Staying sane and productive during the quarantine

Photo by Ravi Pinisetti on Unsplash

I've been working remotely for sometime now and the initial few months (4--5), was a period of insanity.

What I forgot was that in an office, there are many people around you...who you see working and that motivates you to work. When you are working from home there is no one, your achievements and failures all turn private and there is no attention that you can seek. This is a double edged sword, on one hand you have peace, but you are incapable of using that peace to be productive. So, after multiple days, weeks and months getting wasted I got my act together by some light weight tools to help me stay accountable.

⏰ Fixing a schedule for sleeping and waking up.

Seems trivial, but once you establish a sleeping and waking up pattern, a lot of the rest of the things I am about to discuss will get easier to plan. Initially, it is ok to have some erratic behaviour...I was aiming at sleeping by 10pm and waking up by 5am, which used to get shifted by an hour or two. So, I started taking note of when I woke up everyday and that was really helpful.

⌛ Shrink your time frame

This is the real thing for maintaining a good productive day, when you are at home there is a lot of time to think and the mind wanders and starts thinking about next week, month and year...maybe years and that creates anxiety and if you are overwhelmed with things which they are right now then you can do this:

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgFJvBbEiLk

Shrink your time frame to a manageable place i.e., stop worrying about the next week...try to focus on getting by the next week if that is too much then the next day and if that is too much the next hour. I personally prefer to use the hour reference, because once I can do a lot of hours you are good for the day and once you have multiple good days you have a great week.

📝 Maintaining the productive hours

Once you have shrunk your time frame, you want to keep track of how many hours you have done a good job in a day to know how productive you are. I use this app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.tsukanov.counter. Pressing a + after an hour feels good.

📖 Reading a book

Reading a book before going to sleep or between work is helpful in calming down.

Stay safe.✌️