Some of my most productive days since I started WFH were when I took a 30 minutes nap in the afternoon. Taking a nap, a shower, then sitting down with a light snack to finish doing a thing is legit optimal.
OMG, yes!
Sitting groggy and sleepy at your desk in the afternoon kills productivity immensely.
Taking afternoon naps was very common during the Medieval ages. But the industrial workload changed that.
Asian countries like Taiwan or Japan still do this
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a few days a week, I’ll get up and climb sixteen flights of stairs after lunch. really gets the afternoon energy flowing for an investment of about eight minutes
I’m way too fat for that but a bike ride is within my means on a nice day like today. Takes me 10 minutes to get the energy rolling. However sometimes the nap is more effective, especially on days when we have 3 hours of meeting before noon.
I’ve been taking brisk long walks at work everyday. Helps me be way more productive than I ever was in the office. WFH is amazing.
That’s completely out of line. Why is he wearing pants?
they’re just that tired
15 minutes of just sitting in the calm quiet is proven to reduce stress hormones in the body by helping regulate the hypothalamic-pituatary-adrenal (HPA) pathway. 15 minutes of quiet every day can work wonders on your mental and physical health. Deactivating the HPA pathway reduces the stress hormones in your system, which reduces every bodily systems stress reaction. This can help your mood, obviously. Anxiety, depression, irritability, all responses to stress. It can also help with autoimmune issues, though. Stress hormones cause your immune system to go into overdrive because your body is expecting to have to deal with a wound as a potential source of infection. Lowering those stress hormones has been demonstrated to help with autoimmune disorders like lupus, fibromyalgia, psoriasis and others. It’s said that we operate in two modes: fight or flight, or rest and digest. When you’re stressed, your body moves resources away from your digestive system. It’s basically saying “We dont have time to digest food right now, we gotta run away from this bear”. If you’re stressed all the time, you’re always running your digestive system inefficiently. So regulating the HPA pathway has been correlated with improvements in shit like Crohn’s, colitis, IBS and other digestive issues. Constant stress boosts your heart rate, constricts your blood vessels and increases your blood pressure, so regulating the HPA pathway can lead to decreases in the risk of cardiovascular diseases.
Thing about sitting quietly in a calm space is that a lot of us, myself included, will fill that space with thoughts that just cause more stress. Luckily for us anxious folk, meditation exists and is quite literally the culmination of millennia of smart, dedicated people trying to solve this exact problem. There are tons of resources online where you can learn how, many of them are free. They’ll teach you how to detach from stressful thoughts and situations, how to stop agonizing over what’s already done and being terrified of what could happen and just acknowledge what’s going on right now. Try it. If I’m totally wrong and you hate it you’re only out 15 minutes.
Tldr - stress hormones make your whole body go into emergency mode. Emergency mode is good during emergencies, but not good all the time. Bringing your body out of emergency mode when there’s not actually an emergency helps pretty much every part of you be healthier. You can bring your body out of emergency mode with 15 minutes of sitting quietly in a calm space. Meditation can help you establish that calm space.
Thank you for this.
Is it the quiet that does or the time to meditate? I have found in my own experience I can calm down and rest with music that is aggressive and chaotic. I think for me I find it very soothing to find the structure in the chaos.
I can’t really answer that one other than to lean on my personal experience, which is that sitting and quieting my mind is what works for helping me maintain balance, and I get a different but equally joyous feeling from listening to the most violently aggressive and chaotic music I can find. What I can tell you is that you may be accessing a sort of concentration meditation. There are many techniques, some involve trying to empty the mind and let thoughts flow through like leaves floating on a river, some involve checking in with all the individual parts of your body one at a time, concentration meditation involves hyperfocusing on one thing to the exclusion of all others. I think that might be the space you’re in. If you’re curious to find more, Buddhist Geeks has a wiki with a great set of tutorials on focus meditation.
I’ve been on edge almost all the time when I’m at work. I feel like it’s mostly my mindset though, and most of the time things happen to be not as bad as I imagined.
