Have you or anyone you knew encountered this challenge during this pandemic? How did they recover or win over procrastination?
Working from home can turn into a blur of you do not manage your work and your time somehow. For some people, that just try to replicate the office and work 9-5 with some activity to replace the commute to give themselves a psychological distance from their "home" time. But I've found that the most productive remote workers are the ones who work a few hours at a time, a few times a day, and live their own life outside of those working times.
I'd recommend playing with different schedules to find on that works for you, and be deliberate about what you are doing - work when you are working, play when you are playing, relax when you are relaxing.
I'm more productive at home, but when I'm online during "working hours" I feel guilty doing house work or side projects during that time, so when I have free time I end up doing the same time wasting stuff I used to do in the office, surfing, news, reddit etc.
Do you have any advice in this regard?
FWIW, I split my tasks into three lists - Personal Tasks, Home/Property Maintenance (I live on a 40 acre hobby farm, so this adds up), and Work Tasks. Personal Tasks are driven by my goals to stay healthy and create artwork. Home/Property tasks are driven by my goals to increase food production at my home and improve our self-sustainability, and Work tasks follow my employer's goals.
Your goals likely won't match mine, but a similar breakdown might help.
With that, prioritization has become much less challenging for me.
- 8h30AM start working, until 10AM, mostly focused work.
- Take 5 minutes to start the laundry.
- 10h05AM to 11AM, back to work. Mostly focused work.
- Meeting from 11AM to 12PM.
- Lunch from 12PM to 12h30PM.
- Work/meeting from 12h30PM to 2PM.
- Random chores around the house from 2PM to 2h30PM.
- Work/meeting 2h30PM to 4PM.
- Go for a 30 minutes run. I have my phone with me, obviously won't go if I have a meeting.
- 4h45PM I am back in my chair and I work until 6PM.
Now to my colleagues, I was there the whole day. To my employer, I worked the correct number of hours. Yet personally, I was able to break my focus/meeting time into chunks and get a lot more done than if I was in office from 9 to 5.
It's not really about being async. It's about accepting that my brain will start slowing after 1-1h30 of focused work, so I can take a real break, while still doing something valuable. Whereas at work I'd probably just browse HN for 15-30 minutes.
All my remote teams have established expectations of what response times should be expected. I have never worked on a remote team that expected quick responses on Slack, although I know such teams do exist. My teams have varied from 1 hour to 4 for Slack response expectations. Meeting attendance is clearly expected, but my teams have always tried to respect people's boundaries and schedule them at times that work for people. It does take effort to make remote flexibility work at a team level, but the benefits in job satisfaction and getting the work done are totally worth that effort.
Our team finds it hard when there is too much flexibility in the schedule when working remotely. If you are more of an individual contributor, flexible schedule works, but the setup of our team is not like that due to the nature of our projects.
To solve this, our company set working hours that we would follow. However, not all comply with this since some of my co-workers are still going out for long errands.
There is also a lag due to technical issues and the overall setup of remote work where you don't know what's going on with your co-workers. Questions that would typically take a minute to answer if you are working onsite take minutes or sometimes hours to be resolved.
There are a lot of extra stressors that are involved in surviving through a pandemic, and honestly maybe your goal of not just surviving, but thriving, is unreasonable. Maybe just getting through it so you can kick-start your life on the other side is just fine!
For example, if you were in an accident and had to undergo extensive physical therapy, you'd be a lot more understanding with yourself if you weren't also running marathons at the same time.
Be kind to yourself, OP. This shit is hard and you're doing an important job just getting to the other side of it.
I’d say no, not quite over.
I will disagree with it. I may have agreed the first year but not the second. The pandemic doesn't excuse anything anymore.
I was thinking the same as the top-level comment you responded to - before the pandemic I was already quite bad at making time for adventure, exercise, seeing my friends etc. I was new in the workforce and putting all my mental energy into my job. IMO the lockdowns and WFH has been great for my work life but not so much for any other facet of it.
It's going to take me a good while to get used to getting out more, being active, scheduling things to do with friends...
Many people are dealing with profound levels of grief and loss. It may not "excuse" anything, but it's necessary context. Be kind.
* My main activity most days involving physical presence with a group of peers.
* Conversations with coworkers not running through the fog of Zoom. Not ending most days shattered by Zoom fatigue.
* Real reasons to be away from the apartment, not just to exercise and buy things.
The “other side” has been kicked out from under me by the remote work partisans. I don’t see any path to having a life like that again while still being a software engineer. If present compensation packages hold then maybe I will be able to retire and pick up a low-paying but in-person career in 7-10 years. As long as I don’t go starting a family… if I do that then I’m pretty well locked into Zoom and nothing else all day every day forever.
I see this a lot in many colleagues - everyone is just really tired, fed up, fighting to keep things on a level and just exist.
