271: Listener Q&A—"I'm tired of 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.

Happy, happy New Year, everybody. I hope you had a wonderful holidays. Oh, is anyone else experiencing an epic case of the Mondays? Oh my goodness. I've mentioned it before on this podcast. My friends and I have a term for this. We call it birthday party syndrome. That if you've had a lot of fun or a lot of rest, in this case R and R, nobody's expecting anything from you. It's like when you're a kid and you're five years old and you had so much fun at your birthday that when everybody leaves, you start crying. Well, I'm now merging this with the movie Office Space and it's like birthday party syndrome, BPS and a case of the Mondays combined. I don't know about you, but I find there's always a frenzy of activity in early January. So much so that I actually block off the first week so that I can ramp slowly into the new year without cramming my schedule up full of meetings. On a related note, is anybody else losing their mind working from home? If so, you are not alone. We got a listener question from Omar. Hi Omar, thank you. Who asked this very question. He said it is just not working for me anymore. Help. I'm paraphrasing. I'm going to play this question for you here in a minute, but if you too are losing your mind sometimes with the working from home, yes, it can be a blessing. And there's also such a thing as too much of a good thing and working from home overwhelm the mundanity of it. The distractions. If you have other people around, it's not all sunshine and roses. So let me play Omar's question and then I will share my two cents because I struggle with this sometimes, too. I've worked from home for the last 10 years, definitely pre pandemic, but I didn't always live with other people, a husband and a dog while working from home. So I do think that as you add others to your household, that creates complication. Similarly, if you live alone and you don't want to be alone, the pandemic exacerbated a lot of feelings of loneliness and isolation. So there's also that side of the coin where maybe you're just tired of yourself every day, all day, in a sea of sameness. Wherever you fall on this spectrum, I totally get it. And I'm all for pilots and experiments to just ease the monotony. Again, the monotony around this and the sense of despair. So I'm going to share some of those after I play. Omar's question first. Over to you, Omar.

Hi Jenny, My name is Omar. I live in Tennessee and I just stumbled upon your podcast. I believe it was episode 246 title. What is your job? And I'm working from home now and it's getting to the point where I just extremely dislike it and it's been getting kind of hard on, on prioritizing and just, you know, doing the everyday things that I need to do. So just listening to you. Just wanted to thank you.

Kind of answered a lot of questions that I had in regards to prioritizing and just, just making the best that I can. I'm really glad that you put that content out and I just, I want to say thank you. I will definitely be a fan and I look forward to any future shows. It looks like I got a few to catch on up on. So thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Omar. Thank you for the kind words, for listening and for taking the time to submit this question. Listeners, you too can submit something. Go to pivotmethod.com/There's nothing in the queue right now, so I would love your input and questions of what you would like me to address here on this show. And thanks again, Omar, for the kind words. Yes, you have 270 episodes. You can binge if you'd like, not even including my new podcast, Free Time, which has over 50 episodes, as this one right here is going live. Now let's get to your question. The the episode that Omar has mentioned Here is episode 246 of the Pivot podcast. What is your job today? You decide. Oh my goodness. This was a survival question for me in the summer of 2020 and so much so that it Made it into the new book Free Time that's coming out in March.

