Focus.

As I’m writing this, we’re at almost 8 months working-from-home and counting.

I’m not good at it.

Yes, growth mindset and all that- I don’t think I’m doomed, but I do think very few aspects of working from home fit my personal inclinations. For me, it’s been a long series of trying to trick myself in various ways into summoning something vaguely resembling the focus I had in the office, which was already not very robust. I’m a chronic procrastinator who is perfectly content to be not-doing-anything-in-particular, stays up too late, sleeps in too much, and loses track of time too easily. But I also take pride in doing whatever I do well, so constantly falling short of my own expectations is also really draining.

I could turn this into a “20 productivity tips that kinda sorta worked for me” post, but I think reflecting on why this may be the case is more interesting. I’m sure there are countless factors for why I work and focus the way I do, but here are a few I’ve thought about:

Structure (time, part i)

It’s probably not uncommon to benefit from some amount of structure, but it is interesting to consider the different types of structure. Specifically, I’ve come to the conclusion that structured time means very little to me. It’s a blobby squishy thing that I always feel is more flexible than it is. That being said, as a whole I don’t tend to be late to things either- but I would argue that’s usually because of some external pressure, not the inherent structure of time. When I’m setting a schedule just for myself or just for the sake of having one, it’s very rare that it’s effective for me. So the loss here has been in losing the structure of my routine- normally, I have to be in the office by a certain time, so I have to catch either this train or that one, so I have to be awake at latest by this time. Without any of that, and only having times I set for myself, I struggle to follow a set structure, especially getting started every day with my morning brain. (Side note, I’ve wondered if car commuting would be similarly poor for me, because it gives me too much flexibility + adds variability in my commute.)

Multitasking

Thinking of multitasking as a magical do-all skill seems less common than it used to be. People have accepted that for most people in most scenarios, multitasking is not effective. I think I’m exceptionally poor at it, especially because one of my strengths is jumping from one connection to the next within a topic, diving deeper into rabbit holes. If you’re asking me to hold on to multiple threads, I can’t explore each one as much as I normally would. Also, I would categorize myself as someone that has high inertia- so both activation energy and context switching are pretty expensive for me, which has certainly increased now that I have to coordinate a lot more logistics of working from home than I did when working from an office.

Screen On Time

Pretty self explanatory. I deeply love and appreciate the ability of technology to bring people together and maintain important connections, but at this level, too many of my relationships feel parasocial; lacking physical human presence is weak at generating genuine connection. If anything I feel a wider gap between in person interactions vs virtual interactions than I did previously. Meetings have actually been beneficial in that they’ve provided some much needed structure (I know I have to show up to them and show up on time), but I usually end them feeling tired, tense and noticing I have an exaggerated smile. Increased screen on time has meant increased time that I feel I have to be “on” as well.

Novelty (time, part ii)

I don’t consider myself an adventurous person or someone who is always looking for a new shiny thing. But I’ve definitely wished for something to break the monotony, something to look forward to. I’ve lost any frames of reference I had for the passage of time- we’re squarely in the fall and I could wake up and feel like it’s spring. (The constant temperate weather in the Bay doesn’t help either). None of the things I associate with summer or was looking forward to this year happened. I can’t look back on my camera roll and relive memories- all I have are screenshots of the news, memes, and occasional selfies that try to hide as much of my messy room as possible.

Resource Management (time, part iii)

I read something recently that presented the idea of “energy management” instead of “time management”, which resonated with me for reasons mentioned a couple of paragraphs up- I can’t manage time when I stretch minutes to hours and tend not to notice when it’s already gone.

Energy management isn’t terribly concrete either, but at least it’s clear how it happens- some things drain you, some refuel you. Even figuring out how to make that work in these times has almost been draining in and of itself. For one, some amount of my mental resources are always locked up by anxieties and worries about everything happening in the world- this happens to some extent normally, but not to the same degree and usually with more control over “unlocking” those parts of my brain. So relatively speaking, both draining and refueling things cost more, which makes the return on investment for usually refueling activities pretty poor. Not to mention the library of refueling activities is very physically limited (rightfully so, to be clear).

You would think this year would be a fantastic time to read even more than I did last year. The truth is I usually haven’t found myself with enough activation energy to read nearly as much, especially without the structures I used to use for reading like my commute. Honestly I don’t love to admit it, but I think in total I’ve probably thrown a lot of my available resources at my job- it’s the place that has the most external pressures/dependencies, and there’s always more to do.