Work from Home Tips: Letters By Caleb Pt. 7
Today is going to be a bit of a different day for this blog series. Up until now, the blog may have seemed like a blog purely about traumatic memories. This is not exactly the case. Not Alone is better described as a mental health series. As such, I am free to talk about whatever I want essentially.
I would like to give everybody some mental health tips on working from home, along with one or two general health tips. You see, I did two years of high school online and am coming up on doing a full year total of college online. I have learned a thing or two about working from home.
Of course, this is mostly based on what works for me. The most important thing is to find what works best for you. But if you don’t know what to do, here’s a good place to start:
1) Treat your day like a normal day
Keep your schedule as ‘normal’ as possible; do whatever it is you would have been doing if every event, class, or work meeting were in person. Wear whatever clothes you would have worn to an in-person event, eat breakfast at your normal time, shower at your normal time, get into Zoom or your Microsoft Word document at whatever time you would have shown up for class. Online events are going to be the norm for a long time. The best thing you can do is to keep treating each day as normal as you can.
2) Respect your schedule and your time
This is critical to not burning out. When everything is online, without the need to drive to and from events, it can be very easy. You are a child of God and a person of worth. Your time is worth something too. My father once accidently scheduled 12 hours straight of Zoom meetings, with no lunch break or dinner break. It was miserable for him.
3) Take breaks
Breaks are very important to your mental health, especially while working from home. This can be very easy to forget to do. In fact, just last Monday I accidently worked for eleven hours straight without looking away from my laptop. I was mentally drained, and my eyes were severely strained and hurt until the next morning.
4) Take care of your physical health
There are a lot of parts of our daily routine which we may not even realize were part of our routine. Getting some sun while walking between campus buildings, grabbing a quick drink of water during down time, or looking away from a screen are all things which happen naturally during a day of work or school. This doesn’t happen naturally when working from home. Keep on top of your water intake. Get some sun, even if that means just going out to grab the mail or take out the trash. Take breaks away from your screen. Most optometrists recommend looking away from the screen every half-hour or so. A good rule I’ve found was the “20-20-20” rule. Every twenty minutes look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. This helps you not get hyper-focused on the screen, which strains your eyes. Also, most devices sold now have eye rest modes. Keep your phone and computer on night mode with a low brightness setting, your eyes will thank you.
5) Establish a dedicated place for you to work
Be it a desk, a table, or a couch, it is incredibly helpful to have a dedicated spot to work at. Of course, its fine to change things up every now and again and work from a new place. That said, establishing a single place where you do most of your work is extremely helpful. Multiple psychological studies show that working in a singular place improves memory while in that spot and work speed altogether. Your brain associates work with that singular spot. For me, this spot is a desk I recently bought. I only work at this desk, and it has helped me work much faster and improved my mood. Working all over your apartment or house can make you associate the entire apartment or house with working. This is not good for your mental health. If you associate your entire living space with work, it can be hard to take actual breaks that leave you feeling rested.
I hope all of these tips help! We are all honestly struggling in 2020 with one thing or another. I hope these tips can help you work better from home. We’re all in this together, you are not alone.