It was mid pandemic, full swing. Ryder was full swing puppyhood. We brought him home in December of 2019. There were fireworks blasting every night, all night here in my neighborhood in New York City. And at the end of all that, one of the largest non nuclear explosions in global history occurred in Michael's home country and city of Beirut, Lebanon. We were in complete survival mode. We were not sleeping. The fireworks all night had Ryder barking. He still has PTSD from it. It just felt like psychological torture. So I started asking myself this question. What's my job today? In the beginning, to work ourselves out of this. To work myself out of this. I would say my job today is working out. There was a month there where I oriented my whole day and my best energy around getting a workout in so that I could stay as healthy as possible, which is also important during a frigging global pandemic. But I just gave myself permission that if I don't do anything else today and all I do is work out and take care of myself and the house and dog and everything, that's okay. That's a win. Once I got a good workout streak going, I did pandemic purchase a peloton. You better believe it. Then my job today became the podcast. I did a daily streak for three months there when the pandemic first hit. And then I just told myself, okay, I gotta get back on the wagon. This is one of my favorite things that I love to do and that if all I do is record a podcast today, it's a win. Whatever your job is can shift. But sometimes, as Omar mentioned in his question, it is hard to prioritize, as I shared in episode 52 of the Free Time podcast on actual capacity versus perceived capacity. Sometimes we perceive a former self, a former version of our capacity that we think we should be capable of. I use the metaphor of our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. Sometimes when you go to a buffet, a buffet style restaurant, and sometimes our actual capacity just isn't there. Omar, I don't know your exact situation at home, but I can say that there have been days where I'm ready to record back to back podcasts with guests and all of a sudden plumbers are drilling 4 by 4 foot holes in the ceiling or there are sirens outside, or there's a jackhammer in the backyard, which is in the room where I'm recording right up against a window at the back of the house. And if someone's jackhammering all day. On the day I happen to schedule a bunch of podcast interviews, I am out of luck. So it has been my constant quest just to get a place that is quiet enough to podcast. I even went so far as to tour studio spaces in New York. I found one I thought I liked. I show up and what's going on? People are talking in the hallway. The audio quality wasn't great. There was a buzzing sound in one of the interviews they recorded for me. So once again, my comedic quest for quiet continues. As I mentioned in the intro, some people just don't it's hard to work from home. You're commuting from your bed to the couch. Ha ha ha. I've been joking that, you know, once the pandemic hit, everybody learned entrepreneurs sweatpants secrets like many of us do not leave our sweatpants in any given day or ideally a week. So what do we do about this? In episode 163 of the Pivot podcast, I did share 25 of my favorite tips for working from home. So Omar, you may have gotten that far back in the archives already. Some of those I hope you will find helpful for just creating separation and streamlining what you're doing when having some rituals around different spaces in the house and times of day. But sometimes no amount of rituals is going to cut it. And I can relate to this so much beyond optimizing within my space and within my home. Even going so far as to write different types of meetings that I would have on foam door hangers so Michael would know whether he could interrupt me or not or knock on the door or not. I have found two main strategies for mixing things up. One is a little pricier and it's not going to be for everyone. And then the other one has really blown my mind recently. So let me start with the more short term ad hoc method. Pick one day a week and one type of work where you can just leave the house. This might be stating the obvious. You can go to a coffee shop. My latest work hack is paying $29 for a day pass to a WeWork near my house. Or I go to a different location somewhere else in the city just to really mix things up. Take the subway, listen to a podcast during my self imposed commute, end up in another neighborhood, enjoy the sights, the people, the coffee shops, but eventually end up in this WeWork. And WeWork is offering this now. I think it's one of their more impressive pivots of this pandemic and also of all of the chaos that ensued after the founders stepped down and oh, what a crazy, wild story. I've read a lot of the WeWork lore and books about the company's history, but needless to say, at least where I'm at, they're offering $29 a day drop in. They have water, they have coffee, hot coffee, they have sinks, kitchens. It's not the most quiet place that you could possibly find. It's not necessarily equipped for recording a podcast. But unlike a coffee shop, nobody's going to kick you out. You're not going to feel guilty. You really can stay there all day and for $29, even if you don't work for yourself. So I think if you work for yourself, you just go, okay, I'm going to be so much more productive that the ROI is immediate and obvious. If you work for someone else, I don't see why you cannot ask them and say, listen, can you give me a little extra budget for $29 a day, four days a month? So just one day a week or three times a month. And I know that I can be much more productive if I can mix things up a little bit. Because not everyone is going to have an office where you can return to. I know a lot of companies are now doing a mixed setup where you can go in three days, pick which three. But if you are someone that you're in a position and you need to do a little creative problem solving on your own, this is one of my favorites. I had no clue if it was going to work for me or not. So I just. I've been doing a bunch of pilots, honestly, in the last year, and the day that I did my $29 wework drop in, I was so happy. I. I got so much done. It was amazing how much I was able to focus by switching things up, being in a different place. Sure, having hot coffee on drip all day long did not hurt anything. Not having distractions like the dog and the doorbell interruptions, oh my goodness, it was amazing. It was a game changer. Now, I am not somebody that would want to pay a monthly membership for a coworking space. That never made sense to me because I do like working from home enough that I never wanted to go to an office every day. I mean, that involves getting dressed every single day. That's like beyond my quota. It's beyond my capacity, especially now. But I think it would. You would be so surprised at how mixing things up, even one day a week and even carving out interesting or more strategic projects for those days, I think you'd get A lot of mileage out of that would be really refreshing. And it doesn't have to be this all or nothing solution.

