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A lot of us are learning right now about just how easy it is to work in an office.
Think about it. You have to drive to a place that is purely designated for you to produce things, which clearly delineates your home life from your work life. You’re often working directly alongside people with whom you’re competing in some way. You have higher ups constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure that you’re accomplishing something. Sometimes the big boss walks by, and then you REALLY need to get the fuck off of your beanie baby Pinterest page. You can’t jerk off in your cubicle without HR warning you for the third time.
This all makes getting shit done super easy. There’s a bunch of automatic pressure really baked into the whole experience that keeps you nice, and productive, and miserable–the way God intended.
Working at home is hard. You have to make yourself productive and miserable–even when Mario Kart is four feet away from you, and nobody will have any idea if you’re playing it or not. You can commute to work by crawling around on the floor to your laptop like a baby. You can fart as loud as you want in the break room, and offend only your dog.
How are you supposed to get any work done in that situation? You can do whatever the hell you want without a single threat to your short term well being, and it makes doing anything for the benefit of your long term well being a real bitch.
But of course, you likely know all of this–whether just now, or in general. Working from home isn’t just about this moment of quarantine. It’s likely the future for a lot of us–be it with our own jobs, our side hustle, when we try to write our novel about a band of parrots that play yacht rock–whatever. The skill of being able to be productive while in the comfort and fog of constant temptation that is your home is likely to be a huge part of your success in the future.
Fortunately, as a lifelong homebody, I’ve already had plenty of success and a metric fuck ton of failure at being productive while home, and I’ve learned a lot, so I’m here to ever-so-graciously give you some pointers.
1) Disconnect Every Damn Thing That can Be Disconnected
I like to play a game sometimes before I get to work at home. I get really comfortable in whatever seat I’m in, get everything I need, and then I try to find the most creative, fun way I can to get my phone the fuck away from me. Sometimes, this means tossing it and trying to lodge it between the two far couch cushions. Sometimes it means sliding it across a tile floor like I’m curling. Sometimes it means hiding it in a disaster of a junk drawer so that finding it is a fun “I Spy” game later.
It’s important to use every single tool you can–whether it’s website blockers that others have the password to, or putting the remote in the freezer, or playing aforementioned my phone-couch cornhole–to remove the temptations as much as you can.
Of course, sometimes, this isn’t an option. Maybe your job is in social media, and that’s not super doable on your Dell laptop. Maybe the laptop is your source of distraction, but that’s where you need to create the Powerpoint for your stupid Zoom presentation. Maybe that internet you just unplugged to help you focus is precisely what you need to even get started on your work.
Most of the time, to some extent, our biggest distractions are inevitably intertwined with our work. And if you can’t un-twine those two, then you have to move onto step two.
2) Kinda Sorta Plan Your Day
Contrary to popular belief, planning your day doesn’t have to be stringent to-the-minute psychosis, it doesn’t have to involve waking up at 4:30 to “win the day,” and it doesn’t have to involve putting on pants.
But it can involve all of those things. The most important thing about making your schedule is finding your own way of doing it. That’s an annoying thing to read on a website like this, but it’s true. Trial and error like a mother fucker is the best way to figure out how you can schedule your life. This involves staying conscious of things like, “I do my best writing at 2:00 pm,” and “If I don’t work out in the morning, I never will,” and, “Double check at 10:30am to make sure that junior isn’t trying to eat his Legos.”
The only universally important parts of creating a schedule are that:
1) That you have a rough idea of what you’re looking to accomplish in a given day.
2) The things you’re planning to do actually accomplish things.
Don’t make your list of things insurmountable. Don’t make it so fucking hard that you burn out after lunch, and you end up doing zombie work while daydreaming about watching Bravo at 2:30. The best way to keep working is to feel good about the work you’re doing, and the best way to do that is to actually be able to accomplish things. Enable yourself to continually have that little orgasm of the soul that is marking an item off of your list of shit to do by making the shit doable.
Just as important is to ensure that you’re planning out things that actually make a difference. A day full of busy work is pointless. At that point, you might as well just scroll through social media, and leave a permanent imprint in your tempur-pedic.
Planning is where you prioritize results. Stitch enough results-oriented, doable tasks together and you’ve set up a day where you can get a lot done, and as a result, maybe even possibly like yourself.
3) Give Yourself Intermittent Snacks All Day, Then Have a Big Fucking Feast at the End
This section is not about food.
This section is about fun.
If your at home work is at all like mine, or most work, you’re going to need plenty of breaks–or “brain snacks” to maintain the quality of your work and your mental health.
