Episode 166: How to Work Better from Home - a conversation with Laura Vanderkam
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…as many of us go back into lockdown…we need to get used to working from home. But it’s not easy.
“It was hard to figure out how psychologically do you feel productive for the day when you haven’t gone anywhere? How do you know the day is over? Is it sometimes hard to get in work mode or out of work mode, which is more of a problem for many people.”
How to work better from home, coming up on The Broad Experience.
Depending on where you live you may well be experiencing an echo of what we all went through earlier this year – being in lockdown, and working from home. It’s definitely part of what’s happening to women’s careers right now.
And while some people have enjoyed this break from their regular workplace, and ditching the commute, we don’t all fall into that category. Throw in the stresses of caring for children and monitoring their home schooling, and working from home looks a lot different than it did pre-pandemic.
Laura Vanderkam is a work-from-home veteran. You’ve heard her on the show before and probably a lot of other places as well. She’s an author and podcaster, she writes a lot about time use and productivity, and I last spoke to her in 2015 for a show about how women can better manage their time.
A few months ago she came out with a new book, inspired by the pandemic. It’s called The New Corner Office – How the Most Successful People Work From Home.
“I recognized in March a lot of people were trying to work in a totally new way and they were looking for content about how to do it well. And to me I’ve been working from home for 18 years, it didn’t seem like rocket science to me, but then I thought back to what my first year was like of working from home and I realized I was kind of a mess – it was hard to figure out how psychologically do you feel productive for the day when you haven’t gone anywhere? How do you know the day is over?”
How do you avoid re-arranging the kitchen cabinets or falling down internet rabbit holes instead of working?
So those are a couple of my problems as another fairly long-time worker-from-home. In fact it’s why in pre-Covid times I used to rent a shared workspace or use the local library as my office. Being away from home helped keep me focused on work. But for many of us, those aren’t options any more. At least for now.
And I don’t even have kids. Laura has five. Her eldest is 13, her youngest is 10 months old. She has a nanny, as you might expect. But childcare has been a huge problem for so many people during the pandemic.
AM-T: “Before we get into some of the nitty gritty of the book I want to acknowledge that some people even now probably don’t have access to daycare, they are still lacking the supports they had up to mid-March, depending where in the country or where in the world they live. So, ugh…it’s so hard to get work done when you also have children underfoot particularly really little children who need your attention and want your attention all the time, I mean how do you deal with that?”
“Yeah, it is incredibly challenging, thinking back I’ve talked to many people who’ve wanted to work from home for years, I mean this is not a new interest of mine. People say, ‘oh I’d like to work from home, maybe I can save money on childcare.’ No, no, no, if you’re working from home, you’re still working, which means you can’t be the adult in charge of your young children during the hours you intend to work. Now of course people lost their childcare situations or realized school isn’t childcare, right, so you’re now stuck with doing the custodial care of your kids…I would say there’s a couple of things to recognize here. That fundamental thing has not changed, right, it’s pretty much impossible to work if you are caring for young kids, so you have to come up with some situation that can work. So if you have a partner who is also working from home, the best option tends to be to split the week.”
She has a piece on her blog about this, I’ll link you to it in the show notes. The idea is that each partner works for a set number of totally focused hours each week…while the other partner takes care of the kids. Then they switch.
“But to do that requires two people to totally be in it together, and say we are gonna stick to this schedule and when I am on with the kids I’m not just keeping them safe, I’m keeping them out of your office and away from you. And that’s the job, both parties have to do that. Where it becomes a problem is when couples don’t necessarily have that discussion and have that basic agreement on making sure that each party is covering for the other. You don’t have to do it with a partner, you can do it with sibling, a cousin who has kids of similar age, you can do the same schedule, a neighbor. I would also recommend that people try to hire childcare, someone who you trust to come into your home for certain number of hours per week who has similar philosophies to you on how much social distancing is going on. Because long term it doesn’t work. It is pretty much impossible to care for a two-year-old and work. You’ll be pulled in multiple directions all the time. You’re gonna get so much more done in two hours of focused work and two hours of caring for your kid versus 4 hours of going back and forth. That’s making people feel fragmented and distracted and unhappy, and so I am saying to people I know it’s challenging, I know there are a lot of bad situations right now, but do what you can to get some focused hours. Yes, it might cost more money but maybe there are categories you’re not spending on in 2020, like you’re not taking that big trip, maybe that money can move into a different budget category, because your career is in fact worth it.”
