163: 25 Favorite Tips for WFH (Working From Home)

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What's Next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello friends. Me again. Are you sick of me yet? With these almost daily pandemic podcasts? As long as I have a topic in mind that I feel is helpful and can serve and support you, I'm going to share it right now. That's been happening almost daily. We'll see how this unfolds as things continue here in New York City, things are pretty much on total lockdown and in fact the only people I see out are fellow dog owners who are out walking their dogs or people who may not have homes to self isolate in. It's a really tough time and I echo what Lindsay shared on the most recent episode about having almost an hour by hour experience of what's happening. And as a small business owner, definitely feeling reality set in about what this might mean and how so many of us are going to keep the lights on during a time where many, many companies are going to down to only the essential expenses. And that will be really I don't know how it's going to go and there are moments that I feel very hopeful and optimistic even related to Pivot. Now more than ever, our organizations are pivoting daily and on the other hand, training and development budgets are going to be cut sooner than keeping employees on payroll. Even when, let's say retail stores are closed or vital aspects of the many of the businesses I work with are are now going to try to stretch themselves as long as they can. I just read that my favorite bookstore in New York City, McNally Jackson, they just laid off every employee and they said I don't know how long this will be. We hope to hire you all back, but this is what we need to do right now. It's real, it's happening. This episode is for employees and entrepreneurs who are adjusting to working from home. Some of you may have been working from home for 10, 20 years. For me it's been about nine years. Some of you have been in a cadence of working remotely for your organization maybe one or two days a week, or maybe five days a week. And no matter where you fall on that spectrum, I'm hoping that by sharing some of my working from home favorite practices that you'll get at least one idea, one thing you could try, one thing to lighten the load. Because the show does go on. We are going to try as much as we can to have that business continuity that Michael Consuelos and I saw spoke about in episode 159. But we're going to have to work very differently in order for that to happen because we're so early in this pandemic affecting us, at least here in the US and even at different rates of speed at different points in the US and certainly I know Pivot podcasts, we have many international listeners as well. Shout out to Carol, who wrote to me from the UK and is part of momentum. But in the beginning this might have just kind of felt like a sick day or a sick week. Like, okay, cool. Working from home now. And now I think we're all getting the sense that this isn't just a week, this could be months that we work like this. Some of you may have families at home. I encourage you to listen to episode 162 with Lindsay and more to follow on that front. But let's say it, making this adjustment will take time. You might be less productive than you're used to. Can we at least start by accepting that, at least in the beginning. That said, you could be far more productive over time, especially as you adjust and really hone into what you as an individual need and how you thrive. That's one of the biggest gifts of working from home. I love what the authors of the book it doesn't have to Be Crazy at Work what they say in the intro. They say we can't get work done at work anymore. There's just too many interruptions. The more companies move to these open office floor plans now people are having to put headphones on so they don't get interrupted constantly. I think there tends to be more meetings when you're working in an office. I don't know why that is, but I remember when I was working at Google I used to just have a wall of back to back meetings all day every day. And that changes a little bit when you're working from home. So I encourage you to at least hold for the possibility that you could become far more productive this way and it could open up so many new things for you. You might even be somebody who has been working from home for a while, but still in the paradigm of the industrial system, the factory system that so many of our corporations are based on. That by the way, the Monday through Friday 9 to 5 and even how we work has so much more to do with a somewhat outdated system that was created before we had all the technology and the tools and health and wellness insights that we have now. With that, here are 25 of my favorite working from home best practices. Take what works and leave the rest. But I hope that you find at least one or two of these helpful for you. Number one, Ditch the story. I'm only productive at a coffee shop. Or I'm only productive at work. When I was writing my first book, Life After College, this was back in 2009, 2010, I first had that story, I'm only productive at the coffee shop. But pretty soon I realized and I just thought I can't work at home. It's too quiet. I just, I can't work from home. I just thought I was one of those, that it's not going to work for me. I love the hustle and bustle of the coffee shop. There's Even a website, coughtivity.com that makes coffee shop noise. I'll put the link to that in the show notes. I realized that it was taking time to get dressed, get in my car park, get out, buy something from the coffee shop, get signed onto their WI fi. The WI fi would be hit or miss depending how many people were in there. Sometimes people around me would be easy to work and they're talking, but sometimes it would be quite distracting. The Internet goes out, I get hungry, I go buy something else. Someone else needs the plug. The list goes on. I have to go to the bathroom. Oh, this bathroom's gross. Now I come home and I just started to realize this is eating up a lot of time that at the time I didn't feel like I had. Cause I was trying to write the book on nights and weekends, mostly weekends, while working full time. So I just made the shift. I just stopped telling myself that story that I'm not productive at home. Work has a lot of interruptions when you go into an office and they're just. They'll just be of a different variety. So when you're working from home, of course you're going to have interruptions and don't expect otherwise. If you live with others, you're going to get interrupted. If you live by yourself, you're going to have interruptions from your own mind. The TV beckons. The fridge beckons. You will still have to confront these inner interruptions, but start by shifting the story that I can be more productive at home. Number two, I have a very strict protocol for each of my devices. Now, this might sound ridiculous. Feel free to laugh at me for this or any other hack that I share I am obsessive about My laptop is only for conducting business, and I'll tell you why in a moment. My iPad is only for reading on Kindle and my mobile phone is only for browsing light Internet browsing and listening to podcasts. Then a few important emails here or there. Sometimes I want to check in from my phone before I actually sit down to work or toward the end of the day if there's something important that I'm waiting on or that needs to happen. Now let me tell you why for each one of these When I first became an Entrepreneur Back in 2011, I was doing a ton of work on my laptop