The Recovering Perfectionist
The Recovering Perfectionist
Work from home TRAPS (do not do these things if you WFH)
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Hello, gorgeous recovering perfectionist. I'm Claire Riley, and you're listening to episode number 75 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. Today I'm going to touch on five things you should not do if you are working from home. You can grab the show notes and all the links from clairy.co forward slash pod forward slash 75 if you'd like to check those out. And other than that, let's get started. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Alrighty, so this is your daily reminder. We all need these daily reminders. There's many, many things that we probably shouldn't let ourselves do or shouldn't do so much of or shouldn't let other people do to us when we're working from home, and it is absolutely a constant battle, constant challenge we need to consider. But I wanted to just go through a couple of things. Some of them are logistics, some of them are strategy, things that I would just urge you to be aware of if you are working from home and traps that we don't want to fall into. The first one is I'm gonna say it really lighthearted, but it happens, it happens more often than you care to admit. The first one is don't wear your wireless headphones to the bathroom during a meeting, whether it's a webinar or a group call or anything like that. Take them off. You won't miss anything if you do need to run to the loot or just put it on speaker and turn off your video and all of that sort of thing. At the very least, make sure that you are 100 million percent sure that you've muted yourself if you are going to take yourself for a wander while you're in the middle of a meeting or a webinar or anything like that. Number two, let's move on to something a little bit more sensible and hopefully more helpful as well. Um, don't stay seated for more than 45 minutes at a time. We all know all of the things around movement and even standing uh while we work and the benefits of not sitting down for so long. So if you have a device where you can set a timer or a little alarm or a little vibration every 45 minutes at least to get up and do something very physically different. I'm a massive fan of the Pomodoro style technique where you work for 25 minutes and have a five-minute break. 25 minutes works absolute wonders for me. Any shorter I get a bit frustrated, any longer and I tend to lose my concentration span at about the 40-minute mark anyway. Um, but try and get up and physically do something, even if it's just for 30 seconds to stretch yourself, stretch your legs, stretch your hips, your knees, your shoulders, your neck, your eyes, all of that sort of thing. The productivity, the difference in productivity and the longevity that you can actually continue to work for a day goes through the roof when you actually look after your body and do all the things, including staying hydrated, but moving around is a massive thing. The next one is to be aware of and have some really strong boundaries around letting your family, friends, other people who live in your home, neighbours, the delivery guy not distract you if you don't want to be distracted. When we're working in an office environment, like uh when you're in corporate or wherever you might have worked in the past, people had to be a bit more specific or a bit more thoughtful and considerate about what they might interrupt you at work for because there was your boss over looking over your shoulder, or it just wasn't the dumb thing, you know, to call you at work. When we are working from home, we are really accessible to these people, and it can be really difficult to break that habit or break the cycle when people just want to keep coming and talking to you about things or knocking on your door or having a coffee or you know, all of that sort of thing. So having some structures around your time and your space when you're working. Um, something that I really love to do, for example, with my kids, if I have to be working, is I have a little um, like we'll talk about it beforehand, obviously, but I'll have a little prompt. So I might have one of their toys, and if the toy is sitting here next to me, it means don't talk to me. If the toy is sitting on my lap or if I've taken the toy away, then you can come and talk to me, that sort of thing. So you might figure out a few things like that. I also I live in a an in a complex and I often put a sign on my door when I'm doing live training or a webinar or something like that that says please don't knock, I'm recording, or please don't knock, I'm delivering training, or something like that. Um, and it just gives me peace of mind that I'm not going to get interrupted and it also helps to set some boundaries. So if people come to my door and they can see that I'm sitting here talking to my laptop with my earphones in or anything, they know just don't bother knocking, I will you know come find you later or whatever. So have some really strong boundaries of how you're going to work in your home when there are other people around as well. The next one is don't get lost in the scroll. I'm all for taking breaks and I'm all for doing things that are a bit fun, but too often we jump onto Facebook to answer a message, for example, which might be business related, or we jump on to do our posting in groups in the morning, or we go to put some content on social media, and half an hour passes, and we haven't done the thing that we went in to go and do on social media, but we have spent a lot of time scrolling and looking at reels. Anyone else guilty of that? Because I certainly am. Um, how I try and break this habit cycle, mindless scrolling, is that I have a list of things that I'm going to do in my break time. So if it's personal stuff, I write it down. I've mentioned before the Pomodoro sessions where you work for 25 minutes and then you have a five-minute break. I actually write a list of what I want to do in my five-minute breaks. Some of them are personal, like home things around home. Sometimes I want to call a friend, sometimes that's just my five-minute break to lie on the couch and scroll through Instagram. But I've set a timer and I get back into it once the timer goes. So be really specific about how you're going to use those things and have some circuit breakers so that you're not accidentally sitting there scrolling through Instagram for two hours when you only went on there to do one post for your business. And the last thing to not do when you are working from home, working for yourself, is forgetting to pause, especially for celebration. We, especially as recovering perfectionists, tend to have these massive lists of all the things that we want to do. And as we work through them, we get in the habit of what's the next task, do the next task, tick the next task off, what's the next task, do the next task, tick it off, go into the next one, rather than stopping to celebrate. So if you think back to when you've had a great job, a great team, a great boss in the past, you often have someone to check in with at the end of the day or at the end of every task sometimes, with your wins and with things that have been completed or checked off, you get a pat on the back, you get some feedback, you get the yay, that's awesome, we're all done, let's move on to the next thing. When we work for ourselves, we tend to just be like, oh, it's okay, it's done, move on to the next one. And there's no space for celebrating that we've had that we've um finished something, let alone just taking a moment to reflect on how we did and would we do anything differently next time, and so on and so forth. So whether that means getting a biz bestie or someone who is in your um household to celebrate with and just talk through what you've achieved that day or that work session or just that task can make a really massive difference. Um, if you do things like uh yearly planning, yearly planning or yearly planner sessions and that sort of thing, it's a great idea to have somewhere that you might store all of your big wins, but also some of your little wins, right? So when you come to do your reflection on the previous year, you can only usually remember the last month or two of what you've achieved. You might not remember things that you achieved back in January or February. So have a space where you can jot down some of the wins that you've had. Maybe you've updated your website, maybe you have let go of a product, maybe you've updated an automation, something like that. So all of those things can be really, really valuable to your business, but we kind of just do them and then move on to the next task without really celebrating our wins. So have some sort of mechanism in your business where you can stop for celebration and reflection before you just move on to the next task because it just starts feeling a bit boring. Hope that's been helpful. Love to know if you have any other tips for working from home effectively. And until next time, I will see you on the next episode. Bye.