When I’m writing, and I try to blast through a break time, my work always, always suffers. I end up hating it, and myself, and in the spirit of that self-hatred, I end up spending the next 4 hours or years or whatever playing laptop Donkey Kong. It ends poorly.
It’s crucial to give yourself a lot of small breaks throughout the day. These can be anything–scrolling through Twitter, Instagram, playing some phone game where you press on colors that are like other colors nearby and then something explodes and your brain lights up like the Vegas strip.
Whatever it is, feel free to turn to it as earned, and as needed. But there are a couple of important rules about your snack breaks.
A) Course out your snacks.
This should be obvious, but it’s worth emphasizing. Don’t eat your snack right out of the Costco sized bag until you don’t feel like eating any more. That’s how shit gets out of control in a real hurry. Instead, predetermine how long you’re going to snack for. Pour your snack into a small bowl, then curl up the bag, put a clip on it, and put it back on top of the fridge before you start eating.
In other words, pre-determine exactly how long you’ll spend on your distraction and stick to the fuck to it come hell or high water. Then fully enjoy that snacky bowl full of Insta THOTs or X-Box. But when it’s done, no refills–not until you’ve earned them at least.
B) Snack in Your Kitchen, Not in Your Office
In practical terms, this means that all of your work and play should take place in separate locations. This can be vital in helping you to focus on your work when you’re in work land.
This can mean opposite sides of your bachelor apartment, but ideally, we’d be looking at two distinct spaces here. If you go from working while laying down on your couch to snacking while laying down in your bed, you’ll subconsciously equate the two spaces. Work and play will co-mingle until they’re one and the same, and that’s a great way to ensure your work totally sucks.
But do we work in comfort, and play in discomfort, or vice-versa? I actually think this could go either way, likely depending on what kind of person you are.
The first method here would be working in the less comfortable spot (like an office, or kitchen table), and snacking on the couch, or bed. This is good in the sense of you potentially being in a more upright, focused mindset when working.
The problem here is that you, on a couch, scrolling through your phone can be a dangerous thing. This can make portion control a real bitch. Our body and mind are both so comfortable and satiated in that situation, and there’s such a consistent flow of extremely easy joy, that it’s easy for us to lose control and lose our afternoon to a whole lot of nothing.
But you know that. You’ve been there.
The alternative is working in the comfortable spot and playing in the relative discomfort. This is what I try to enforce because I can control my mindset pretty well (meaning I don’t need to be in an office-like environment to work well), and I fucking love the shit out of comfort. I’ve even tried (and mostly failed) to enforce a rule where I can only play on my phone while standing up. This would be perfect because I fucking hate standing more than anything, and so that would help me to really enforce my portion control.
The potential downside is in being too relaxed, or losing focus on your work because you’re just so cozy wozy.
Regardless, if you can succeed in this model and have a productive day in which you accomplish your goals, then make sure to have a feast at the end of the day. Once you’ve checked off everything on your schedule, dive into your escapism. Dig into a big old pile of Cheeto-dust covered Facebooks and MMORPGs and throw yourself a little party.
4) Dealing With the Whole Fear of Failure Thing
Fearing failure is a real bitch of a thing to deal with, and it remains one of the main reasons that we avoid getting started. We have these internal thoughts of, “If I try to start this business, I might fail! Better sit here and scroll through Twitter for six hours to make sure that never happens.”
There are a couple of possible ways to deal with this.
The first tactic is in realizing that the only way to guarantee failure is to not try, and to let this push you to try, and try, and try more.
Theoretically, this would be the best way to go because it would keep you focused on results, and also, it’s dead accurate, and very rational.
But unfortunately for most of us, our brains are fucking broken and we can’t just apply logic like this, and let that push us forward. If you can, great. Go for it. But it ain’t me, and odds are, it ain’t you.
My method is simple: Once I’ve planned results-oriented goals, I generally forget about the results when I’m working, and instead obsess over executing the process.
I take huge pride in trying, and huge emotional indifference about what happens otherwise. This is, I believe, the most emotionally healthy option. It still really pushes you to do your best without making you a total wreck about what’s going to happen.
The risk with this method is in “putting in the work” on things that don’t really matter, but that’s why the planning step is so important.
So those are the basics for being productive at home. It is doable if you set up some ground rules.
This is how you can take the steps you need to take in life from the comfort of your bed. This is how you can pursue your dreams while covered in zit cream and threadbare pajama pants. This is how you can be the absolute best version of yourself while giving your dog intermittent belly rubs.
