Random musings: 4 Ways to Fight Staleness While Working From Home

Today's blog post is based on an article from The Art of Manliness, and ties in with Break The Monotony Day coming up on Saturday.

Like the rest of the small crew here at AoM, I’ve been working from home for most of my career, and have observed that without the presence of coworkers to chit-chat with, breakrooms, or a coffee shop in the lobby, it’s easy to feel a bit stale. While lunch is a nice interlude in the middle of the day, I’ve found I need some refreshing mid-morning and mid-afternoon too.

Fortunately, one’s ability to re-energize at home is even better than at the office — you can freely play with habits and routines without worrying that onlookers will think you’re a weirdo or a slacker — and over the years I’ve experimented with a lot of different ways to shake off my listlessness and get back in a focused groove.

If you’ve recently joined the ranks of the WFH crowd, and have experienced the phenomenon of staleness yourself, below I suggest four things that have worked for me in breaking out of it.

Many of us, myself included, are working from home these days. And if you're like me your calorie intake has gone up and your calorie expenditure has gone down.

It might be tempting to just take a mental break from your work, i.e., set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes and cruise Twitter or Instagram, check the latest headlines (which, these days, is always a recipe for demoralization and/or rage), even read a bit from the novel on your desk. But these activities don’t feel different enough from your normal work to be sufficiently refreshing. As Winston Churchill said, “Change is the master key”; to really alleviate your restlessness, you need to break off from your mind-work to do something physical.

There have been plenty of days where I make it to lunch only to realize I haven’t moved in about four hours and my legs feel like jelly. As the body affects the mind, it’s no wonder that this stagnant posture leads to stagnant cognition.

To defeat the staleness of your workday, you need to periodically toggle to more physical, senses-reactivating activities. I offer the following suggestions with that idea in mind.

So, what do they suggest?

Do 30 Jumping Jacks
Take a Quick Walk Around the Block
Make a Drink (I Prefer Coffee)
Practice Productive Procrastination

I'm pretty sure my downstairs neighbors would frown, or worse, if I did jumping jacks to take a break from work...especially since I work at night.

I do walk a few laps around the parking lot here at my apartment complex during the day...I usually don't like walking it in the middle of the night. Although I did a lot of walking in the middle of the night when I was working in the office...I could easily get 20 - 30 minutes of walking in without ever having to leave the building. However, it looks like I may be working from home for another nine or ten months.

It's not good to intake coffee within eight hours of bed, so I usually won't have coffee after 8:30 PM. If it's after that time, I may have hot chocolate or a glass of milk (with or without Ovaltine), There is some caffeine in those beverages but not as much as there is with coffee.

But what do they mean by practice productive procrastination?

At the times when your willpower starts flagging, it can be hard to motivate yourself to tackle certain tasks, especially those which are difficult or tedious.

Rather than fighting this desire to procrastinate, and pretending you’re still working, while actually just half-heartedly staring at a screen and distractedly flitting around the web, deliberately lean into it. But make your procrastination productive, by using this hiatus to take care of a few things around the house.

When you set a timer (10-15 minutes is a good procrastinatory period) and you’ve focused your energy (by giving yourself permission to take a hard break from work), you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish in a short time span. Do a quick kitchen clean up, mow the yard (that one’s for me — my small yard takes 12 minutes to mow), start or fold some laundry . . . you know the drill.

You’ll get your mind off work, move your body around a bit, accomplish something that needs doing anyway, and return to your desk (or kitchen table) re-energized and ready to tackle more tasks for your job. Win-win-win-win.

Try these four tactics to spicing up your work day, and also look for other ways to vary your routine. I know that our daily routine for many of us took a drastic turn about five months ago, but now we need to shake things up a bit from time to time.

If you have any ideas that you use to break up the monotony in your daily routine, I'd love to hear from you!