If working from home tips you over the edge of sanity, you’re not alone.
Not so long ago, working from home (or telecommuting from your favourite coffee shop) topped many employees’ wish lists. Who didn’t relish the thought of ditching their grinding commute in favour of a gentler ease into the working day, sans public transport, endless face-to-face meetings, and tight deadlines?
And then the world changed.
Now, according to a recent Servcorp LinkedIn poll, around 26% of 230 respondents preferred to only work from home while 18% stated they’d prefer to work in the office. A huge 57% said they’d like a combination of both.
It turns out, working from home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Perhaps one of the pandemic's greatest ironies is the realisation that too much of a good thing can be downright bad for you, despite what Mae West famously said. She’d obviously never juggled a Zoom client presentation and a rambunctious toddler who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
Now, as the weeks stretch into months, the monotony of WFH is palpable. On the plus side, we’re beginning to genuinely appreciate the positives of separating where we conduct our work and leisure. But now, more than ever, we need a manual that explains just how to work from home effectively and delivers foolproof remote working tips.
Working from home is, well, hard work. We might blissfully avoid the peak hour crush, but those endless meetings and tight deadlines remain, made even more complicated by the remoteness of our colleagues and the close proximity of all our nearest and dearest all of the time.
Suddenly cabin fever has become all too real for many of us and it’s seriously hampering our ability to do great work.
When 2020 began, few would have thought that, within a mere matter of months, we’d feel a strong kindred sense with those living more than 100 years ago.
Not just with the generation who weathered the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, though there’s undoubtedly increased media interest in how our grandparents and great-grandparents soldiered through the last worldwide pandemic, which cruelly hit in the final months of the Great War’s carnage.
1918 was also the first time the phrase ‘cabin fever’ passed into popular culture, courtesy of a novel of the same name by B.M Bower, now largely forgotten. Here’s an excerpt:
“There is a certain malady of the mind induced by too much of one thing. Just as the body fed too long upon meat becomes a prey to that horrid disease called scurvy, so the mind fed too long upon monotony succumbs to the insidious mental ailment which the West calls ‘cabin fever.’”
The parallels with our new WFH reality are unmistakable. And, perhaps it does make perfect sense that the phrase’s rising popularity coincided with the Spanish Flu epidemic as families retreated into their homes to avoid a virus that infected 500 million people worldwide.
‘Cabin fever’ originally described the experienced extreme loneliness and isolation experienced by sailors and ship’s passengers trapped in their cabins during foul weather. It also conveyed the malaise felt by early pioneers during long winters in the world’s most remote locations.
The negative symptoms of being confined to a small space for days on end, wrote Bower, included sleepiness or sleeplessness, irritability or intolerance, exasperation or low motivation.
And doesn’t this description of cabin fever perfectly describe how many of us feel about the struggle to work from home effectively while we’re cooped up, fed up, and cut off from the world?
The problem is, if you don’t find the right working from home tips to reign in your cabin fever, it can lead to feeling seriously off-balance. In some individuals, the long-term effects of this very 2020 condition can cause rage, confusion, or even classic PTSD symptoms after weeks of strict lockdown (which, as an aside, was coined in the 70s to describe extended state-enforced isolation in prisons or psych wards).
The mental health effects of this pandemic are very real. Don’t let the loneliness of lockdown get under your skin—try our remote working tips to boost your productivity and get you back on an even keel.
Clearly, the simplest way to combat cabin fever is to get out of the cabin. But when that’s not possible, these 5 remote working tips can alleviate the stress and anxiety of quarantine and help you do your best work, every day, regardless of what’s happening beyond your door.
Consider Virtual Office or Coworking to add some balance to your working week. These Servcorp solutions will provide you with daily workspace access should you need a more collaborative workspace with powerful and reliable IT.
There you have it, the more effective and productive you are, the more time you spend with family, playing with the dog, video calls with your friends or binging TV shows. Make the most of your day and stay positive. There will be an end to this pandemic, now let’s invest in ourselves and make the most of our time working from home.
Has your office considered a virtual office set up to telework as a team? Working from home could become the new normal for your team during this time. Virtual office services are a smart and cost-effective solution for managing a business' administrative requirements. Let us worry about the details while your team get on with the business of expanding your company without expensive overhead costs.
