How to Thrive in Your New Home Office

Increasing productivity and avoiding burnout during the COVID-19 shutdown

I’ve worked remotely for years — and faced burnout in the process. When office demands take over your home life to the point that everything and everyone seems like work, it’s already too late.

As many have now discovered, the border between personal and professional can blur in the transition to working from a home office. Irregular working hours combined with the temptation to catch up on tasks late at night create a recipe for disaster long-term.

My own experience with this shutdown began with the classic first stage of burnout: the honeymoon phase of a new challenge: high commitment, strong sense of purpose, boundless energy.

Within days, however, I started feeling physically and emotionally exhausted, overwhelmed and unappreciated.

Recognizing these burnout warning signs, I made immediate changes — like setting up a regular daily rhythm and releasing expectations that I should be available 24/7 to everyone. Focusing more on meditation than on ever-increasing levels of productivity.

I also realized that some of the psychological dynamics connected to the COVID-19 work shutdown (including unclear job expectations, isolation, and perceived lack of control) are also factors leading directly to burnout. It’s important to make a distinction between the two right from the start.

An attitude of gratitude has also helped: noticing the beauty of nature each day (even if it’s just from my window), cooking meals with love instead of speed, spending quality time with my husband, and thanking the people still working in supermarkets for their service. I appreciate my warm apartment, full fridge, and access to medical care.

In short, living with mindfulness and gratitude has helped enrich my return to a home office lifestyle. Since this shutdown could last a while, positive sustainability is key.

“In a culture fueled by burnout, a culture that has run itself down, our national resilience becomes compromised. And when our collective immune system is weakened, we become more susceptible to viruses that are part of every culture because they’re part of human nature: fear-mongering, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, and demagoguery. “— Arianna Huffington

Protecting Body and Mind

During these home-bound times, many of us are finding it tempting to trash our health: use isolation as an excuse not to exercise, rely on alcohol to calm down, and exploit new flexible work hours to pull all-nighters binge-watching.

Since none of that will help long-term, I’ve found that it’s important to develop better habits from the start. Honestly, I spent the first lockdown days at my makeshift new desk, wearing pajamas as I downed espressos and inhaled pizza during phone calls.

Soon, I looked and felt awful.

So, now I’m trying to get back into doing yoga on a regular basis and developing a bedtime routine that allows time to decompress naturally. I’m taking advantage of the respite from social functions to reduce my intake of processed sugar and alcohol.

All of these steps are in the beginning phases, of course. But I feel better in the short term, and if I can make long-term progress in even one of those areas, it will help in coming back much stronger after the shutdown has passed.

A related part of my detox process has been to be more selective about information consumption — unplugging from the daily COVID-19 drama, for example. News reports bordering on hysteria and friends obsessed with relaying the latest doom and gloom statistics don’t actually help me in any way. The never-ending inundation of COVID-19 negativity can trigger burnout feelings of powerlessness and overwhelm.

As a result, I’m intent on creating a balanced approach to keeping informed about current events within the context of empowerment. I have customized my social media news feeds to block unhelpful outlets, and I disengage from conversations promoting panic or conspiracy theories.

My friend Hellmut Santer, the executive director of osb international, also emphasizes the importance of self-discipline during this COVID-19 period: “Concentrate only on information that matters — in the media, at home, and with your colleagues.”

Santer extends self-discipline to the emotional sphere and suggests avoiding escalation whenever possible. “In times like these of heightened sensitivity, people get hurt or angry more easily. The tiniest disagreement can burst into a full-blown conflict. With emotional self-discipline, you’re able to see such emotions creeping into conversations and to stop dramas before they start.”

In short, this period of relative isolation can ironically be a fertile social learning period — the opportunity to develop better habits long-term.

Getting Things Done

Most of us have been scrambling to optimize work-related tech solutions during this shutdown.

But challenges are everywhere. Many companies don’t have a coherent strategy for remote working, and even if they do, staff members often don’t have access to the correct resources.

There’s always a silver lining though, and in this case, it’s the opportunity to develop a fresh new digital toolkit.

Luckily, great collaboration tools are readily available, like Slack for group messaging, Trello and Asana for project management, Zoom for video-conferencing, and Yammer for collaboration.

In reevaluating the best tech strategy for our own team, we have been looking at a balance of messaging channels: synchronous (phone, video calls) vs. asynchronous (email, text messages). We aim for efficiency with a human touch.

Here’s a concrete example. My colleague Gary recently took over a managing position and was being inundated with “a tsunami” of emails from contractors negatively impacted by the COVID-19 shutdown.

But Gary’s initial approach of personally responding to each message just created hundreds more emails per day and less time for him to complete urgent work. Even worse, as the bulk of his daily tasks steadily transitioned from creative innovation to email administration, he lost inspiration and headed into burnout.

Luckily, Gary soon recognized the trap he had created. He ditched the individual emails and is now holding group video conferences for the contractors instead.

With this new approach, the contractors have real-time info and equal treatment — and Gary has the sustainable mojo he needs to excel in his new position.

Understanding Work-From-Home Habits and Environments of Others

Maybe you’re isolating with someone you’re not used to being with 24/7. The initial joy of sharing time can quickly give way to exhaustion from the obligations of care-taking and frustration from distractions.