It’s a weird concept, as (from a personal perspective) pre-pandemic, working from home was always a pleasanter, stress-reducing choice. So I don’t think it’s purely related to the location - but there’s definitely something happening on a large scale related to how we’ve been working and existing over the past couple of years now.
Anyway, I wonder if this is what you’re describing? And if it is, then the ‘procrastination’ you describe maybe isn’t actually procrastination, but a natural (protective?) secondary reaction to something else going on in the background.
And if so, the correct response is probably to recognise and accept it, not beat yourself up for not being productive, and instead figure out what you need to do to recover and heal.
I know what I did is maybe not an option for a lot of people (thank god for the German social net and healthcare system), but I feel many could really benefit from therapy and focusing on their mental health for a while.
I am hoping to do the same over the next few months. I haven't started looking, and I am quite horrified to do so, but my back is up against the wall at this point, and I have no where left to hide.
If I stay at my current job, my life will be a constant spiral downwards, and if I leave but cannot find another job, then my life will still be a constant spiral downwards, so I have nothing to lose in my search.
- WFH means normally working alone in physical terms, normally we have aside a physical local social life, during covid scenario that part was much cut and as a result people WFH are also lone people (well, except for family members);
- WFH in the classic sense, with a properly organized work is a thing, people normally working in an office that have been forced to work at home arranging a place with craptops (and perhaps no external monitor(s), real keyboard, good desk etc) forced to use crappy VDIs and overloaded + badly used communications is another totally different beast.
In general WFH, with a good home, a dedicated room for the working part with anything needed there, a good surrounding area etc is a thing, living in small flat in dense cities, with no good home setup, incertitude about how much such model will remain and how in general so incertitude about mid and long term investments, like leaving the city and flat for a house in a good place with the risk of being forced back, even worst hybrid work with the need of moving gears from home to office and back etc does not help at all.
A good, well cooked steak, is good; a potentially equally good steak, badly cooked, badly cooked can be just a shoe sole. Things pushed rapidly typically have issues, even when potentially they are extraordinary good and life changing for good. That's is. Pushing a good thing sometimes is needed because people tend to be reactionary, just think about the history of potatoes in Europe where at first no one want them fearing they are bad, poisonous etc and only after a massive campaign of military goes through the countryside dropping potatoes around showing how easy they grow, then coming back collecting them and eating them remaining perfectly alive, satisfied and healthy change the game. In the meantime some get seriously ill for having eaten potatoes left exposed at sunlight tough. People need a tool, an incentive but also time to understand it before profiting.
A normal physical local social life is dramatically smaller in quantity than the working day. Meeting friends for meals or weekend activities does not really make up for being alone 9-5 Monday-Friday. And it is pretty hard to activate people on weeknights after 5-7 hours of Zoom.
It will take time, of course, but that's the good target we can tray to reach, in the end basing social life around work is not that good for many reasons, specially when you do not like much a colleague but have to work with him/her etc.
OTOH when you procrastinate at home you end up working late to make up for it.
You might also consider if you're in the right job. If you're not given engaging work, you don't care about the company's goals, and you're not being monitored/managed properly (due to WFH) it's easy to procrastinate. First step would be to discuss this with your supervisor, but changing job to a more interesting one, even if it pays less, might help.
The problem, for me at least, is that my brain doesn't want to swap to "work mode" when I'm at home. I can do it for the short term but over the long term I really struggle with focus at home.
How did I cope with it? Well, sad to say, I never found anything that completely worked. Outside of lock down I'd go work in a coffee shop and that was my most productive time. Now, going into the office, it's crazy how productive I am compared to when I'm at home.
I think all you can do is try to trick your brain into work mode. If you have space (which I didn't), a dedicated office that you only use for working is one approach. Only enter that room 9-5 when you're working. Other people have similar tricks. Prior to lock down, at least half the remote engineers I was working with had co-working offices they'd go to.
Another trick I used was to have a dedicated pair of noise cancelling headphones just for working, and use them at home just like I did when in the office. This seemed to help quite a bit.
I will say though that the flexibility of working from home is wonderful. But I never feel quite as productive work wise.
I switched to a startup that's fully remote and it feels much better now. I went and traveled east from the regular working hours and started work at 12 instead of 9. Then I spent the morning surfing/snowboarding (depending where I was). By the time I came back, I was physically exhausted but mentally prepared to work.
I realized, for me, I procrastinate when I have too much physical energy. I wanted to get up and move around rather than sitting and coding. Maybe that could help you?
And as others comment: the pandemic is also what influenced your mood. You sound a little down. And I think that is normal because most restrictions during the pandemic were very destructive for society.
One fix for procrastination is to think about the first step for something you would like to do. Do you want to go walking outside: the first step is to put shoes on. Start doing only that and the rest will follow.
