5 Steps to Stay Healthy While Working Long Hours from Home
The big variable that changed with the pandemic is that I don’t have to travel for my consulting engagements. I’m working entirely remotely for the foreseeable future. Still, working from home has brought some additional challenges, namely coworkers with a newfound sense of, “His office is at home so I can ping him whenever I want!” When speaking to classmates working various post-MBA jobs, a running theme I hear is working from home has led to a decrease in time management, particularly when meetings are run, because there no longer is a possibility that people in the meeting actually need to be somewhere. With that in mind, I’ve come up with 5 steps that helped me stay relatively physically and mentally healthy through the engagement.
Stay Squared Away
Nobody likes having to actually commute to work. At the same time, having to physically move oneself from home to the workplace forced structure into the lives of people that would not have had it otherwise. In my case, as the cultural norm both within my firm and on the client side is to have cameras off on conference calls, it became all too easy to roll out of bed without even getting dressed or doing any self-grooming, open my laptop, and hop onto my first call of the day.
For that reason, I discovered how critical it is to have a morning routine that keeps yourself squared away. In my case, my morning routine includes heading to the gym for a workout, which then forces me to take a shower and change when I get home, grab a nutritious breakfast, and making my bed.
It may seem more convenient to simply roll out of bed and go through your whole workday in your pjs. As somebody with an inclination to the sloppy, I totally get it. That said, I discovered working unshaven while wearing the same clothes I wore to bed the previous night with an unmade bed behind me (my home office shares a room with my bed) actually really messes with my brain with added stress. Knowing that I’m more presentable (even if nobody can see me) and that I have a presentable bed waiting for me at night makes getting through the work day far easier psychologically.
Avoid Indulging in Unhealthy Habits
When you barely have time to eat food, buying it instead of making it at home becomes much more tempting.
More than the fact that I love to cook and I love the taste of my own food, I know that I also eat far healthier as soon as I cook for myself. I did indulge in Wendy’s when my apartment ran out of lunch food one week, but I know my own psychology enough to know that when I’m at Wendy’s, when confronted with a choice between fries and a salad, I will pick the fries.
For that reason, I recommend either meal prepping or having some recipes that you know you can make quickly on standby.
My omusoba is a classic quick and delicious meal I can make even when pressed for time.
And while you’re at it with homemaking your food as much as possible, make sure to opt for healthy beverages. It’s tempting to pour yourself a glass of wine during a particularly painful call, but avoid alcohol and sugary beverages. I really enjoy Coke Zero.
Even before the pandemic, a large amount of adulthood obesity in the United States is the result of Americans consuming sugary beverages while getting little-to-no physical activity.
3. Engage in Physical Activity
To the best of your ability, ensure there is a time that you can protect to make it to the gym and get in a workout, ideally a few times a week.
For me this was relatively easy because my team operates on West Coast time while I live in Jersey City. That means my days don’t typically start until 10 in the morning. For that reason, I’m able to drive over to the gym in Hoboken at 7:30, get in a workout (masked-up and socially distant per the gym’s rules) consisting of about 40 minutes of weight training plus another 25 of cardio, come home, and get myself squared away in time for my first meeting.
To actually plan my workout, I have a subscription to Fitbod, an app that dynamically generates a workout based on your goals and your present ability. I love having an app like this because simply following a prescribed routine will inevitably result in plateauing, be it in your goals to get stronger or to lose weight.
Having a consistent workout, in addition to helping me stay physically healthy, also helps remind me that I am more than my job.
4. Have a Life Outside of Work
This is particularly challenging as there is a global pandemic, so most of us are stuck at home, which happens to also be the workplace for most of us. There were times I wrapped up my last call at midnight, went to sleep, woke up just in time for my first call of the morning, and got back to work for another 13-hour day.
At the same time, I’ve met many people who had absolutely nothing going on in their lives outside of work even before the pandemic. Because they have so little going on, they would get extremely emotional over trivial things like how their sports teams are doing or an event they saw on televised news the previous night that most likely has absolutely nothing to do with them; thank you 24-hour outrage cycle. To put it bluntly, these are the absolute most boring people I’ve ever met.
It’s easy to find myself binging television, scrolling through the news, or scrolling through my phone for hours in my free time. When I saw the number of hours I spend staring at a screen even when I’m not at work, I knew I needed to find a new hobby. I’ve resolved to get back into home brewing having brewed my own beer for the first time this past spring. In addition to that, I do my best to schedule something social with friends who live in the New York City/Jersey City cluster every week.
My homemade Belgian golden ale from this spring!
The one thing just about everyone will agree is good for you is reading some good books. I got my start in Japanese literature recently and I read Mieko Kawakami’s Ms Ice Sandwich in one sitting last night.
Especially when we get back to life beyond the pandemic, the worst thing you can do is simply settle. This can be both in terms of your growth (“I have a job so I don’t need to learn new things”) and your social circle (“I locked down a spouse and I’m surrounded by all my friends from school so I don’t need to meet new people”). Settling is a euphemism for stagnating. My life had stagnated before back when I was working as an engineer, and that stagnation was precisely what prompted me to go back to school for my MBA and make a career change.
Of course, in order to ensure you have a life outside of work, you have to set boundaries.
5. Set Boundaries
Setting boundaries deserves an entire post unto itself. Because we now live in our workplace, it’s easy to feel pressured into being “on call” 24/7.
In order to set your boundaries, you have to know where you can draw them. And the way you can do that is by asking! I was taking a Japanese class until recently, and one time I had a call running into my class session. I asked my team leader if it was ok for me to drop from the call, take the class, and come back to the call when the class was over, and my team leader was fine with it.
There was one time during the engagement in which (thanks to a major communication mishap) I had to work over the weekend to get a deliverable out for the following Monday, but otherwise I made a rule that, unless I had a major deliverable going out that night, I close my work laptop after my last call on Friday evenings, and I don’t check my email over the weekends. And, of course, nothing bad happened as a result of my not checking my email over the weekends.
Of course ensuring I have a healthy life while working from home is still a work-in-progress for me like it is for many other people. Personally, I’m hoping I don’t have a chance to perfect it because I’m itching to go back to a physical workplace the first chance I get.