Working from home, without a home office and without the perfect chair
What this isn’t
First, let me tell you what this article is not.
This is not “9 Ways to Easily Transition to Working from Home” and this is not “23 Essential Tips…”. Further, this is not “How 5 Highly Successful People Transition from Work to Home.” The latter, a real article about real “notables” who insist (or who insisted when interviewed, in a pre-Covid-19 context) on separating their work lives from their home lives — and also, importantly, who are/were privileged to be able to separate their work lives from their homes lives — aaaalmost made me retitle this current write, “How One Person Who Sometimes Gets a Lot Done and Often Gets Nothing Done But Mostly Meets Her Deadlines Transitions from Work to Home.”
What this is
Now, let me tell you what this article is — or at the very least, what I mean for it to be. I mean for it to be, foremost, a response to an artist who is also an advanced student currently enrolled at Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) and who wrote to me the following yesterday:
I’ll be upfront and say that because I don’t have access to my studio or campus and I’m restricted to working from home, I’ll have difficulties; I have a deep set divide between work and home spaces in my head, and because of this, I’m experiencing a mental block that’s making working from home difficult… but I know I’m not the only one experiencing this, and I’m trying to adapt (personal correspondence).
In addition to the above-mentioned student, I am picturing as I type, an audience for this article that is composed of my current and other college students and then of other professionals who may or may not have sometimes worked from home in the past and/yet/but who are, nevertheless and unexpectedly, now doing ALL of their work from home in this Coronavirus-inspired, quarantine-defined moment.
More specifically, the audience I imagine for this write includes individuals who are unlikely to have dedicated home offices. And even if they do, those offices are unlikely to look like the all white, or all white and black and grey and light filled, minimalist and highly organized home offices that come up when one runs a Google image search for “home office” in the present. The offices of my readers, if they exist, are unlikely to include a desk that becomes a standing desk, for example, and they are unlikely to include flourishing plants in hard to water places, and they are unlikely to include the kind of adjustable lighting that Philips lighting corp swears maximizes employees’ (and by extension our own) productivity: white or green for creativity, orange for energy, etc., etc., cringe, cringe, how did we even become this species?!
Many of those for whom I write share their homes, in their entireties, with roommates and/or family, and those roommates and/or family are sometimes loud. As I type this, my partner is singing blues covers at top volume from our “shared” office, preparing to livestream a performance later this evening, while my roommate and I work (RM’s composing a screenplay, I’m composing this) on Chromebooks in the living room.
Actually, wait one second.
To show rather than tell you that I am not positioning myself to claim that context matters less than you think it does when working from home while secretly typing away in some utopic home-office mashup, I offer you the following image of what I see from where I now sit:
My own problem with working from home is that I would rather play boardgames or watch boardgame reviewers on YouTube than focus, or I really need to check the news again even though I just checked it, or (you should know that) I am exceptionally talented at making works of fiction relevant to what I am currently thinking/teaching/researching, and thus I am exceptionally talented at saying to myself in a totally convincing, she-never-stood-a-chance sort of way: “let me take today and tomorrow to get through that new novel, which I can totally work into my current project so it’ll be worth it, and then I swear I will go back to the project itself.”
Maybe these are your problems? Or maybe the child-shaped joy(s) of your life is/are home from school, sharing your imperfect (non-)office, and so now you’re balancing work-work with all the domestic labor you so painstakingly outsourced, outsourcing upon which you’ve come to rely in order to get more than parenting done.
“I think I’m not succeeding at this,” a friend messaged me today:
I’m out of patience. Obviously I’ve tried to do a thousand things to distract [child]…; but it’s really complicated, because he’s so “young” at two years. It isn’t so easy as getting him cooking or giving him instructions to do something [he can go off and do on his own]… (personal correspondence, cdmx)
How does one maintain one’s former productivity, the kind achieved in collaboration with a day care, when suddenly, day cares are closed and there’s a two year old loose in the work-play-living-space? Rhetorical.
Additionally, the audience I imagine for this write is either uninterested in buying or unable to buy a 1600 USD office chair that purports to be the end point of “the evolution of the ergonomic evolution.”
I can tell you that I’ve witnessed academics chat for days or weeks about the best ergonomic chairs and then heavily invest in these chairs. I can also tell you that the author of my second favorite book on writing (after Steven King’s On Writing which is my first favorite) wrote that he typed his first book in a bathroom on a metal folding chair and initially, a particle-board folding table (this was Paul Silvia, in the book How to Write a Lot). What Silvia argues, and what I have always found useful to keep in mind as I fight to stay focused while working from home (which I do All. The. Time.) is the following: “The best kind of self-control is to avoid [or eliminate] situations that require self-control” (2010 [2008]: 22).
Some things that help me, personally, to stay focused and also, I think, to stay sane while working from wherever I reside, however temporary that residence may be
Qualifier: I’ve worked, full time, from cousins’ apartments and friends’ condos and hostels in Chicago and Mexico City (both) and a 100+ degree concrete, government subsidized apartment in southern Oaxaca and while housesitting for someone I met in that same town in southern Oaxaca and from a bedbug infested apartment I accidentally rented for one month when I went to visit my sister who was studying abroad in Spain, and from my friend’s mom’s boyfriend’s house in small-town, western France, and, and, and…
What follows is some unsolicited advice which, as with all of my espousing, you can choose to take or leave. I’ve typed it out just in case it proves to be useful to someone somewhere some day. Things that help me (emphasis on me) do real work from home include:
- I use a Pomodoro app (I hated the app the first three times I tried it; now I need it for those days when I have to focus for long hours). I use Clockwork Tomato for Android. But there are tons of other options, too.