and I started to feel allergic to it. If it was a weekend, I started to associate. My laptop was my business. It was the only separation that I had in my home to indicate that I was at work or I wasn't at work because I've been working from home this whole time. I actually I never signed up for a coworking space. I never did that. I guess I got used to it when I was writing Life After College, and so I realized that I get so much more done at home. And so my laptop became the signal that I was working. And it was the only signal I had to the point where when Michael moved in in 2017, there was one night where he wanted to watch a movie and he said, great, can I just pull it up on your laptop? And I was like, don't you dare. Don't touch my laptop. I had this visceral reaction like, do not open that laptop. It was in the evening and I freaked out. He looked at me like I was an alien. He could not understand the strong allergic reaction that I was having and why I was being so ridiculous about not letting him open my laptop. This could have even been when we were traveling. Maybe that's why we weren't able to watch. I didn't have even a TV at that time. I just had a monitor on my desk. But maybe we were traveling and the options were watch a movie on the iPad. On the iPad or my laptop. And of course he would choose the laptop. It just makes sense, right? And I just said, no, do not open it. And by 2017, I was six years into working from home and. And I just. No. It is the only thing I have, again, that separates my business brain from my resting brain. And as soon as the laptop opens, I'm going to see the Chrome tabs, I'm going to see everything that's there. It was triggering for me. So he accepted and we ended up watching on my iPad. And I'm stubborn about this too. When I travel, back in the day, when I used to travel for speaking gigs, when I had those things, I. I would not watch content on my laptop. I would watch it on my iPad. I would make the sacrifice for a smaller screen to keep that digital device boundary. Same thing with my iPad. My iPad is not for working. It is a leisure device for reading on Kindle. And I still read a lot of books in hardcover as well. But my iPad is not a working device. I have a small one. I have an iPad mini. If I had a big one that simulated a tablet, maybe I would allow that for working. But my. My iPad is meant to read books. So I like my iPad and I enjoy it, and it's a reward for me to get to be on that device. The reason I like mobile for browsing and of course, listening to podcasts, is that I'm less likely to linger because it's harder to read and type. So I naturally will get more fatigued if I'm trying to type emails on my mobile phone. It's just not that efficient. So I mostly only scan emails. I'm not a good email mobile responder. And this is part of the reason I'm so slow at responding to email in general, because I only respond to email when my laptop is open, which means I'm quote, at work. I don't go on social media. The only thing I used to do was scroll Reddit. I found that was less annoying to me than scrolling Facebook or Instagram. But now I don't really do that. And if, If I would scroll and I'm not even really reading the news, I'm just checking in daily on some coronavirus updates to see what's happening, especially being here in New York, which is now one of the hubs in the US for the spread. So. But other than that, I'm not. I don't get the rest of my news on my phone. I get it from Subscribing to the New York Times paper edition tip number three related to having boundaries for your devices. Have boundaries for physical spaces in your home. I find it helpful to designate one or two work zones. That's it. So I now in the new house as of 2019, I have an office that's mine. It's actually my office. And I have the mirror in here so I can do yoga. So it's my office and my yoga room. And there was a quirk of this room when we got the place that there's a bunk bed built in above my desk. So it's a little awkward. I have this desk above my head. No, this is a bunk bed above my head. I kind of work underneath the bunk bed, so it also becomes the guest room. You can imagine this is somewhat disruptive when we have guests because my office and yoga studio goes away. So it's awkward, but we make do. Even when I was living in the studio apartment before Michael moved in, so Michael lived there with me two years, but I was there for five years on my own. I think it was five years, four years on my own. I had a desk, so it was a studio. I had a bed on one side. I had two IKEA bookshelves separating the bed from the quote, living room, even though there was no door. And I had books floor to ceiling. So it actually did create kind of a wall in between. And then I had a desk that was by the window with a big computer monitor on it. And I had a couch. I really didn't let myself work on the couch. And I never let the laptop cross over the threshold in the middle of the room to the bed. So when I was sitting at my desk, I was working. When I was on the couch, I was relaxing. When I was in the quote bedroom, I was resting or sleeping. And that was really important to me. So here again. When Michael moved in in 2017, there was a point where he's like, oh, Netflix and chill. Let's. Let's bring the laptop over to the bed and let's watch a movie. And I was like, no. I freaked out. I just said no. Cause I feel really strongly about not having a TV in the bedroom. And similarly, I do not allow my laptop in the bedroom. So maybe that happened one time since we moved into the new, bigger place. I don't know that my laptop has ever climbed the stairs. Maybe I think one or two times I. I brought it up to work. We have a little balcony. And when it was nice how I could work outside. But I don't cross pollinate, I don't bring my laptop into the living room. I don't, I don't do that. If I'm gonna work, I'm gonna work. I'm in my office. We do have a bigger dining room table and for a while Michael was set up on that and he would work out there. He didn't wanna work in his, he has like a painting room, it's really a small room but he wanted to separate those two things. So he has his painting studio and then he wanted to do computer related things on the dining room table. And at first of course there's me going, oh no, it's our living room, it's not an office. But maybe you and your family, you do have a dining room table or you do have something where you want to set up and co work or work side by side. And we had some really fun days where we did do that and we were really productive where we were both sitting at opposite sides of this dining table and working and that was really cool. So, so as long as you designate in your home where the work zones are, try as much as you can not to blend the activities of different parts of the house so that, and they say this about the bedroom, like don't bring even your mobile phone into the bedroom. I mean how many of us are not listening to that advice? But keep these sacred spaces so that your mind, your body, your energy already starts to shift when you change from room to room in your home. I think it's so important to have that I can't even call it psychological safety, but psychological break. Because maybe I, well, I don't want to speak for you as an employee. I don't know if you have the always on feeling. I'm sure you do. I had it when I was at Google. But and certainly as a small business owner, there can sometimes be this, this really tough thing to shut off one's brain. There's not really a sense unless you, let's say you work in retail. Maybe when you come home your brain is