Now I can’t work unless I’m listening to music.
When I can’t sit in the quiet it’s because my brain is circling around something uncomfortable. I wouldn’t dare to presume to tell you that’s what you’re doing, or what to do about it. It could be something as simple as “I’ve got something I want to talk about with my partner”, it could be something foundational to who i am as a person and I’m gonna have to acknowledge it and work on it.
Things like this are why meditation is important. Few if any of us are able to sit comfortably in the quiet in a way that will benefit our minds and bodies. It’s natural to be looking to the past or the future, and doing so has its place. We learn from the past, and we plan for the future. What meditation will teach you is how to delineate between looking at the past and future and obsessing over the past and future past the point where it serves you. It teaches you how to, in the words of Ram Dass, Be Here Now.
Not that different with companies with power nap rooms in their office.
You may joke but this is real.
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You know, for awhile tech companies were encouraging this on site. Google had nap pods in the office.
They saw the benefits for a short time. But now that commerical real estate values are tanking…
Even still, they weren’t doing that out of a genuine concern for employee wellbeing. They read the studies that said perks like nap pods and catered lunches meant people spent more time at the office without complaining. It was just a way to manipulate workers into more overtime.
And Google’s shtick was basically “you never need to go home”. Laundry? Pets? Nap? Food? Do it all here at work!
That’s why my company makes sure we are on conformance calls at least 6 hours per day. Actually being able to complete something would be glorious. Being able to design my day in a way that works for me sounds like some kind of fever dream.
I left a job of eight years for a WFH job. I lasted 15 months and they worked my ass off. 11 and 12 hour days for weeks on end and still unable to keep up. I left and took a 49% pay cut. I’m selling shit on ebay to pay the bills and no longer WFH, but I’m back to 40 hours a week.
Are you literally selling shit? Or what kind of shit are you selling?
Sounds like OP has a shit buyer here
20+ years in IT and I’ve never been closer to leaving the industry. It’s either a good old boys club or a cesspool of dysfunction. Sometimes both.
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I feel like there could be a middleground found here 😂
I sure as hell tried. Management ultimately failed several of us.
If management are demanding that you do work beyond the agreed upon hours that’s a management problem you’d have exactly the same issue if you’re in the office.
If you want to work from home, don’t let this experience dishearten you most of the time it isn’t like that.
Thanks for the sound advice. I’d like to try WFH again if I’m able.
Arguably if you are working beyond your stated contract hours in the first place I wouldn’t call that a management problem I would call that a worker problem, you should not be working more than what your contracted hours are that’s just letting them abuse you and will lead to massive burnout
I don’t know where you’ve worked, but everywhere I’ve worked since retail the guy who doesn’t put in extra hours is the next guy who won’t be around much longer. I have both been, and not been that guy. It doesn’t seem to matter how it should be, it always eventually turns into more overtime for everyone. I have never had a job since retail where my employer hasn’t tried to manipulate us into giving them overtime.
at my work place they strongly discurage working overtime
I do this mentally at the office
"How DARE my employees use WFH to take the edge off the negative aspects of being at work! I’m canceling WFH! They make me so mad I need to… have a tumbler of bourbon… from the fully stocked bar… that I keep prominently displayed in my office… for ‘client meetings’… next to my office chaise lounge.
sips
I feel like the last hard worker left. Tsk tsk tsk."
“People who work from home are taking naps in the middle of the day! They have to get back into the office where we have nap pods!”
I solemnly swear to be less productive in person out of spite.
And I never even had WFH.
Not out of spite, but the 2 ish days a week I go to office I’ve been clear I’ll focus on socializing because it’s harder to focus to work in the noise of office
Socializing can be very important for your job, depending on the job. Possibly more important than your actual “work”.
True, but that’s not the case for me (at least contractually)
I am at the best 60% as productive at my office so forcing me to go in is more their problem than mine.
this is the real reason they want everyone back in the office. You might realize being 40% more productive for the same pay is a shit deal and go elsewhere.