My husband and I experienced that exact transition during this shutdown. While our 20-year marriage is stronger than ever, the new demands of sharing office space have been surprisingly difficult. In the beginning, arguments boiled up over petty things; nerves were frayed from the urgent pressure of adapting our very different careers to one relatively small working area.

What has been helpful is letting go of our unrealistic expectations: acknowledging that we are adapting to a new way of life, with fewer freedoms. That includes forgiving ourselves for feeling annoyed and forgiving the other person for any perceived infractions.

Setting clear rules has also been important. For example, we’ve created the “closed-door conference” rule to limit noise and interruptions when one of us needs to check in with the outside world.

A clear perk in this shared transition has been the opportunity to understand more about my husband’s work life.

And similarly, since my team is also now working remotely, a related perk has been the opportunity to learn more about who they are outside of working hours.

For example, it soon became apparent that the concept of a “home office” is radically different for everyone on the team. Some of us are feeling exhausted by balancing childcare responsibilities with office duties, while others are feeling lonely under the lockdown.

So, we started this home office process by having all team members give a “virtual tour” of their new working spaces; that way, others could understand special factors such as young children, pets, unusual work areas, etc.

In short, we have found that sharing information about new working environments is critical to a successful transition.

Maintaining Business Relationships

It also really helps to keep some type of watercooler experience. It can feel lonely and isolating working from home, so it’s crucial to create an informal virtual meeting space where the team can catch up and connect.

Since many of us have enjoyed sharing lunchtime together in the past, we have continued the tradition via synchronous media like Skype or Viber. In short, we have tried to keep productive office routines by just moving them online.

As a team leader, I have also aimed at extra communication during this transition: for example, scheduling a virtual 1-to-1 with each staff member to go over the specific challenges s/he has faced in this transition and to explore what can be done to make the new work approach more effective.

Since regular hours are often impossible now, I have also allowed more implementation flexibility within the context of still meeting deadlines and keeping quality high. Anything to build trust and to promote communication within a team is extra important now.

Of course, this same focus on communication goes for clients, too. Social distancing may be good for health, but it’s bad for many businesses. Canceled are the conferences, trade fairs, and in-person meetings some of us are used to attending. Brick and mortar stores are shuttering; stocks are plummeting.

So, I believe that proactive communication with clients is more critical now than ever. Giving them updates or helpful strategies for coping in their market can be a good reason to stay connected to your company.

Keep in mind that many of your own clients are sitting at home right now looking for quality digital content. Instead of canceling that event, can you move it online? Do you provide a service that could be promoted through informational videos? If so, consider using a screen-recording tool like Loom to produce videos and then either sharing them for free or putting them behind a Vimeo paywall. This shutdown is providing the motivation and opportunity to explore different virtual technologies. Who knows — there might be a new product line just waiting to be developed.

Managing Expectations

In this often-chaotic transition to working remotely, many of us have experienced an ad hoc scope expansion that significantly adds to our weekly duties.

“Oh, don’t worry, this new responsibility is just temporary,” rarely actually turns out to be the case.

So, it’s important to clarify if your department is still operating under the same roles and goals.

If the process of completing any task is actually now very different — and you have inherited most of the related work — check in with management to see how much of that can be more fairly delegated.

Bottom line: If you don’t respect your energy and time, no one else will, either.

That being said, in a transition such as this, it’s easy to become your own worst enemy. In my case, as soon as the isolation period started, I fell into the familiar pattern of overscheduling to overperform.

Great, now I can finish that project which has been sitting on the back burner for too long and catch up on everything else while still keeping ahead of office tasks and taking care of everyone around me…

Sound familiar? An unsustainable path to burnout.

Beware of the ever-expanding to-do list. Limit daily tasks to what is actually possible to achieve, and be sure to give yourself a pat on the back for significant accomplishments.

I also make a point to put the calming activities that I love at the top of my daily list during this shutdown: exercising, listening to music, meditating… whatever. Now is the time for soul-feeding habits that spark creativity and passion.

Using the Disruption to Innovate

COVID-19 is already pushing companies into insolvency. For the millions looking at potential job loss, it’s tough to put any kind of positive spin on these developments.

But it’s also creating a business boom for others. Amazon is hiring 100,000 workers to meet new e-commerce demands, Gilead is raking in profits from its antiviral drug, and Clorox is cleaning up from sanitizer sales.

Which begs the question: How can a product or service gain traction by supporting the general public during this market disruption?

For many of us, creativity is key. As sales meetings and client consultations move online, new strategic approaches can be explored. Our companies can approach this disruption as an opportunity to consider new virtual markets and fresh ways of working.

This reevaluation period means balancing whatever worked in the past with leaps of innovation. Tricky, but worth it. Yet it’s simultaneously crucial not to fall into a cycle of fear, anxiety, and depression.

Bottom line: Control what you can, and let go of the rest.

Anything that helps you focus on being in-the-moment will be especially important right now. For me, it’s yoga, gratitude, and new practices and habits for working at home. Find what works for you, practice it every day, and adapt your work habits and environment creatively as needed while you work from home.