off, you're not thinking about the clients you serve today and the customers you're going to serve tomorrow. But in the information business, a lot of us often keep things on our mind. And certainly if you have the bad habit of checking email at night, don't do that. It's going to make you so anxious, it's going to be harder to sleep, you're going to have all those emails rattling around in your brain, but it's harder to turn off it's harder to shift from our business, our working self, to our relaxing self. So the only way we can do that happens on the inside by putting boundaries around our devices and our physical spaces. Tip number four around physical energy and productivity Find your real hours again. Monday through Friday nine to five is a construction. I do not believe that that is at all how we are most effective as humans. Workers, employees, business owners, forget about it. If I could reinvent it from scratch, of course I would invent Monday through Friday 9 to 5 or 9 to 6 or whatever hours any of us are actually working. I think it's insane. So I understand that if you work for a company, especially now, and companies that aren't used to remote work, they're probably going to be a little bit overcorrecting and obsessive about trying to make sure you're on during the appropriate working hours. But if you can show that you are even more productive, I do believe that even if your company has more strict guidelines around that, you can still find your real hours and you have more of a chance to do this working from home than you do when you go into an office. So optimize around your best energy windows when you go through a day. What is your circadian rhythm over the course of a day? When do you have your best energy and when are you the least energetic? I love what Shout out to Brittany said to me once. She said by 3pm I don't even know my own name and I can so relate to that. My brain is a complete fog from about three to five, but I'm really on in the morning and we'll get to morning routines in a moment. But I. I work really well on strategic creative projects. I'm recording this in the morning and then around midday I can take meetings and do email stuff because it's not my best window. So I am not giving my best window away to reactive work. You might need more ramp up time in the morning. You might want to work out in the morning. You might not want to eat breakfast in the morning. I don't eat breakfast and I feel much more focused. I would much rather sit at my desk and and work an insanely focused five or six hours where I don't even get up, I don't break, I don't have lunch and I'm so focused because my at least in terms of fasting, the blood in my brain is not going to my stomach. So I have so much more mental clarity and alertness. But that's me. I prefer six hours of Incredible focus to eight or nine hours of dilly dallying, procrastinating, scrolling and trying to just stretch to make it through the day. So if you listen to Free Up Founder Time, it's my free mini course, you'll hear that I talk about time batching and schedule blocking and I'll put all these links in the show notes, but if you want the link to that, it's pivotmethod.com FFT when I say time or rather content batching, think about the nature of the work that you have to do this week and try to batch all similar tasks to together. So content batching. Right now I'm recording almost daily in the moment pandemic response related topics, but it would work really well in normal times that I might record all pivot podcasts in one week of the month or the quarter and then I'd release them. Then we could content batch or or that type of work be batched at the next point in the podcast production chain of audio editing and then the next batch could be go together in terms of setting up show notes. And that way every single person at every point in that chain is more efficient because you're not context switching. You get to stay on that one mode, that one topic, and that one type of work. If you're a coach, you might want to do all your coaching calls on one or two days of the week. Then you have an admin day, one of the other days, and then you have a deep work day for one of the other day. So that is content batching, where you put similar things together and give yourself that momentum of similar activities, getting into the groove and getting it all done at once because it makes you so much more efficient than stopping and starting and trying to context switch all day. When you have a reactive schedule and you're just reacting to what others have requested from you, it can be really challenging to feel like you're getting anything done. You wake up and you're responding to email and then you're responding at meetings and you're responding to the action items that came from those meetings. And then you try to work on your deep work, but you only have an hour now and then it's time to go do something else so the time can feel like it dissolves really quickly that way. Schedule blocking is very similar. It's look at your week in advance and block off entire days for what you want to focus on that day. Or look for smaller blocks where you block out your workouts, let's say, and you make that commitment to yourself. And that way you don't schedule over them. If you don't block things that you care about in advance, they're most likely not gonna happen. And when someone requests a meeting or they request your time, you're gonna say, oh, yeah, I have that time free. And you forget in that moment, oh, that's when I was gonna work out that day. And then all of a sudden that workout slot goes away. So if you wanna hear more on those topics again, I encourage you to check out Free up founder time. It's totally free. Pivotmethod.com FFT number five. Let's talk about attire. Some people have said, oh, if you're working from home, I love getting dressed in the morning. I still get dressed. It makes me feel professional. I go down to my desk and I feel ready to work and ready for the world. I even put on shoes or I put on makeup. I take the exact opposite approach. I don't want to spend a single minute of time on hair or makeup or getting dressed if I don't have to. Secondly, I believe you should get comfy. Michael and I have a joke. We call our line of attire our clothing that we curate comf core, which means what is the comfiest thing you can find? So for a while I was wearing Nadam. It's a light kind of cashmere company. And we joked in Momentum that it was like our work from home uniform. Because you could get these Nadam cashmere. They're not really sweats, but they're pants and it's so fun to work in those. It just feels so soft and I really like it. Michael found these pants on Amazon that were sweats and then they had fleece on the inside. I just found on Athleta these fleece lined and then velvet on the outside pants. They're so amazing. I just love feeling comfortable. I've often joked that in terms of working from home attire, it's business on top of party on the bottom, like, or business on top, freedom on the bottom. Because if you're, if you're on a zoom call or an interview or I have a business meeting, of course I'm going to put on a nice shirt. And for that I will put on some lipstick and I'll spruce up my hair or something. But I'm still wearing my sweats. No one knows what I'm wearing on the bottom half of my body. You know, why wouldn't you make yourself comfortable? Another thing, my friend Laura does this. She wears workout clothes. So she works in workout clothes so that at any moment she can get up and stretch for 15 minutes. And I've done this too. I actually like working