Imagine working at the distance of a phone call, a text message or a videoconference, without having to waste endless time commuting, dealing with daily difficult traffic, reducing travel costs in your family budget, and being able to better manage the needs of family accompaniment with your children or your parents.
You will have the freedom to choose your own hours and even work on a terrace, on the beach, in the countryside, or any other place you prefer, as long as you are reachable at a certain time of the day and do what you have to do. This scenario not only allows you to act with greater freedom but also to become more independent to manage your professional and personal activities and, above all, to gain a different quality of life.
Would you accept this invitation to gain greater freedom in organising your time, self-determination in your decisions and autonomy in carrying out your activities?
This lifestyle desired by many can become a real nightmare without personal discipline, concentration on goals, adequate means of work and without creating mechanisms for communication and social relationships. What are the main challenges?
- Organise and focus on goals;
- Creating the conditions for better work;
- Take care of your health;
- Caring for your relationships.
Working from home – What are the main challenges?
1. Get organised
Seneca, lawyer and counsellor to one of the Roman emperors, one of the richest men of his time, said with the simplicity that wise men usually have “if you do not have a direction, no wind will be favourable to you”.
If you don’t have a goal, you can do many things, but easily your attention will drift to other matters.
Countless people live without having clear goals and priorities. To gain the pleasure of completion,
set goals oneself even if they are the goals of others,
identify tasks to be done, focus and set a start and finish time.
As I write this article, I’ve just accomplished a goal – to work uninterrupted for an hour and a half – and get my main goal almost accomplished. It has helped me to have turned on the radio (other days I prefer to have just music), to have inventoried a list of tasks for today and scheduled others, and to have recorded the start of my work.
And since I’ve been working consecutively for an hour now, I will now stop and get up to stretch my legs, walk to the next finish line, socialise over lunch with former colleagues, rather than spend hours on social media. In the meantime, I have recorded what I did so that, at another time, I can analyse and consider the relevance of my activities.
2. Create conditions to work and live better
When I took my break I looked at my phone and I had several unanswered messages. I inwardly congratulated myself that I had already turned off message notifications, social media and that I had put my phone on silent. Had I not done so, I certainly wouldn’t have made as much progress as I did.
Right now, I have a desk set up with everything I need whenever I have to work from home. I’ve remodelled the space to have natural light and the environment that inspires me most, with a beautiful view of the street and the flowers I have on the balcony. Even if you are not receptive to the environment it matters that your workspace is functional and has the necessary equipment and means of communication.
Creating conditions to work better requires you to treat rest as an important measure as taking care of your health. And, one of the measures to rest is to engage in activities and be in environments that are not related to your usual activity. Only in this case your emotional and mental recovery will be greater.
3. Care for your relationships
Working from home can be very rewarding, but also very lonely. Even though you may not have much affinity with your colleagues and you don’t depend much on others to do your work, having people around you is different from being alone for several hours. For those who are very sociable, this can be particularly distressing. Even if you are the “bush animal” type and for you it is a real blessing not to be surrounded by many people, factors with the greatest negative impact on health are loneliness, social isolation and the absence of meaningful relationships with other people. Some people will need daily contact with other people with whom they have affinity to be well, while for others a more sporadic contact will suffice.
Whatever their situation,
promote and create conditions to socialise with others, share experiences, knowledge or just have fun. We have a social nature, so we need to be with others to feel better. The opposite is the exception not the rule.
4. Take care of your health
Pode ser muito desgastante em termos mentais e emocionais trabalhar remotamente. Como prevenção precisa de assegurar uma rotina de atividade física que substitua e compense a ausência de deslocações habituais para o local de trabalho. Pode criar hábitos para andar mais, por exemplo, deixa de andar de elevador e utiliza as escadas, estacionar mais longe ou utilizar uma estação de transportes públicos mais distante para assim andar um pouco mais. É uma questão de ver o que resulta melhor consigo.
Para além do exercício físico
it is essential to find a style of eating that is healthy, varied and gives you the nutrients you need for more energy.
These are some of the aspects that interfere with the benefits that working from home can bring. But, for that you need not leave them to chance. After all, as Aristotle, one of the Greek philosophers to whom the foundations of Western thought are attributed, said: “health and happiness are incompatible with idleness”.
