your stress levels increased, it prepared you to a flight or fight response. Back in the present day, we are secure, there is no need for us to fear for our life, or think where our next meal will come from. But our lizard brain, continues to function the same way that it did several millennia ago. When we hear smart phone notifications, stress hormones are triggered.

Of course, I am not advocating that you stop smart phone notifications altogether. I am also not suggesting that you completely stop multi-tasking. We can follow some simple strategies to reduce our stress at work.

1. Reduce / Eliminate notifications from unimportant apps. You have to decide what is important for yourself. For example I don't even need applications like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc on my phone. I need a lot of applications like WhatsApp, Slack, Ola, Uber, Zomato, Swiggy etc. But do I need notifications from all the apps all the time? Enable notifications from only a handful of applications. Allocate some time during the day when you can browse all the less important apps like WhatsApp, News, Instagram etc
2. Slack is our office messenger, enable it during your working hours, rest of the time you don't want to be disturbed. Save your phone number in your slack profile, so that if its really urgent people can call you.

Our laptops/PCs technologies have advanced at lot in the last 2 decades. These days you have a minimum 4 core processor with a lot of RAM. This enables us to run multiple applications at the same time. On a typical day, we are attending a meeting on zoom, we are messaging a colleague on some information he failed to send, running some command on your Linux VM etc. Even though your laptop can multi-task, we perform poorly when it comes to multi-tasking. We can do some mundane task like walking along with listening to a book or calling a friend. But you cannot listen to a book and message your friend at the same time. Recent researches suggest that multi-tasking reduces cognitive abilities permanently. Not to forget the stress and anxiety that multi-tasking induces.

1. Your laptop has 4 cores, but you have only one brain. Do one thing at a time as much as possible.
2. Working on many things at the same time might give a false sense of efficiency. But it drains our mental resources and you would be tired sooner.

Two years ago, when people were forced to work from home. There was still a question mark whether this would work well. But these 2 years have proved that work gets done even with people working from home. But we now talk to each other only at a professional level. The loss of face to face communication where you read the facial cues to validate your actions is missing. Tea breaks earlier also allowed us to break the monotony of a work day, talk about trivial things and help us relax. Work from home is here to stay and we need to learn how to unwind even during the weekdays and not wait till weekend.

There is a similarity between how you play badminton and how you pace your work from home. You start the match fully relaxed and hence go from one end of the court to the other with relative ease. You also want to jump up high and hit smashes. You start the Monday the same way, you are excited to work and don't even realize that you have already worked for 11 hours straight.

Towards end of the match, you are gasping for breath, win or loss you want the match to end soon. Towards the end of the week, you want to finish off the work soon. If it's taking time, you tell yourself that you can spare at least two hours during weekends to finish the work.

Just like in badminton, we should not expend all our energies at the start of the week. A good night's sleep and pacing your day would go a long way in keeping your energies high throughout the week.  

Badminton coaches would tell you to come back to the center of the court after playing each shot, so that you are not too far away from the shuttle cock for the next shot. At work, you need to keep your mind agile and well rested to take care of not just current work but any unplanned work that might come your way. But how do you keep your mind well rested and agile?

1. Follow 80:20 rule, After working for 50 min, take a 10 min break from work. A break is not just being physically away from your laptop and your smartphone. But mentally replace your office thoughts with any other thought. You can also think of doing some breathing exercises during the break.
2. Be mindful of your narrative. A narrative is the kind of thoughts in your mind during a particular interval of time ( week/month etc). Make sure your mental narrative is positive and productive.
3. Talk to your friends. Because we stay isolated during work from home, we need to make additional effort to talk to friends either during weekday or weekends.
4. Exercise regularly. Exercise release hormones which make us happy.