Well, forcing someone against their will to come into the office will push people even more to find an other job.
Especially the good ones, who can find a job anywhere.
I’m also done taking responsibility for time lost due to issues with my commute.
It’s not my fault the bus was late. It’s not my fault there was traffic. And it’s certainly not my fault that I have a commute in the first place. I’m leaving at 4pm no matter what.
Now that’s commitment. Fuck ya
My company is forcing WFW after several years of WFH and we have had an incredibly low compliance rate, like 5%.
The hilarious thing is that the CEO, the one guy responsible for the push, works from friggin home. Lately they’ve been trying to crack down because he thought he’d go in for some rare office face time with us peons and was shocked to show up at an office full of empty desks.
Oh, the number of times my introverted mind has become exhausted after a meeting, and instead of taking a 30 minute nap and play time with doggo followed by a 4 hour focused work session, I’m borderline catatonic with a headache for the next 2 hours until it’s time to head home.
Actually that’s often the most productive thing you can do. If your mind is fuzzy and you try to work through it you will continue to have low productivity for the rest of the day, but if you take a 30 minute nap to refresh your mind then you’ll have higher productivity for the whole rest of the day.
As much as the term
work hard, play hardis abused there is truth in it. An incredibly important part of being productive is making sure your mental and physical needs are met. Whether its through naps, exercise, or some other activityWork hard, sleep hard
Always be hard. 😉
If you hard, then you hard
It’s true, and much of the enlightened world does it. American businesses, on the other hand, largely measure productivity by how sufficiently drained/beat up their employees appear at the end of the day.
I mentioned to my current supervisor once that I was going to the gym after work, to which their reply was “I guess you didn’t work hard enough today then, haha.” my mistake for momentarily forgetting a lesson I knew: the owners and their doting lackeys are the the opposite of friends, if it’s not work related, it should be a lie(same as they do to you constantly) or silence. At least in the US.
Just like when you’re in the presence of an American cop, when at work, anything you say can and will be used against you, so be as fake and stepford as possible.
It’s true, and much of the enlightened world does it.
Ain’t it the truth. I’m an American who does software development for a French company and it’s amazing. 10/10. Best job I’ve ever had.
If those project managers could read they’d be very upset.
I’m a manager and I confirm that I am not upset, I endorse taking a rest when you’re tired, and I took sleeping breaks myself from time to time. I’m working from the office at my current position though :(
Sometimes a 30 minute nap accidentally turns into a 4 hr nap, which I believe will improve your productivity for the rest of the week 😂
Happens to me every single time. I stopped taking naps because I wake up all groggy and then it takes an hour to become fully conscious again. It’s just not fun anymore
Short naps are the key. Not long enough for rem to start otherwise you wake up groggy.
One thing I do when I’ve got a big task is to take a break and do some chores. I’ll think on it in the background while I’m focused on folding laundry or whatever, and then grab a cup of coffee and get to work with a fresh brain and at least some idea of where to start.
(I don’t like naps but I imagine the principle is the same.)
It took some practice for me to get comfortable putting something I’m working on down instead of hammering it out that evening, and just picking it up in the morning.
99% of the time, what would have been an hour long slog filled with distractions and snacking becomes a 10 minute, low-effort task after a good night’s sleep.
CEOS HATE THIS PRODUCTIVITY TRICK!!! /s
did wfh today. it was slow, I didnt do much. mostly emails. had a pretty decent lunch. watched some youtube videos on forestry mulching (using skidsteers/bulldozers - those things are craaaazy).
probably the same thing tomorrow.
As long as he pushes out that report on time I don’t see anything wrong here, moving on.
That’s the crazy madness of this. Some of these jobs out there require so little actual work that in office work is just to torment the workers. If love to have one of those jobs though
also who doesn’t automate their reporting? New reports should be made once, with dynamic date filters (e.g. “31 days ago to 1 day ago”) and then just refresh for data.