- If I am not “doing pomodoros,” as they say, I leave my cellphone off or in another room for multiple hours at a time.
- When I was writing my dissertation, I was an anti-focusing disaster (I couldn’t focus). To resolve this, I used two Internet-blocking apps on my then-Mac: 1) Freedom, and also 2) Anti-Social. (I don’t need these now, but I definitely did then. Also key: trials of both apps are free, so you can decide if these are useful or not for you at zero cost and/or you can choose to use them for the length of the trial period and no longer.)
- I migrate throughout my apartment. Often I work sitting on the floor, using my couch as a desk, in the mornings, because… I think I like the lighting(?), and I like sitting on the floor. Later, I usually work at our dinner table, where the hard bench keeps me awake precisely when I start to wonder if I should take a nap. Right now, I am sitting on an old, neon green and red, wood + padded vinyl chair in a room that my roommates and I use as an office, but also as a production/recording studio and a “gym” and a guest room and a storage room and a stage now that my musician partner is livestreaming performances instead of playing shows in bars/fests. My other roommate, who writes and directs and films and acts, has his own patterns of migration through the apartment we share… (Other people, of course, insist on having dedicated work spaces, something as simple as one folding table in one particular corner, so again: you are going to have to figure out what feels best to you.)
- I often wear headphones without anything playing, because this keeps my roommates (who I love/adore) from talking to me.
- I cannot multitask, so I don’t try to multitask. Instead, I find I get much more done, and I even get freetime, by focusing on one thing at a time. (My sister, in contrast and who is an undergrad at the University of Minnesota, insists she needs BOTH Netflix on in the background (for the lighting and ambience, she says) AND music playing through her noise-cancelling headphones WHILE she studies/writes → yet again: find what works for you, and don’t worry if it isn’t what works for someone else).
- I take naps. Even when I don’t have time. Because I know my tired brain works better and faster when it is less tired, making up (in the long run) for the 30 minutes to an hour (okay, sometimes two and even three hours) that I just invested in sleeping in the middle of the day.
And lastly, my favorite
- I have a writing totem, something that sits in front of me wherever I work and which reminds me I am in my working space. I would not have thought to tell you this except yesterday I was in a conversation with a former student from SAIC, and when I asked them what they would tell now-students to help make this transition to work from home, they said — just after “I make my bed everyday now because it makes me feel better looking at it” — the following:
I remember this author once, I can’t remember who it was, who gave each of her students a miniature figurine, or a stone or something — it was something little that could fit in a pocket — and she told them, this is your writing totem. You can take it wherever you go, and when you need to write [or work], set it somewhere in front of you. This way you are telling yourself this is my space for focusing, and for doing what I need to do (approximate quotation, T Hack, personal correspondence, Chicago).
A writing totem? Really?
My own writing totem I had never considered as a totem, but after listening to T Hack yesterday, I decided that is precisely what I have: I have this tiny little St. Juditas statue that I keep out wherever I work.
San Juditas is the patron saint of work (in the US they say “of hope” but in Mexico, it is work not hope that pays for things and thus for which one prays) and also of lost causes. And while I am not Catholic, a man in a huge market of magical and religious things here in Mexico City once gifted him to me, at a time when I was the poorest I have ever been. The man, a vendor in a shop filled with saints statues in many sizes, told me the little guy would certainly help me to get out of my slump, and this remains one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.
Now, thinking about how many people on the planet pray to this little man for work, and resolution to whatever counts as a lost cause, makes me smile and feel like I am a part of something, even if my own belief system is not theirs — and then it (the figurine? the memory? I don’t know which) makes me focus on my work, and also value that work, in the present. All to say: maybe find something in your apartment/home/residence that you can use as a totem — which really just means, find something that inspires you to work, something little you can put into your workspace to remind you that’s where you are when you see it.
And okay, that’s a lot for now. Definitely enough. Remember that all I am doing is describing for you some things that work for me. Most importantly: making this transition to working from home is NOT about spending money on things. It’s not about the perfect chair or a dedicated office space (picture Paul Silvia writing his first book in a bathroom). Making this transition is, instead, about figuring out how to trick/talk yourself into focusing on particular things in spaces where, perhaps, you do not generally need to focus on those things. Some people need patterns and schedules. Others cannot do patterns and schedules (I count myself among these latter individuals). Etc., etc. Which means: you are going to have to experiment. You are going to have to figure out what works and doesn’t work for you. And you are going to have to be kind to yourself, forgiving even, as you do so. After all, we are all learning, at the same time, how to live in a pandemic.
Final note (to my students)
As I wrote to you two weeks ago, “please do not allow this course to cause you extra anxiety or stress in this moment. It’s a course. It exists to educate, to allow for us to converse and learn from one another when we have the headspace for doing so. When we do not have that headspace, we’ll figure out together what else a ‘course’ can be and do.”