in yoga pants and being ready to go. So if I, if I want to take a break and do 15 minutes of yoga or stretching or just I want to reduce friction of kind of making myself exercise a little bit, hopefully it's you're not having to force it. But I like being already dressed for that. Number six, decide what to work on the day prior. I do like and Charlie Gilkey talks about this. He has a great set of digital planners called the Momentum Planners. And in his book Start Finishing, I'll link to the podcast episode we did in the show Notes, he talks about getting clear at the end of a day on what your next projects are for the following day. And he actually the Momentum Planners help you do this on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual cadence. It's really cool. I love his system. I love how intentional he is about his time. So if nothing else, as you close out the day and maybe you did this when you're working in an office too, but I find working from home can sometimes feel more wiggly and amorphous. It's just, ah, everything's a blur. My life, my work, my relationships, phone calls with friends, pets, if you're taking care of them, it's all a blur. So reduce your decision fatigue of every day having to figure out not just how you're going to find the motivation to work from home, but what you're going to work on. So I always like to know what are my top three priorities? If I only got three things done tomorrow, what would they be? And I picked those out in my head the day before. And that helps me reduce anxiety as well and reduce anxiety in the morning when I wake up that, oh my gosh, I have so much to do today. All right, but these are the most important things that are truly urgent that must get done today. Now let's talk about accountability and co workers or colleagues. So number seven, Sprint with friends. My friend Alyssa and I have been doing this for almost 10 years where when we're having a tough week, we don't ever really live in the same place. We set up email sprints and this could be daily or weekly or even monthly. And we go back and forth on the same thread and we ask each other, we say, what do you want to get done today? Or what are you going to get done this week? And then we both update that thread with our accountability updates. What have we gotten done. What are our challenges, what we don't even put the pressure on each other to respond, but we know that the other one's kind of there and listening. So we find that really helpful.

Number eight. On a related note, you can still set up side by side virtual coworking. I just did this pilot with my team the other day. We did a two hour virtual sprint on Zoom and we connected at the beginning. We said what was important, what we wanted to work on for this sprint, what we wanted to get out of it. And then we all went on mute and turned off video and just worked side by side and we had a half point and midpoint check in and then we also had a check in at the end. So I'm going to put two resources related to what I just shared. Alyssa and I came up with some work bestie business Bestie Best practices. We have a doc for that of course, because that's what we do. She's been a previous Pivot podcast guest as well. We talked about all of our systems. So I'm going to link to the podcast in the show notes. I'm going to put the business bestie in the show notes. And we call our friendship the Spurl slumber party in real life because we were so used to spurling over Skype slumber partying over Skype. And then it turned into a really great business accountability relationship as well. In addition to the personal side, I'm also going to put in the notes a template that my team and I created for how to run a two day sprint with your team. And then you could certainly shift this that to a virtual sprint. There's no reason not to. Some people like virtual coworking where you see everybody on video. I find that awkward. I don't want to be on video. I don't want you looking at the side of my face or the top of my head. I just prefer to have video off but then have some would call it a Pomodoro sprint. You can even buy a Pomodoro timer and just indicate what your goals are for each mini leg of the sprint. One thing that Stephanie and I did over the summer, we also had a decision sprint. So we actually set aside a day and we didn't even get work done. I thought, oh let's what can we get done? What can we walk away with? We ended up just making decisions together all day. We teed up all the decisions we had to make. It was actually at that time it was about Momo 3.0. This new version that we launched and it was really productive. Tip number nine shifts us to some tech. Now, I highly recommend a dual monitor for those of you who worked in an organization. Worked, past tense. Oh, no. I mean, you know, went into work every day back when things are normal. You might have already had a big monitor at work and at home. You might not have that. You might not be used to it. You can get some that are more expensive and you can get some that are not, that are pretty inexpensive. But I find it very, very helpful to have a large screen sitting next to my laptop. I find it helpful to have both. So my laptop is on a stand. Just get yourself set up. What tech do you need? If you had an ergonomics expert come to your home, are you set up to be comfortable and have the tech tools that you need? I like to sit on a bouncy ball, so it only gets awkward when I'm on a work meeting and I'm kind of jiggling a little bit. If it's a professional call, I'm sure they notice me. I'm sitting on something that's not totally stable. But I love working on a yoga ball. It's not a yoga ball chair, it's just a full on purple. I think I paid $10 for it on Amazon yoga ball. And I don't know, it just feels good. Maybe it works my core. I think I talked about the benefits of it. There's even a known strategy for reducing stress. Just letting yourself bounce on the ball a couple times. So take some time to assess your workspace. Again, this is not just a sick day. We may be doing this for a month, two months, three months, could be more, we don't know. So you might as well look at your setup and figure out what you need to get your tech and your ergonomics working for you. Tip number 10. When I asked Michael what his tips were from someone working from home, he said, anchor your day. Make sure that you have a couple meetings set in stone, even if they're meetings with yourself or meetings to work out. But understand the brackets of your day. And this way it gives you something to build around. And, and again, it reduces decision fatigue of having to decide every single day what this new day is gonna look like. Some of you may have more meetings than others and more time commitments already built into your day. Especially if you have kids and you're taking care of their school schedule or their work. Work from school, work from home, school schedule. But do think about what are the anchors that you wanna Put in your day that are rewarding or recharging or orienting for you. Tip number 11, build your playlist. You actually can now put on headphones and listen to music. Get yourself pumped up or relaxed. I like listening to the Deep Focus playlist on Spotify. There's two of them now. That works for me. Some of you might want to listen to classical music or Opera or Indie 100. Whatever gets you most inspired, focused and in the zone. Now is the time. Or maybe right now you want some emotional comfort. There's gotta be all kinds of people who are staying home building playlists. I listen mostly on Spotify, but figure out how you can