How To Work From Home Together During Coronavirus Quarantine

Hey, there we are. Vanessa and Zander Marin. We're a married couple, and we've been together since 2007. And our mission is to equip you with the tools that you need to have an extraordinary relationship inside of the bedroom and out.

So because of the coronavirus crisis, your relationship is probably under more stress than ever before. So we're here to help your relationship and home life not just survive, but thrive during these challenging times.

In this video, we are going to be giving our top five tips for working from home together without wanting to kill each other. Very important, because, let's face it, this crisis is putting a lot of couples in positions that they have never been in before. So you are going to walk away from this video with five simple, practical steps to support your partner, nurture your relationship, and help you create the boundaries that you need to thrive in a work from home situation. So just to quickly introduce ourselves, I am a licensed psychotherapist specializing in sex and relationship therapy. And I've spent the last 15 years working with thousands of couples. I've also been a featured expert for magazines and websites like the New York Times, oh, the Oprah Magazine, Real simple, and many more.

And I'm just a regular guy. I used to work in the corporate world, but when I saw how much of an impact Vanessa was having with her business, I decided to join her so that we could reach even more people. But being married to a sex therapist, I've actually picked up some really good insight into what does and doesn't make relationships work. And I really just love sharing stories from our own life that can help all of you take your relationships from ordinary to extraordinary.

So with millions of people now under mandatory quarantine all across the globe, a lot of us are finding ourselves working from home. And for many of us, this is for the first time ever. And this can pose a lot of challenges. If you've never done it before, maybe your small apartment is starting to feel extra small. Maybe you have a toddler or elementary school child who's requiring your attention during the workday. Maybe you guys keep having zoom meetings at the exact same time and struggling to figure out how to make this work. Now, the good news is that Xander and I have been working from home together on the same business nonetheless since 2015. So we have figured out a pretty good system for making it work. And we have some great tips for you. You, even if this is your very first time working from home together.

Yeah. So that's what this video is all about. We're Going to give you a specific plan for staying sane and productive and bringing as much normalcy back into the workday as possible. So let's start talking about our top five tips from working from home together.

So tip number one is to make a schedule. So one of my favorite productivity hacks is to spend five minutes at the end of my workday planning out the next day day. So I take a look at what's on my plate, and I actually write out a specific schedule of when I'm going to accomplish those tasks. So doing this the night before, it just keeps me organized and focused and I can really hit the ground running the next day instead of spending all this time in the morning thinking about, oh, my gosh, what do I have to do and what's my plan here? So we also do this check in together. So every morning we check in about what's on our plates for the day, we share our calendars with each other, and we talk about how we're going to make it work. So you may find that kind of check in really helpful, too. Even though you're probably working for different companies, since you're sharing a small space, it just can be really valuable to know what's on your partner's plate when they have important meetings and they can't be bothered how you guys need to divide up the day.

Yeah. So depending on your needs, you also might find it better to create your schedules and check in the night before. That gives you the opportunity to talk about your responsibilities for the next day and then come up with a game plan together. So, for example, your partner might have an important conference call at 10am so you could offer to watch the kids for the morning so they can prepare. The important thing is making sure everything's on the calendar so that each of you can see it and neither of you forgets about stuff.

Yeah. I think it's fair to say right now that if something is not on the calendar, it is just not going to happen. There's so much chaos that we're all dealing with right now that having that really detailed, specific calendar is essential. All right, tip number two is to set up individual workspaces. It does not matter how small your apartment or your home is. You have to carve out separate designated working nooks for yourselves. So you might have to get a little creative here, depending on what you're working with. But you have to have those separate spaces. The further away you can get from each other, the better. You just do not want to feel like you're on top of each other all day long. Because you're going to drive each other nuts. If there's a way for you to close at least one door between the two of you, that would be amazing.

As long as the other person isn't stuck in the bathroom.

