The night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.
~Ernest Hemingway [1]
Recently in Working from Home...Together I discussed the challenges faced by people who now share working quarters with a host of new "colleagues"--their spouses, partners, children and/or roommates. But what about the opposite problem? What about people who may be compelled to work from home for an extended period of time and live alone? I haven't lived alone for 30 years, but for most of that time I've worked alone, usually from home, as employee #1 of three new ventures, as the only West Coast employee of a Washington D.C. consulting firm, and as a one-man coaching practice since 2006.
The primary theme of yesterday's post was that people who now find themselves living and working together need to establish effective boundaries, a concept explored over a decade ago by my former colleague Michael Gilbert, who drew on his training as a biologist:
Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. Bad boundaries lead to either being overwhelmed or withdrawal. Good boundaries lead to wholeness and synergy. [2]
While groups of people in close quarters need to manage their boundaries to support differentiation, people living alone need to manage their boundaries to support integration. They must be intentional about "letting the right things through." As I've written before, three different types of boundaries--temporal, physical, and cognitive--promote "wholeness and synergy," and here's how they might be employed by someone living alone who's working from home for an extended period. [3]
Temporal boundaries designate certain times for certain activities.
While an organization that has rapidly moved from an in-person office to mandatory work-from-home will hit some rough spots as employees master new tools and develop new norms to support their use, we know it can be done. And if you're living alone you'll have help in these efforts, because all of your colleagues are facing some version of these challenges. Resources will be dedicated to get everyone up to speed and coordinated, and schedules and routines will be re-established. The organization will establish the temporal boundaries it requires in order to function.
But as an individual who has rapidly moved from an in-person office to mandatory work-from-home you will also hit some rough spots as you re-organize your life in the absence of predictable routines, including "going to work" and "coming home." And you may have no help in these efforts, because most of your friends, family and colleagues are all trying to figure out how to re-organize their own lives. While the organization will provide you with the temporal boundaries necessary to support work, what about everything else?
- To make work-from-home sustainable for a period of weeks or months, it will be necessary to continue to engage in the other activities that support your wholeness and fulfillment as a human being. But during a crisis work can expand to take up all the time and space that we make available, and those other activities can easily get forgotten or pushed off the agenda. As strange as it may sound, you now need a calendar for your personal life that's as well-organized as your professional calendar.
- Note that this need not entail "life-work balance," which may not be possible in the midst of a crisis and may not be of interest even in ordinary times if you're like most of my clients, who I think of as "happy workaholics" (an identity I share.) But as I've written before, "The amount of undisturbed time we preserve for [non-work activities] will vary and may be quite small, but what matters is that we create and maintain a functional boundary around that time. [4]
- One of the most important non-work activities--especially during a crisis--is sleep. [5] A challenge you may face living along is the temptation to keep working late into the night. This may be necessary at times, but if it becomes a consistent practice you'll quickly begin to undermine your effectiveness at emotion regulation and decision-making. As former Intel CEO Andy Grove once noted, "My day always ends when I'm tired, not when I'm done... A manager's work is never done." [6] And as I regularly tell my clients, the workday doesn't begin when we wake up--it begins when we go to sleep.
Physical boundaries designate certain places for certain activities.
As I wrote the other day, "Back when we 'went to work,' the physical boundaries were embodied in the corporate campus, the downtown building, a series of rooms, a series of desks. We entered and engaged these spaces and we were 'at work'... The dilemma we face now is that those boundaries have been collapsed--or at least severely compressed. There is no 'at work' or 'at home'--it's all the same place." [7]
An advantage of working from home while living alone is that you don't have to worry about how to share space with other people in a way that feels fair to all parties--which is one of the main challenges faced by your colleagues. But a consequent disadvantage is the risk that work takes over your entire living space, which will make it harder to disconnect and engage in other activities (and may ultimately make your home feel more cramped and smaller.) The key is being as deliberate with your space as you need to be with your time:
- To the greatest extent possible, designate workspaces in your home and keep them distinct from spaces you use for other purposes. If you have a dedicated home office, count your blessings--and be mindful of the impulse to conduct other activities there. If you don't have a separate room for work, consider utilizing spaces for that purpose that you're unlikely to use for relaxation and personal activities.