create some delight in your day. Number 12, clean your workspace and clean your house. I know, I know. So many people read Marie Kondo, the Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. There's even a show on Netflix. I forget what it's called, Tidying or who knows what about reducing clutter. But sometimes my office tends to pile up in particular. Papers pile up, books pile up. Just stuff I have to file. Get little filing boxes if you don't already have them, and just clean your workspace. So right when the pandemic craziness was really hitting New York, I actually took one day and I did a deep clean of the whole house. And I, I did feel so much lighter. I know sometimes for me, cleaning or tidying is a way that I reduce stress. Cause it's tactical, it's with my hands and I have that sense of accomplishment. I see the chaos. It's like talk about order from chaos. I see the chaos and then I do a clean and then I feel calm. That actually does work for me. If you're going to be working from home and you're not used to it, give yourself a soothing, clear, clean space to do that in it's visual calm. That if you have a calm space, you can have a calm mind. I'm already hearing those of you who love a chaotic space and you work creatively in a chaotic space, fine. If you love it, keep it as is. Especially I'm married to an artist. I know sometimes artists love the chaos of the studio. And it just that creates the inspiration and the visual cue of like cool things are happening in here, ideas are colliding. Whatever works for you, get your space the way that works for you. That's not just a concession. That's not just, oh, this is short term. When will this be over? Now let's talk about good old morning routines. So number 13, you essentially, if you are used to commuting, your commute has gone away. And for all the complaints that people have about commuting, what it does offer is those those brackets to the day. And some of you may have rituals that you really appreciate about your commute, the time to listen to audiobooks or podcasts or make phone calls. And when I was working at Google, I commuted an hour and a half each way when I lived in San Francisco. And I would take one of those now infamous buses from San Francisco to work. And I actually loved those times. I love looking out the window at a moving skyline or moving horizon line in front of me and just observing what's out there. And. And I would do often deep thinking and resting. I was never the one working on my laptop. As you can imagine, the bless was me time I would have headphones in. I wasn't a podcast fanatic back in the day. This was still in, you know, 0607, but it was. There was ritual around it. So think about if you're someone who no longer has a commute, it can be disorienting to just what is your commute now? It's from your bed to the living room to your office. Hopefully you're not going straight from your bedroom to your office. That to me would be there's no ritual there. So what ritual shift can you create? Whether it's a shift of space lighting. Part of the reason I love going to bed early between 8 and 9pm Is that I love waking up before sunrise. And only when I was coming to record this episode did I realize why. I realized that when I wake up before sunrise, there is a visual ritual that happens. It's dark, so I read and I read, maybe on my Kindle or I read with a candle and the light's dimmed and lower and then the sun starts to rise and the beautiful fresh morning light starts to enter. And then I feel really good. I might read the newspaper again, the physical one I hold in my hands. Now I can really read a book. The that's not digital. I just get that next phase of the light. And then when the light is too bright to even be outside or I feel complete in terms of my reading and my tea, coffee or tea. Then I go into work and I feel that I have had a commute from my bed to my living room to my office where I woke up, I had some morning rituals and routines. I had a shift of space, a shift of light. And then I go in to work for you. Think about if you had a commute what was important to you about the commute even with all the complaints? What did you get out of it? And how could you build in a new commute even while working from home? Get creative. Is there anything out of the ordinary in your morning routines? Are you somebody that has felt that your morning routines were always rushed or you weren't really starting the day for you was starting it for everyone else? What can you do now? Now you have an opportunity to rethink how you work your morning. And the biggest and most important question I believe about morning routines is what sparks joy? Back to Marie Kondo what would be delightful? Don't think about what's going to make me the most productive when I sit down at my desk. No, what would be delightful? My friend Neil and I spoke in one of our podcasts together about his what he calls the Saturday morning Test. What do you do on Saturday mornings when you don't think you have to go into work? And how could you build that in to every morning? Why not? Why not? I genuinely believe that if we give ourselves moments of delight, moments of recharging like this every single day, you will be a better, more creative, more relaxed, more, more happy, more hopeful person.

Number 14 evening wind down routines Just as important as the morning is drawing boundaries within the day. So I don't check email once I leave my office and I leave my computer. I do not check email after about 4:35pm Once I'm the afternoon dog walk tends to happen around 4:35 and I unless there's something important going on, I don't check. I don't want to know. There is nothing that I do in my line of work that could come in after 5pm that would be truly urgent that I didn't need to respond to before 10 or 11am the next day. There just isn't I'm not a brain surgeon. I'm not somebody that is working in emergency response. Michael and I, Michael Consuelos and I have been going back and forth about podcasts where we're letting we're saying let's text each other and have in the moment huddles when big developments happen. Cool. I don't mind that. What I don't want are every single of a hundred or two hundred or three hundred emails in my consciousness for my evening wind down routines. Shout out to Michelle Powers who wrote to me when I asked pivot list what are your favorite work from home practices? And I forgot to say this about morning routines but she said don't check social media or email first thing, it's a slippery slope. Instead, focus on making time for a self care routine that feels good to you. Setting digital boundaries magically unlocks hours in the day. I love that magic comment. Same thing goes in the evening. If you find it truly genuinely relaxing to be on social media in the evening, don't do it. That has never really been my experience. Unless I'm looking at memes on Reddit, I did find that very relaxing. Or looking at cute animals on Instagram. Find the thing that actually relaxes and recharges you. If right now you're obsessed with the news, which I would really understand because for some of us there's very practical considerations that affect our day to day lives and our day to day work. I love what Michael said in episode 159. Just limit that time. So yes, you can check once in the morning and pick an amount of time. Is it 10 minutes? 