But what if you’re not a parent? Rather than feeling like you don’t have enough time for your work, we non-parents often feel like our work could fill the whole day. And it can be hard to introduce boundaries between work time and non-work time…it all mushes together – especially now when there’s so little else to do.
I asked Laura how important it is to have boundaries.
“People have different feelings about this. If you are the sort of person who thinks you’d benefit from more strict boundaries…there are a couple of things you can do. Do close the door, have a workspace you cannot see, that helps, but it’s psychological as well. It helps to come up with a way to indicate to yourself that the day is done – if there is some kind of ceremony you can have, call a colleague to say goodbye, walk the dog, write your to-do list for tomorrow…that’s a very good way to close out the day because then you can stop thinking about all the stuff you have going on that you know you have to do because you gotta plan for it – hey look, here’s my schedule for tomorrow, I plan to tackle these things. So now I’ve done marching for the day so I can rest to march again tomorrow.”
She says it also helps to think of your work day not in hours, but rather as a series of tasks…
“You know, these are the 3-5 main tasks I have to do today and if I do all these it’ll have been a great day and when these are done you are done…and you know it’s been a great day because you’ve set these goals, and you usually can give yourself a little more permission to relax. If all of that does not work then you need to be slightly more aggressive about scheduling things into your personal life that will force you to stop. So many years ago when I was first working from home, I didn’t have any caregiving responsibilities so there was nothing forcing a stop on the workday, no sitter who had to go home or anything like that. So I would half work, half surf the web into the evening doing nothing of importance but not feeling relaxed either…so I ended up joining three community choirs, and that allowed me to say three nights a week, I have to stop at 6 because I have to get ready to be at rehearsal at seven…it made me much more efficient because I had this commitment, I knew the day would end and I couldn’t just blow it off.”
AM-T: “Three? That’s a lot of singing!”
“I need a lot. Well I had nothing else going on. To get myself out of the house that’s what I needed to do…but having some commitments in your personal life is key. You will blow off a general desire to stop work…what is that? You don’t respect that, other people won’t respect that. but oh, I’m doing online tutoring for high school students at 7 o’ clock, well nobody wants to keep you from doing that. They will respect that in a way that they won’t just respect like, yep, leaving.”
What I’ve found quite useful for making me stop is booking an online class right at 6 o’clock. There’s a Pilates class I really like that starts at 6 – and it’s all happening from the same computer where I do my work – but when I book that I know I have to be done by 5.55 and I won’t go back online afterwards.
And if you live alone these online classes are also a nice way to see other humans, not connected to your workplace. There’s a sense of shared goals and doing something you all enjoy that really cheered me up during the early days of lockdown.
I spoke to Laura back at the start of October. And before she and I sat down together, virtually, a few of you on Facebook brought up things you’d like to ask her about. One of you asked this, about sticking to routines:
AMT: “She said, does Laura have any tips about people with neuro-diverse brains especially people who struggle with making routines and structure long after the fun of making them has gone away.”
“Well you know we all have different affinities for routines, some like them and some don’t, but if this person knows herself you know what are the structures that help you be your best and often being your best is incredibly motivational – so maybe you set certain rules for yourself. ‘I will always do X, I will spend an hour on X first thing and then let the day be a little more freeform. But I know if I spend an hour on X the day will go better so I will feel better.’ Or maybe this person needs to set timers, or put alarms for taking breaks at certain times. Maybe she has a tendency to not do that and then get distracted by things she wouldn’t actively spend time on…maybe you need some sort of alarm to bring you back to the present say OK well I’ll take a ten minute break, then re-evaluate what I’m working on.