My second strategy is a little more involved and it does take a little more budget. There are two episodes I've recorded, one for pivot, episode 250 called Staycation in the City, and one was for free time, episode 18, Workcation in the City. I encourage you to listen to those. I'll put them in the show notes because I'm not going to give the full debrief of those two strategies. They're two slightly different things. And part of it is that, yes, I was able to take advantage of nobody traveling during the pandemic, so hotel prices were way down. But both involve staying in another place than home. So let's call it W a F H Working away from home, Staying away from home. So the staycation is, oh my goodness, you're totally fried. You're losing your mind. Yes. When I say you, I mean me. And I go stay in a hotel for one, two or three nights even in the same city. And I know I live in a city like New York City, so I can. It is true that my commute could be 45 minutes just downtown and it feels like I'm staying in a different city, even though it's technically the same. Maybe not all of you live in a city where there are compelling options to do this, but I have friends where even if you can go stay with a friend in another city who lives an hour or two drive away and they're the type of friend that is not going to talk your ear off, they could actually give you some quiet, some so you can rest and recharge. So I consider a staycation. It's. It's not a big commotion. Maybe you don't even need to take more than a day off work, but if you could take at least one day and give yourself a three day weekend, these can be very recharging. And there's not necessarily an expectation that you're working on anything. Its close cousin is the workation in the city. One of my pilots for finding deep, focused, sustained productivity when I really need it. And recharging as my super introvert self, I just need these bursts of quiet that I get by doing these two strategies. A workation in the city is where you pick something really juicy that you're going to work on. And yes, you do pay for a hotel. In my case, I do pay for a hotel. Even a nice one, even a big, nice room in a nice hotel. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not staying at the Ritz, but I am looking for a good deal. Sometimes I use the app HotelTonight because they give you good last minute rates and the way that I to myself kind of justify the cost. Maybe this is all a story I'm telling myself is to prioritize a big project that if I were to make some significant progress on it would be worth the investment and then some. And then some. For example, if I am working on a program that when it launches, would launch for 10 or $20,000, okay, I can cover a few nights hotel if I am able to make a tremendous amount of progress that I might not have otherwise been able to make in that in depth way. At home. I wrote a huge chunk of the free time book proposal doing one of these workations. I've done so many of them and every single time I find them to be deeply recharging. The quiet time is really invigorating and it's also really informative and inspiring. I'm able to get quiet enough to hear and make big decisions. One staycation I did, I tried to batch record a bunch of podcasts. That was going to be how I make up for the cost. And then sure enough there was construction in the room next door. So, you know, again, the quest that I'm on continues. But I've tried all kinds of things and I think that's the thing that I would leave you with, Omar, is, you know, you've identified this point of friction as I talked about in episode 270. The friction point is, ugh, I'm getting really exhausted working from home. Whether you're exhausted, bored, overwhelmed, interrupted, whatever piece of this is causing the friction, try to understand what ingredients are most compelling to you, what would energize you, and then just design some experiments. You might not get it right away. Like I've been doing all kinds of these experiments up and down the island of Manhattan. I've done podcast Studios, I've done WeWorks, I've done coffee shops, I've done hotels, I've done it all. And I still work from home most days of the week. But I have learned strategies now for getting out of the house when I need to and how much I can get done. And sometimes just one day every other week is really energizing. I'm also a member here in New York City of Soho House. So that's one where you're not allowed to talk on the phone. You can't even really be on meetings you have to go into the stairwell or into the hallway. So that's kind of nice to be in a space where, yes, people are talking, but you really can't be on meetings or on Zoom or on the computer. So for those days, I line up computer work, thinking, reading, decision making, and sometimes even meeting with other people in person when that's on my schedule. So these are all the experiments that I've tried. I encourage you, Omar, to just try a few small experiments and design something that is going to work for you, that isn't all or nothing, that. And that isn't reliant on somebody else, whether it's a boss giving you permission of how you're going to work or a partner or a spouse. Like, for example, I just, I don't want to be a tyrant around the house of telling Michael he has to be quiet 247 and don't ever interrupt me. And you know, I'm podcasting at all hours, all days a week. That's not going to be fair to him because he's here too. But I do podcasts on Wednesdays and I do tell him on those days when recording's about to start, I need it to be quiet. You can't be on the phone, no deliveries, don't flush the toilet. You know, I do also need to design the space collaboratively in a way that is not overwhelming for him. In my case, those podcast days are only once a week, but that creates some time and space and quiet within the working from home setup. So I hope this wasn't too much of a rambler. I hope it was helpful, Omar. And I just really want to say that you're not alone in feeling how you're feeling. I think we've all been juggling so much, and although working from home has many, many benefits that I do enjoy, it also does require some creative strategies and backup plans for those days where you really just gotta get out of the house. Let me know if you've tried anything interesting. I want to hear from you, Omar, or any other listeners. What did I miss? What are some of your strategies for shaking things up? Thank you so much for being here listening, everybody. And remember, you too can submit a question@pivotmethod.com ask. That's pivotmethod.com ask. I'll put all the links to every episode that I mentioned in the show notes. You can always check those out@pivotmethod.com podcast and don't forget to pre order the new book if you want to check it out. There's a whole chapter on what's your job today. Head on over to itsfreetime.com book. Remember, if you pre order, you will get early, instant, almost instant access to the audiobook as soon as someone on my team can give it to you. And you can gift early audiobook access to a friend as well as get all the new tools and templates in the Free Time toolkit. So again, go grab your copy now and submit your proof of purchase@itsfreetime.com book. Thank you so much everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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 PivotList, 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.

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

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