20 minutes max, maybe 30? And then once in the evening. I also think it's really crucial to ask yourself what are you modeling for your team, for your colleagues and for your clients? So if you are someone that is sending emails after 5pm or on weekends, which I'm guilty of, I've done this in years past, but I really try not to do it now. What are you modeling? You're modeling that you don't have good boundaries and that you even if you think oh well, that they don't have to check it right now. But why then? Then why send it? I never understood this. Let me show everybody how late I'm working and how committed I am. Some people, myself included, there have been times where I love working on Saturdays or Sundays. I love when the rest of the world is quiet and gets so much done. I try to schedule those emails to send the next day. I use Boomerang for Gmail. Many email clients are now building in this type of capability. But try to be mindful of others. And if you're self employed or you're an employee, that's client facing. If you send emails at all hours of day and night, what are you modeling? You are modeling for your clients that you are always on and always available. Be very intentional about that. If that's important to you and that's part of your offering or your value proposition or your role, fine. And you accept that and it's intentional, fine. But otherwise I never try to model that I'm available 24. 7. That's, that's not true. No matter. Even we're launching momentum, doors are open right now. And still I wouldn't respond to incoming questions late at night, nor would I ask my team to do that. I've seen job posts recently that say working at at our company is very intense. We may ask you to work nights and weekends, but we love our work and we hope you do too. I don't understand that. I don't understand. I mean, I get it, I see where it comes from, but I don't want to ask my team to work at night or on the weekends. I don't care what we're doing. It shouldn't. I don't believe, I just don't believe in that. I don't want that for them and I don't want it for me. So I make it really point unless it's truly urgent and there's like a client situation. I have some VIP one on one coaching clients that I work with that I don't mind if they text and there's this urgent update of something that's going on. I don't mind that at all. But I never set that as the baseline expectation for day to day work and I encourage you to do the same. So what are some other evening wind down routines that help you relax? And I don't even have to tell you to do these because think about what you do when you get home from work or home from a long day. Maybe you do allow yourself an hour or two of tv. You have dinner with your family. I like to try not drinking water at least one hour before bed so that I don't have to wake up to go to the bathroom. Simple things like that. Just think about what yours are. I like ending the day by reading in bed analog style or sometimes on my iPad with I turn the brightness all the way down to the lowest it could be. And with reading, I don't read business books at night, I don't read nonfiction at night. I read memoirs or I'll read things that are a little lighter that I'm not. They're not generating ideas in my mind.

Tip number 15 meeting and team communication formats. So everyone now is talking about Zoom. Zoom is zooming up the charts now with everybody working from home. Check out Zoom Breakout rooms. It's one of my favorite unique features that Zoom in particular offers, which is if you have a meeting with 10 people, you can do. The meeting organizer can launch breakout rooms where you split off in groups of two or three and maybe you're even having people split off and just talk about their day. Talk about what's going on with the pandemic and you just give them a chance. Some people are more shy, they don't want to say something in front of a whole group and it creates really intimate moments for people or brainstorming moments. Hot seats. There's a lot you can do with Zoom breakout rooms. And a lot of people are also talking about Slack. That could be a whole episode in itself. Let me just say that I like having Slack channels for every different area of the business, different products or programs. Some people have a cute channel on Slack cute or aww aww www or funny. So that becomes moments of levity throughout the day. Or I think you could have a Slack channel of what are you binge watching or favorite podcasts so you can incorporate some of those water cooler chat channels into Slack. And as I've described in previous podcasts, my team and I do not use Slack as a constant. Always on part of our business. None of us would want that. But we do pop up slack like when we're right now, when we're launching momentum. We are committed to all keep an eye on Slack because it is a very efficient way to communicate when you're doing in the moment, collaboration, brainstorming and problem solving. Number 16 going back to your physical cadence. Get outside. Take naps when you need to. Why not? Who is going to know and who is going to miss you if you take a 20 minute nap and that might completely recharge you so that you're five times more productive when you do wake up from that nap or five times happier or less cranky? I don't take naps every day. There was a time when I was particularly when I was working on my books. But I like now I have to get outside at least once or twice a day to walk the dog. And I'm so grateful I was thinking about that that without the do I might be afraid to go outside too much and I might not get that fresh air. And yet an hour of movement and fresh air is so energizing. So if you are working from home at the start of the day, plan when are you going to get outside today. Or if you feel yourself getting really antsy, get up, go outside even if it's just five or 10 minutes. Number 17 if you live alone, figure out what you're going to do for dinner in the morning when you have the energy. And if you live with someone else or a family, figure out who is going to prep dinner or figure out dinner, maybe even what you're going to have. But do that in the morning when you have the energy. Too many times I get caught up in my work and then I put the laptop down, I'm starving. I haven't had breakfast or lunch because again, I do like fasting. I feel better most of the day, most of the time. But there are times where I get up and I'm famished and now the dog needs to be walked. We don't know what's for dinner, there's nothing in the fridge and. And it's just that decision fatigue by the end of the day is so much more challenging to deal with when you're just tired from all the day's events and conversations and work. So try to figure out dinner prep in the morning. And I know there are many families out there that are even more on top of it and they figure this out at the start of the week or on Sundays. Some of you might even want to batch cook where you cook a whole bunch of vegetables on a Sunday, put them in glass Tupperware in the fridge and have it ready as a go to during the week. I used to do that. I talked about my mom's chili soup recipe in Pivot and in fact I'm going to look for that and put it in the notes where you make one batch of soup and then you have it all week long. It's so, so, so yummy. Number 18. Work out when you're most likely to do it. For me now this has been mornings before I sit down to work but it shifts sometimes. I used to like to work out when back in the day when I could walk to yoga when I lived downtown I would take a 45 minute walk to yoga, do class, one or two classes and I would walk home. Those days sadly are long gone at the moment. But I now do most of my yoga from home anyway, even pre pandemic. And I noticed that sometimes in the afternoon it would just my window of opportunity would slip past me. So now I work backward from