Some people benefit from having accountability partners…someone they’d check in with and say, we’ve decided on this certain template for our days, because we think it’ll help us work better, let’s check in at the end of the day and rate ourselves, one to ten.”
Someone else asked how to get time for yourself AND time for you and your partner during all this. This person has 3 kids. Laura says time for yourself is easier – she and her husband swap times, like he runs one morning while she does the kids, or she runs while takes charge at home.
Time for your relationship, she says, that’s harder…in the case of her and her husband…
“We try to go have a drink together on the porch at night when the baby is in bed for instance, and the other kids are doing whatever, watching horrible stuff on YouTube…but just let it go, try to find some spot in your residence or outside…put folding chairs on the balcony, back yard, whatever you have, in the driveway, and it doesn’t have to be an incredible amount of time, even just deciding, ok we’re gonna try to find 15, 20 minutes talking to eachother without the distractions of kids, two to three times a week. It’s something. It’s not the long weekend trip to Paris but nobody’s doing that now, so take what you can get.”
I haven’t done this for a while, but I want to let you know about a new podcast series.
It’s called Work It and the two hosts won a podcast competition in Charlotte, North Caroline last year. They beat out 400 other entries to win.
The hosts are Stephanie Hale and Jill Bjers, and they have conversations with people about their relationship with their jobs and how it shapes their view of the world. That includes the theme of pain with a doula and a piercer… and the idea of success with a barber and a stay-at-home mom.
Gain a new perspective on work and life: Check out Work It on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever you find podcasts, not to mention on WFAE.org/WorkIt.
There’s a chapter in The New Corner Office called Getting the Rhythm Right that struck a chord with me. It stresses that many of us working from home have the opportunity to do our work when it best suits us. I know that I am much more of a morning person, and it was good to be reminded that if I have something challenging to do, I should do it at the time of day when my motivation and energy are highest.
“Yeah, you want to match the right work to the right time. One of the upsides of remote work is it can be more self-directed, but part of that is figuring out when you can do various types of work…and if you are the sort of person who works best in the morning on difficult and complicated things – and that is the case for most people, we are better able to handle those things in the morning – then by all means put that work in the morning. Save the status meetings and email checking and all that for later in the day when you’re a little bit more tired and you don’t need to be your best self.”
And one of her readers suggested something that is perhaps even more important, which is if you’re someone who expects to be regularly interrupted during the day try to get in at least one hour of focused work really early in the morning. That way you get a head start on the day and if your day gets torpedoed by other people at least you’ll have got that time in first thing.
AM-T: “Can we talk for a minute about the differences between being…for instance, you and I both essentially work for ourselves. I am used to managing my own time. Others have just been launched into this WFH situation, you work for a company, you’re being managed from your home computer, then there are those people who are managers. How do you manage a team from home?”
“Well I think it’s really an opportunity to shift management more to managing by task rather than time. There’s been a lot of lazy management in the world that you assume because you see a row of people in your office at their computers looking busy that stuff must be getting done. Is it getting done? That’s not always apparent…when you have that team working remotely you can’t rely on that at all. Certain in the first days of the pandemic there were a lot of organizations requiring everyone to check in on a video chat at 9 o’ clock to check they weren’t watching Netflix or something…that’s not really the danger with professional employees. You really need to help employees manage their time well and partly what this can be is having conversations with each of your direct reports like, what would be a challenging but doable week – if you got through the end of the week and did these things what would it be, and what would make it be a really good week, let’s set those goals on Friday looking to the next week and check in again the next Friday and see what got done and what your priorities are for the next week.”
I was really surprised to hear that some companies actually wanted to check in with their people at the beginning of the day…
“Yeah, a lot of places were doing these 9a.m. check-ins, there’s so much so wrong about that, it’s just hard to know where to start. It’s a lack of trust. People who work from home are in fact working. Like I don’t know why there was this worry people were going to watch Netflix all day if they were working from home…if you are managing people who are engaged employees they’re gonna be engaged employees no matter where they are, the location is not gonna be what’s gonna turn somebody into a slacker.”