Sometimes you can also join a business club in your community. This sometimes costs money but this can be a good investment.
And the most important: deliver good work. That will spread the word.
When you get demotivated and start procrastinating look back at what you did to remind yourself what you can do.
Oh and write lists. Lists are cool. Don’t procrastinate by spending ten hours reading HN trying to find some list software though; just use whatever you have on your phone already (I just use reminders on iOS). Don’t use some outliner software on a PC because you need that on you all day every day.
Whenever I start my day, I try to finish some of the complex tasks right away, thinking the rest of my todos are easier. Then I would find myself spending time on other things distracting myself from being overwhelmed, and ended up achieving nothing or incomplete work
I believe WFH would work great if my job was motivating and I could afford a proper house with clear physical boundaries between work and leisure. Small apartments are absolutely depressing if you have to spend nearly all of your waking hours in them.
As a result I have more high value deep work days where I can get difficult things done.
The biggest thing is being able to proactively manage my own burnout without a manager physically breathing down my neck.
I have found that maintaining a daily routine is an effective way of dealing with procrastination. I still get those moments of thinking I should be wasting my time rather than doing something productive but knowing that it is only an hour until lunch, or 2 hours 'till nap time helps me push thorugh the tedium.
I have also found that anything that requires creative thinking is best done early in the morning and simple mechanical stuff late in the afternoon.
My easiest rule to adhere to, and my one concession to my procrastinating alter ego, is that from 12 noon until 2pm I can do what the hell I like.
Note that this varies from person to person. I have the opposite polarity to you: it takes me a few hours in the morning to get out of the mechanical crap stage, and I hit my coding flow in the latter half or two-thirds of my workday.
The important thing is for each of us to figure out what works individually and plan around that. I am fortunately able to have most of my meetings in the morning, for example, where they don't interrupt my creative time.
There's no secondary task at work to help me rest my mind a little, nor a comfy sofa to get some rest.
In the office I would end up browsing social media to distract myself while at home there is lots of things to do from listening to loud music to just walking around, doing the dishes, stretching, going for a brisk walk and so on. It is way better.
This also helps with my creativity as sometimes the best ideas come when I do house work. The best way to solve a problem is sometimes not found starring at a screen but when you allow yourself to relax.
On the other hand, when I'm in the office, I'm a bit depressed and feel like a powerless slave, just can't wait to be free. Fortunately my companies has an elastic WFH policy but I'm not sure how long it will hold.
All others have been remote (with a few days/year spent at the office at most). I like to think that I'm more productive at home because there the way I show my work is to actually produce visible results instead of being at a certain place for a certain amount of time. It's IMHO way easier to goof off at the office.
I got a new job around 6 months ago, and now I feel more productive than ever because it's interesting and fulfilling.
And that is at like 5% occupation. Can’t imagine how horrible it’d be when everyone moves back to the office.
I apparently had someone hotdesk in my spot (fair, it’s a kind of nice one, with a ultrawide screen near a window with a view), but when I saw someone had rearranged the stuff that had been in the same place for the previous 2 years, I found out how much I absolutely loathe the idea of anyone doing that.
One more important thing: I thrive in the environment were important things are written down. In my world it eliminates the power of "popular" people and cliques who work via "charming" and "politics".
But I transitioned into it from a one year sabbatical in 2014.
The job I had before was full-time employment in an open office. I never procrastinated more in my life.
Currently, I'm self-employed and work from home. Now, I simply work explicitly less and take time off more often, so the procrastination turned to something more enjoyable.
Now that we get some stationary lessons, it's going better, and I've got some contact with my peers.
This is the exact opposite of procrastination.
Who says you should do them?
Eventually, I began to understand "remote culture" and that just because I was seeing others doing stuff, asking questions, committing to repos, etc. at all hours didn't mean I was expected to be "up and working at all times".
Once I made my peace with things, I began to see what advantages WFH brought. Once I understood what I really needed to be working on, I found that the quiet of my home office made me much more productive. I bought a standing desk (and, yes, YMMV) and it's been a great way for me to focus, especially early in the day.
There are still some advantages to going into an office. Two that stand out to me are: • Early planning meetings where it's much more productive to brainstorm/whiteboard together. • Water cooler conversations. Yes, you can still connect with your co-workers remotely, but it's a lot less organic.
TL;DR - Yes, there are times I find myself justifying running personal errands or other stuff that ends up deferring (procrastination of) the things I need to accomplish for my team/employer. However, I've learned that I'll feel much better about myself and work product if I'm "diligent enough" to do just that.
Everytime we pass by, he has to tab his screen of Lychess/Reddit away. And he's more productive at work than at home..
Another collegue comes online before the Kanban, interrupts us at 12:05 ( when we eat) or at 17:35 on Friday or at 18:10. Just to show that's she's working "more". ( Hard to reach during normal hours fyi )
Ugh