whenever my first meeting of the day is. I try to look. If I'm gonna do a 30 minute class 45 minutes prior to my first call, I will work in a class. Sometimes I feel guilty. Oh, I should be emailing. Oh, it's, it's after 9:00am Should I still be doing yoga right now? Maybe it's even 10am get your workout in, get your workout in. You're gonna be more sane again if you take care of yourself and try to drop. There's so many micro guilt moments throughout a day that could happen when you're working from Home. Because in a way, it's just you, yourself and you, or me, myself and I. And there's all these little moments of tiny shoulds throughout the day or micro guilt, or you're. You gotta just get used to doing what you need to do and trusting that you're actually gonna be happier and more productive. My friend Mike Michalowicz, he told a funny story of. He wasn't working out, so now he makes himself pick up his tennis shoes and take them with him when he goes to the bathroom first thing in the morning after waking up. So he has to hold his tennis shoes in his hand, go to the bathroom, and then he is more likely to go for a run. Number 19, accept that FOMO for your family or your fridge is going to happen. No matter all these boundaries, rituals, routines, schedules that you set, you are going to have moments of FOMO for your family. If you live with others, for your fridge. Whether you live with others or you live alone and maybe even for your friends, it is going to happen. Just accept this. Sometimes you're going to want to close the door and you're going to have fomo. What are they doing out there? They're having fun. Or when we first got Ryder and even now, where is he? What's he doing? You know? And I just want to go play with him or go. I hear Michael and him are like, playing and having a lot of fun. And I want to go out there. Sometimes I let myself do that, and other times I got to stay doing what I'm doing. And I just accept that I have FOMO right now. I'm just missing out a little bit on the fun that's happening outside the office door. You might have FOMO for calling your friends, and you just. You're working and you don't really want to be doing what you're working on, so you want to just pick up the phone and call someone, or someone calls you and you want to just, why don't I just pick up the phone and answer it? Or your fridge. You're like, what's out there? Oh, wouldn't it be so nice to just stop right now and go make something? I encourage you. If you're not used to following your body's signals, do that. Just do it. What would happen if you followed your own body's intelligence for a day, two days, a week, a month? Can you imagine? You have an opportunity now to do that, to actually listen to your authentic self and your authentic energy? I highly encourage you to do that. And if you Know that it's not your authentic self and your authentic energy. It's just procrastination. Procrastinacking then, okay, just notice that you're gonna have those urges and try to keep moving through them and give yourself time. Okay, don't get up right now, right before you have to write this important email, but in 30 minutes, once you've gotten that one important email done, then you're allowed to get up and go make lunch.

Number 20. Speaking of family, I love the door hanger system that I developed. I shared this in free up founder time, and I shared it in the episode one of the pandemic episodes with Michael Consuelo. I bought a set of foam door hangers and I wrote on them different protocol. So red means do not enter, do not knock, that I'm recording a podcast or I'm on a very important call. Blue is for meetings. And I write on the front of the blue door hanger video. And I write on the back, audio only. So that sometimes Michael would do really nice things. He'll bring me. Bring me a cup of coffee or a bowl of grapes or something, and he should know if I'm on video, they're going to see him come in. And if I'm on audio, it's okay. He can kind of come in unannounced and no one will be the wiser. I have a purple door hanger that's for meditation and yoga text only. Please don't knock, because if he knocks, I am going to come out of my practice and I don't, ideally don't want to do that. And he doesn't really know what I'm doing in here. So if he knocks, he doesn't know that he just interrupted, you know, the most sacred meditation or Shavasana, I mean, or he doesn't know, oh, I'm just working as normal. It's no big deal. The yellow door hanger says working, but feel free to knock, enter. And then there's a green door hanger that says, come on in. Like, I welcome any interruptions. I'm doing something that I welcome that this has been so helpful. And Michael Consuelos the We've been doing these pandemic podcasts together. He even told me that his daughter took his advice and, and put her schedule on the door so that when he was knocking and interrupting her, she actually put her schedule for the day or the week on her door so he would know when, what time she'll be doing schoolwork, when she's talking with friends. And so she didn't use door hangers, but she did indicate to her family what she's doing and when you're allowed to knock or even inquire and come in and when you're not, which I think is just awesome. 21 right now with the pandemic, the advice is, especially in New York where we're basically in lockdown mode in self isolation, whether you have coronavirus or not, they're saying limit your errands and try to do them in batches and try to go in off peak hours. Even before all this madness was happening, I always limited my errands to midday during the week. Now bosses, you might not like to hear that. Who uses the word boss anymore? Managers, business owners, you might not want to hear that. That, oh, your employee is just going to take a errand day in the middle of the week, but leave it up to them to make up their work. Here's why. Why it's going to take five times as long to go to the grocery store in the peak hours when everyone else is home from work or on the weekends. Why do that? We all have the flexibility now we're all working from home. How long is that errand really going to take? I'm sure you'll figure out how to get the important work stuff done. You'll be able to do it much more peacefully, happily and now safely and quickly by going midday during the week. What I like about this is that you also get to break up the week. So again, even when I was in college, I batched all my classes for several years. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday only. Which is so crazy because that's essentially what I do now. So I started this back in 2003, 4 5. I was batching so I would have really long class days. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And then I always had four day weekends. I just felt like who wouldn't want to have four day weekends every week? Now I do the same thing. No meetings on Mondays or Fridays. Sometimes I'll even go run an errand on Mondays. I'll do sort of in person physical errands and it helps break up the week. Especially if I did end up working on a Sunday. For example, 22 could be its own full podcast. If you are someone that has a manager or a client that you're working very directly with instead of focusing on how much time you're spending but in seats time, focus on results and impact. So sometimes this is called a row results only work environment. My friend Julie, who wrote a book called the Work Revolution, she Calls it impact, not activities. All of us now are shifting to working from home. So instead of rewarding and obsessing, are you in front of the computer? Are you available to me from 8am to 9pm we should be focusing on what are the results that you want your team to achieve or if you're an employee, what are the results that you're going to deliver every day and the impact of those results and deliverables. And then be more flexible. We should all allow ourselves to be a little more flexible with what time we get that done. I know some people who even pre pandemic like to work after they put their kids to bed because they really wanted to spend some of their typical work day with their family. Their kids are home from school, they want to talk with them, make them dinner, put them to sleep, and then they're happy to work for the three hours after that. I'm kind of, you know, foggy brained at night. So I don't work very well at night and I go to bed very early. So that wouldn't necessarily work for me, but for some people it does. So just think about how can you focus on results and impact, not just the time you're spending working from home. We're on the home stretch here. Last three, number 23, quiet times or what Mike and his team, who I mentioned earlier, call library hours quiet time. So for me, I need, I crave quiet first thing in the morning. I really need like a pristine, quiet, inward reading reflecting time. And when I don't have that, I get very cranky. On the contrary, there are some mornings where Michael, my husband, loves to listen to music, sing, whistle, talk, talk about what he dreamt about. So we have a completely opposite desire for that morning time. And when he's singing and whistling, who am I to break that up? He sounds so happy, so happy to start the day. And I'm happy for him. So we just need to compromise. I have now I'll say I'm gonna need 20 minutes of quiet now and we might even set an alarm on Alexa. Okay. Or I'm going to need 30 minutes or I go into another part of the house. But it's a compromise. Figure out when are going to be your quiet times if you live with others or your, quote, library hours and maybe someone else needs it later in the day or in the evening. When Michael and I were on completely different sleep schedules, he was more of a night owl. I'm a morning person. We would both have that precious quiet time because I would go to bed so early that he would have it at night. He would get it for himself from let's say nine to midnight or nine to one. And then because he would go to bed so late, I would have it in the morning for three hours. And even when we lived in the studio apartment, that was a way to create space. So part of quiet times is also just when can you create space to recharge?

Number 24 do not get sucked into all day email.

This goes whether you're working from home or you're working in an office. Do not just sit there hitting refresh on your email all day. I learned this from my friend Pierre Coand. To treat email like a task, do it once or twice a day in batches. Maybe it's 10am and 3pm, but do not just sit there hitting refresh all day. That's going to drive you crazy. So that's all I'm going to say for now. We could have a whole podcast on email and maybe we should. That's a good idea. Although I am certainly not the expert, I have not figured this out. I also like what Nur Eyal brought up in our podcast. I'll link to it in the show Notes on Distraction and he talked about that he marks emails for today and this week and he does one batch every day. That's his Urgent Today emails and then he does one batch of email weekly. For any emails marked weekly, the last tip number 25 and I'm sure there's many more. So after you listen, if you have best practices that I haven't covered, please let me know. I'd love to share them in a follow up. You can leave those@pivotmethod.com ask or email helloivittmethod.com but the last one is hire your own assistant. Create your own team. There is no reason you can't have a virtual assistant even if you work for an organization. Why should just be executives that have EAs or VAs? You can have one too. You they're not as expensive as you might think and you can outsource a lot of your personal tasks. Tim Ferriss in the four Hour Workweek inspired so many of us on this front with the way that he talked about having a virtual assistant and I've shared before. I have I'll put it in the show notes 75 plus ways I've worked with my virtual assistant. I even have a whole course delegation ninja on all the tools and systems for delegating effectively. There's no reason you can't take this opportunity to build out your own team. Other people need work right now. You may not have any flex in the budget and I totally understand if that's the case. I think we are all tightening the belt right now. At the same time, start to keep track. Just notice what would you delegate if you could what are the 20% of tasks, personal or professional, that completely drain your energy? And what could you delegate can happen first before you decide who you're going to delegate to or how, or worry about trust issues Or I could do this better myself. Just create a tracker and notice within a given day or week. I love this from my friends at Helios. They run an assessment called Strength Scope. What energizes you and what drains you. The way I talked about this in life after college was the hotter, colder game that many of us played as kids. What work of yours feels hot, hot hot. Like the game was that you would hide something around the house and your friend or sibling would go looking and as they got closer you'd say hot, hot, hot on fire and then as they got farther you would say cold, cold, freezing. So notice in the course of a day or a week what of your work feels hot, hot hot and what is freezing or draining and you just would love to delegate or get rid of it if you could. Even if you are not in a position to hire someone else or you work for an organization, these are good conversations to have. Build the awareness now while you have the space and the time at home and see how you can come back to work more recharged and more refreshed and more aware of what it is that you love and want to do more of which of your strengths you can double down on as I talk about in Pivot. And then we what's that 20% that you might want to get creative about delegating or offloading or by the way bartering for everything you hate. There may be somebody who loves it. So that takes us to the end of this list of 25 of my favorite work from home practices. I would love to hear yours. You can get all the links and resources in the show notes. I mentioned a lot of things. I'm going to throw them all in the notes@pivotmethod.com pivot podcast and again, if you want to submit a question or a request or feedback or an idea, please just leave me a voice note@pivotmethod.com ask or send us an email hellopivotmethod.com thank you all so much for listening and I'm wishing you well during this time. I hope you and your families and your friends are safe and sane and we're all on this work from home Wild west together. Some of us again, have been doing it longer than others, but we're all dealing with a heightened sense of uncertainty, anxiety, and even isolation during this time. And we're still trying to get work done. But if you're getting less done right now than you're used to, accept that it's okay. We're all adapting to so much change every single day and we will figure this out. You will build these muscles and you are going to find your own systems and rituals and routines that work for you, sending you tons of love. Thank you so much for listening. Bye everybody.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for pivotless, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.