- Small investments in these spaces and the tools you'll be using can yield significant benefits. Get the best office chair you can afford. Upgrade your webcam and your microphone. Pay attention to the background behind you, because that's what your colleagues will be seeing.
- While communities will begin to impose restrictions on movement outside the home to slow the rate of infection, be sure to get outside on a regular basis while adhering to these mandates and practicing social distancing. This is important under normal circumstances, and it will be essential if work-from-home is to be sustainable over time.
- One very specific point: Do not work in bed. When we go to sleep, we need to stop thinking about work and allow our attention to roam freely. For "happy workaholics" this can be difficult under ordinary circumstances, and it can be harder than ever during a crisis. Working in bed leads us to associate that space with problem-solving and other challenges that will make it more difficult to get to sleep or enjoy high-quality sleep.
Cognitive boundaries direct our attention toward an object of focus (and away from distractions).
This has always been a challenge in the workplace, one made worse in recent years by open offices [8] and all the tools in our work environment that have been designed to capture our attention. But at the root of the issue are several fundamental aspects of human psychology: Attention and deliberate focus are finite mental resources, and in order to conserve them for important situations, we've evolved to experience their expenditure as depleting. And emotions are vitally important in orienting us toward perceived opportunities and threats, so as a consequence emotions are "attention magnets." [9]
The primary challenge faced by your colleagues who now find themselves working alongside family members and housemates is avoiding the distractions posed by those other people in order to focus on work. The primary challenge you may face as someone living alone is avoiding the distraction posed by work in order to focus on everything else. This will likely be more difficult in the current situation because work is providing many of us with a sense of contribution, a feeling that we're doing something to help even though we're not actively involved in fighting the pandemic. And yet if you're going to make working-from-home sustainable, you're going to need to disconnect from work on a consistent basis and direct our attention elsewhere. So what can you do?
- The temporal and physical boundaries discussed above are all ultimately intended to help support cognitive boundaries that allow you to direct your attention as productively as possible. In the current situation it won't be possible to perfect your temporal and physical boundaries--like everyone else, you'll have to do the best you can. But a helpful start is simply being aware that attention and deliberate focus are limited resources, and to mindfully observe where your attention is being directed (and when it's being pulled back toward work.)
- Recall that good boundaries "let the right things through and keep the wrong things out,"and as someone living alone one of your most important needs will be to stop thinking about work and to stay connected with the people in your life other than colleagues. Temporal and physical boundaries can help here, such as a schedule reminding you to check in with people, or phoning a friend or loved one while taking a walk outside.
- And even if work isn't absorbing all of your attention, the pandemic and COVID-19 may well be. Cognitive boundaries are essential in helping us regulate our consumption of the news and its impact on our state of mind. We have to manage our "information diets" so that we're not constantly distracted in order to be truly present in the rest of our lives. [10] It will be difficult, particularly as the crisis worsens, but it may be some of the most important work we can do to survive it.
In Closing
I'm keenly aware that countless numbers of our loved ones and neighbors do not have the luxury of dealing with these problems because their work cannot be conducted online. My brother David voluntarily closed his bar in Washington D.C. to support social distancing, and he will not be able to earn a living until we can return to normal social activity. I don't know how to help in your community, but here in San Francisco we can give to the Season of Sharing Fund, or the city's Give2SF fund.
This is a companion piece to Working from Home...Together.
Thanks to Ian McMilan for the inspiration.
Footnotes
[1] A Farewell to Arms, page 216 (Ernest Hemingway, 1929/2014)
[2] Good Fences: On Boundaries, Agency and Wholeness in Work-Life (Michael Gilbert, 2008)
[3,4] Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance
[5] A compilation of readings on the importance of sleep.
[6] High Output Management (Andy Grove, 1983/1995)
[7,8] Working from Home...Together
[9] The Uneasiness of the Open Office
[10] A Better Information Diet
Photo by Luca Volpi.