#WFH
The biggest change the Covid pandemic has brought to the lives of many working people has been the need to work from home.
Working from home, or #WFH as it is often referred to on social media, is something that millions of people were thrown into through necessity. Yet, 22 months after first being told to set up a work desk in our own homes, lots of us are still doing it and look like doing it well into the future.
Most employers had never contemplated their staff members working anywhere else but in the office, so home working policies and guidance simply didn’t exist and hadn’t been required. It was little wonder that staff were told they would have to work from home and to just get on with it to the best of their abilities.
By the time Covid appeared on the scene and the instruction to work from home was sounded in March 2020, I had already been a home worker for over 14 years, so the biggest change it made in my life was suddenly having my partner at home through the day and working in a different room.
Combining my own experiences of working from home and drawing on Fiona’s experience of becoming a Covid-enforced home worker, I thought I would write this article to share some of our tips and tricks for not just surviving, but thriving whilst working from home.
First of all, working from home has considerable advantages and disadvantages when you compare it to working in a traditional workplace.
Let’s look at some of the advantages. No longer having to commute means a saving on time and expense in terms of fuel and/or public transport costs. That time and money can be put to other, more enjoyable uses, which I will come onto in a couple of minutes.
Turning to look at some of the disadvantages, working from home can be lonely, and missing the buzz of being with colleagues can be a source of anguish for many.
Some issues can work in either direction, depending on how you manage your time, and whether you maintain a degree of self-discipline. Take one example; being at home during the daytime in summer is great because you can hang your washing out on the line at lunchtime and it’s dry by the time you finish work, but if you’re not careful, activities like that can become distractions and too many distractions lead to your work being compromised because you’re constantly popping out of the room to do odd jobs and household tasks.
Also, the state of your home and scale of your journey to work can have a big impact on whether or not home working is better or worse for you. If you have a reasonable-sized house that is 30 miles from your workplace, then a switch to home working is probably going to be a welcome improvement for you, whereas for someone living in a small flat, a five-minute walk from their office, is far more likely to have a preference for working in the office.
As for the technology involved in working from home, it’s almost as if the virus waited until we had Zoom and Teams before raising its ugly, spiky head. Imagine if this had happened in 2005 when we all had Nokia 3310 phones with no internet access. Let’s not even think about how we would have coped back in those days. After all, that’s a hypothetical question. It didn’t happen then; it’s happening now, in the 2020s. We are where we are.
The real point of this article, and the link to my book, Find Time for Exercise, is to discuss the levels of exercise that people have been taking since they switched from working in their traditional workplace to working from home.
Throughout that summer of 2020, there were news items on TV, radio and newspapers of people exercising in their back gardens, running marathons by completing several thousand laps of their lawns and Captain Sir Tom walking up and down his garden path; but the hidden side of that story was that there was actually a decrease in the activity levels amongst the population. While back lawn marathons were newsworthy, sitting indoors watching endless TV with worsening mental health was not so attractive a story, so it didn’t get reported quite as often.
A big part of the problem, in my opinion, was that we were suddenly confronted with the need to stay at home and work from home. There simply wasn’t time, let alone any planning, for such an eventuality.
Given that many people are still working from home, and likely to continue working from home, here are my thoughts on turning one of the advantages of home working into an opportunity to increase daily activity levels.
Unless you live really close to your workplace, the saving in commuting time is likely to have provided you with a couple of truly valuable benefits, more time and more money. OK, some of that money may go into having to heat your home in winter, but I want to concentrate on the time aspect.
If you manage that time well and think in terms of using that time for your physical and mental well-being, then you can really amplify the main positive aspect of working from home.
Here are my four tips for working from home:
1. Commute
That’s right, commute. Although you are now working from home, and therefore not HAVING to commute, my suggestion is to go through your morning routine (shower, dress, breakfast, check social media) then commute to work by going outside, leaving the house, walking for six minutes, turning round and walking six minutes back to your work. Then at the end of the day, reverse the process, leave work, walk for twelve minutes and arrive back at home. That should be sufficient to walk about two kilometres a day and make a mental shift between home and work. Do that for a five-day-week and you will have walked ten kilometres. You will also have gained 120 minutes of exercise and be well on your way towards the minimum recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week.
If the weather outside is revolting and you feel like missing out on one of your walks then have an indoor alternative. For example, walk up and down the stairs 10 times instead of going outdoors, and if you don’t have stairs then use your imagination and come up with an equivalent exercise.
2. Lunchtime
Get outdoors at lunchtime. Take another walk if you can and add a few more minutes of exercise to your weekly tally, but even if you don’t walk far, just get outside and beyond the door for a bit of fresh air.
3. Stretch
Take regular breaks from your work to stretch, especially if your work is predominantly desk-based. It’s up to you how you fit some stretching into your day, but a good way to do it is to schedule a five-minute session into your morning and afternoon. Pick a couple of time windows when you will do this, for example between 10.30 and 11.00 in the morning, then 3.00 and 3.30 in the afternoon.
In terms of choosing some exercises to do, a great source of advice can be found in these two videos from the British Heart Foundation:
Strength and flexibility exercises
4. Challenge
Finally, set yourself a physical exercise challenge. It doesn’t need to be anything over the top, just a simple target that will give you an extra push and provide you with a level of motivation to keep working towards your goal.
I discuss setting exercise challenges at some length in my book, but just to give a few quick examples here, I think the key is to set yourself a challenge that has a number attached to it. So, a good one would be to aim to walk, run or cycle at least a set number of kilometres or miles each week or month, or maybe for a set number of minutes. If you challenge yourself to, let’s say, walk fifteen miles every week, then you are likely to push yourself to get outdoors more often than you did in the past, and to sometimes turn a one-mile walk into a two-mile walk.
Some people set themselves an ongoing challenge like walking at least a mile every day, while others set a target for the year, like walking at least 500 miles in the year, then set themselves a different target for the next year. Other people like to set a different target every month, because that is their way of mixing things up and maintaining their interest. It’s entirely up to you how you do this.
The rules of your challenge are also entirely up to you, you can use your imagination to come up with something unique or take something off the shelf like the Step Count Challenge. You can also look at what others are doing and adopt or adapt their challenges. My own personal challenge is to actively travel at least five kilometres every single day. Another physical activity challenge that recently made the news was Michael Shanks who ran every street in Glasgow. Michael is a fit runner who is capable of running long distances, but I mention his challenge because it highlights his use of imagination to come up with a challenge that was right for him.
Whatever you do, have fun with your challenge and do everything you can to ensure you enjoy getting out there and working towards your goal.
Summary
The main aim of these four suggestions is to give the exercise aspect of your working from home an element of structure and to encourage you to do more than you have been doing since the start of the pandemic, and also, more than you were doing before the pandemic.
In offering this advice, I don’t want you to compare yourself to other people or try to do more than some other person. You are your own benchmark. Aim to do more than you have done in the past. After all, it is better to aim to walk an extra two or three kilometres per week and succeed, than aim to run an extra 50 kilometres a month, but fail and end up back where you started after the first month.
I’ve made four suggestions above and I hope you manage to build all four into your daily routine, but even if you only succeed in two or three of them, you should still achieve the main objective of taking more exercise than you were doing in the past.
The key to working from home is to open your front door