By Ed Eschler, Consultant
Among freelance writers and artists there’s a truism that makes its rounds: when you set your own hours, every day is Saturday—but you work Saturdays. With COVID-19 getting us all to social distance and shelter in place, a lot of graduate students very suddenly find ourselves working in unstructured environments. This can create a situation where we have more “free time” but are getting less done.
What we’ve done here is compiled a list of tips often shared among freelance and other “from home” workers that helps them be productive when working from the same location as their children, pets, televisions, and beds. While not exhaustive, they can help you make sure the quarantine doesn’t become a dead spot in your progress towards completing your program.
Set Up an “Office” to Work From
If you have space in your home to have an actual, dedicated office, that’s great. Those quotation marks in the header are for those of us living in studio/single room apartments: designate a space somewhere in your home as a work-only space. It can be a desk, one end of your kitchen table, or failing or a specific chair you only sit in when working. If you don’t live alone, let people know that this is your office, and when you’re there, you’re working.
Now, of course, this means that you should only do work-related tasks in your designated space. No social media, no web surfing, no chit chatting. I’m not saying you can’t do those things (and those of you with partners or children know that it would be a dealbreaker to sit in stony silence all day), but “leave the office” to do them. Stand up, walk to the other side of the room, or, if you can, do non-work activities on a different device/computer than your work computer. Make sure your work space is a work space.
Do a Pseudo-Commute
Part of what helps us separate our work life from our home life is the ritual of getting ready and actually going to work.
When we work at home, it’s tempting to just sit down in whatever we’re wearing and get to it, but doing so can cause work and our other activities to blend together, and when that happen work time tends to slowly disappear (or, less common but probably worse, work consumes all of your time at home). Keep work and non-work distinct by creating a going-to-work ritual: change into work clothes, maybe take a walk around the block, and—not pointing any fingers—shower and groom as if you were going to work with other people.
Of course, you are still working from home, so you set the dress code and likely only need to be presentable when teleconferencing. Work clothes may simply mean designated daytime pajamas, and I think we’ve all noticed some scraggly quarantine beards popping up on social media and in our Zoom meetings. Much like establishing an office is about creating physical space to work, doing your pseudo-commute is about creating mental space; the specifics of what that looks like are up to you.
Schedule Breaks and Be Available to Family/Roommates
Much like setting up a distinct space and a pre-work ritual, scheduling specific work times can be a great help to keep work distinct and to make sure you’re getting something done. When scheduling, don’t forget that you need to schedule breaks as well: short 5 to 20 minute breaks every couple of hours can help with productivity. You can also use them as self-rewards for completing a small part of a larger task: say, 5 minutes for every page completed.
At the same time, it is important to remember that you are not actually a telecommuter. A global emergency is forcing you to work at home. It is okay to schedule yourself much longer breaks, or to take unscheduled breaks, for mental health reasons. The people you live with are also probably under a lot of stress too: as crazy as it is to hear sometimes, you and the people in your lives are more important than work deadlines. Don’t use the pandemic as an excuse to not work at all, that can be unhealthy in its own right, but be kind and supportive to yourself and those you live with, which sometimes means being less productive and more available.
Make a Small Daily Goal and Hit It Every Day
If you write a page a day, you can finish a thesis or dissertation chapter in a month. You can write a book a year. This isn’t some crazy fantasy: every field has one or two scholars who have more books on their CV than everyone else has articles, and this is almost certainly how they do it, writing a small amount every single day. Most of them are just as busy as everyone else, if not busier, but they make and keep this small daily commitment.
You don’t need to write a quarantine book, nor do you need to be at your most productive away from your lab or running statistical models through a remote desktop connection. But even if you write just a paragraph a day, you will have something to show when the world settles down and things get back to normal.
Conclusion
This is a very unique time, but the challenges it presents are not totally unique. Although the circumstances and rationale were different, there are many people who have chosen to work in the conditions we have found thrust upon us, and they have been able to have satisfying and productive careers. By following their advice, we can make sure that we both are productive and have time to connect to friends and loved ones during this time of physical distance.