AM-T: “Do you think working from home is going to be much more common from this point forward?”
“I think it has to be. I mean it was growing in the past, quite a bit. But there were many organizations that were not using it to the extent that they probably could. I’ve interviewed business leaders in the past and I think I use this quote in the book: One gentleman had been talking about remote work as a future trend his organization needed to be aware of. But he’s like, ‘but of course it could never work for us.’ Well I can tell you that organization is all working from home right now and as far as I can tell they haven’t gone out of business, so it’s possible it could work for them…that their meetings and emails and phone calls were not so different from everyone else’s that they couldn’t possibly be done remotely.
The problem is people tend to see this is either /or…they’re like ‘but we have to do work in person,’ well nobody’s saying you don’t. But there’s a way to do some work in person and some work remote. In many cases there is best done in person and other work that is best done remotely. If you have a hybrid situation you can often get the best of both worlds. You can also hire from far more afield, which is a great upside for having different talent; if you have a situation where people can come in more like one week a month you can hire from anywhere, fly people in, they can stay in a hotel, they work from anywhere else in world the rest of the time. And you’ll still have the benefits of having pretty frequent in person interaction. But I find it hard to believe the best people for your business all live within one hour of you. So the idea of being able to hire more broadly is just a huge upside.”
But one downside of the whole pandemic is the effect it’s having on women’s careers – whether or not they’re working from home.
I mentioned to Laura the recent McKinsey/Lean In report that found more than one in four women in corporate America are considering downsizing their careers or leaving the workforce altogether. The report came out around the same time as US jobs data that showed hundreds of thousands of women had left the workforce.
Laura certainly believes in the power of the individual to do things for herself.
“Now obviously I’m not saying organizations can’t do a million other things to be better about this. Great, I’m glad to hear McKinsey is interested in this, I’m sure there are things they can do too – any company can manage differently, manage by task rather than time, don’t require a 9a.m. check-in, don’t judge people based on hours in a seat, understand people have lives and keeping people is a bigger benefit right now than the short-term thinking of oh, this is an A plus employee who is doing B level work, we’ve got to get rid of that person - it’s probably more efficient to have an A plus employee do B level work for a year and be back to A plus, than trying to hire someone else to replace that person who’s gonna do the equivalent of their C minus for at least six months till they get ready and get on board. Trying to understand that everyone is doing their best is great. And then I also think people themselves, women in particular need to figure out what will make daily life doable and understand that their ability to concentrate and focus should be a family priority, and if it is not you need to figure out what is going wrong and how you can enlist the support to make that possible.”
She urges women to try every avenue before succumbing to the pressures of the pandemic.
“I hope people who are considering leaving their positions will really think hard about that. It reminds me of the rough moments/rough months when people come back from maternity leave. I think pretty much anyone who’s had a regular job and has come back from having a baby has had that moment of like, I should quit, because it’s so hard for the first few months. But it does get better. So you want to make sure you are not making a life altering decision based on a few months of difficulties, same with this. You want to make sure that – if you want to quit your job because that’s your long term plan, awesome, great, that’s wonderful, but if it’s because the current situation is challenging you might also ask yourself what can I do to make this better, and try that, and if that works great, and if that doesn’t you can re-evaluate, but you might want to try to improve the situation first.”
Laura Vanderkam. Her new book – it’s available as an e-book – is The New Corner Office.
I’ll link you to Laura’s site under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.
That’s the Broad Experience for this time.
Next time on the show, we hear from a professional woman who would have loved to have had kids running in and out of her Zoom meetings. But she’s single, and going through this time alone.
“I haven’t touched another person since late February, no hugs, no comforting hand-holding, no nothing. It is a very unique experience, and it doesn’t get a lot of exposure.”
More on that in the next episode as we continue this series about what is happening to women’s careers right now.
And do check out ‘Work It’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or WFAE.org/WorkIt.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next time.