Yes. Don't trap someone in the bathroom. That's not a great workspace. If you do have to be in the same room, a great tip that you can use is to try just facing separate directions. If you are having to look at each other all day long, it's just gonna drive you crazy. So even if it's just turning slightly away from each other so you have a little bit of distance.

Yeah. So the third tip is minimize conversation during the day. So when you're first working from home together, it's super tempting to walk into each other's spaces, strike up a conversation. And it's totally understandable because that's what you're naturally used to doing when you're together at home. But if you do this during the workday when you're both working from home, you're just going to end up talking to each other all day long.

And we could get a little bit better at this tip, actually.

And like, yeah, let's acknowledge it. That can be fun at first, but after a while, it gets old really quickly, especially when you have deadlines and projects and things are creeping up. So instead, try to maintain as much distance from each other during the workday as possible. It can help to just pretend that you are actually physically in separate offices and you don't even have the opportunity to talk. So one way that you can do that is make an agreement that, say, for example, during the workday, you're only going to communicate via text.

Yeah, that can be a really great one to create some distance there. Okay, tip number four. Do not monitor each other's time. So this was a really hard lesson for us to learn, and it was made more complicated by the fact that we work together on the same business. So the reality is that everyone kind of moves through their day in different ways. So what would happen is I would catch Xander sometimes taking these long, very leisurely lunch breaks, and I would find myself getting really judgmental and annoyed that he was wasting all of this time. But then he would see me clock out early for the day, and he would start to feel a little bit resentful that I was just checking out, and here he was burning the midnight oil. So the reality is that we are all productive in different ways, and we all have to take breaks in different ways. So you might start and end your workday earlier than your partner. Your partner might take fewer breaks throughout the day than you do. You might have different responsibilities that are on your plate and taking up different amounts of time. So it's just really important for us to not be constantly monitoring what each other is doing and judging how productive or not productive they're being.

Yeah. So just try to give each other the benefit of the doubt and not monitor. Don't judge your comings and goings or you're doing this or not doing this. And of course, all of this is way easier if you keep to your separate spaces and you minimize conversations. So all of these kind of go together.

Yeah.

All right, so tip five is create rituals for the beginning and the end of the day. So previously, when you're working outside of your home, you probably had some sort of commute to the office. This commute serves as a really nice transition time. We transition from being at home together in the morning and then to being in work mode. And at the end of the day, we transition back from work mode back to couples mode. But when you're both working from home, you don't naturally get that transition time anymore. So this can make it way harder to start work in the morning in an effective and productive way. And it can can mean that all of that stress that builds up during the day because you don't feel like you're getting stuff done or whatever, it can bleed over into your relationship time at the end of the day.

Yeah. I don't think many of us even realize just how powerful that commute time can be, that opportunity to just get in the zone, get ready for the workday, and then at the end of the day, just sort of let go of the stress and transition into that home time. So we really highly recommend that you create some sort of transition rituals for the beginning and the end of the day and do them separately from each other. So there could be a ton of different things that you do. It used to just be driving or taking public transportation, but now maybe you want to journal, stretch, walk around the block. That can be really nice. Blast your favorite song, close out all your work tabs. You know, whatever you want, whatever's going to feel good for you. So just take a few minutes during that time to think to yourself, okay, I'm going from relationship mode into work mode. Or, okay, now I'm going from work mode into relationship mode.

So that wraps up our top five tips for working from home during the current coronavirus crisis. If you like this video, please give it a like or better yet, leave us a comment below. Let us know which tip resonated with you the most and how are you going to put it into use. And if you want to keep getting free resources like this, just subscribe to our channel.

And we also have a gift for you so you can click the link in the description box to download our free guide. The simple daily check in that every every couple needs to be doing right now. This check in just takes a couple of minutes, but it can have a massive impact on the well being of your relationship. We've been doing it every single day and really loving it and can't wait for you to try it out as well.

See you next time.

Bye.