You’ve got e-mail… and plenty of Zoom calls!
Writing helps me make sense of things and put them in perspective. At work, I write an email to my team with some reflections every other week. The people that I work with are constantly teaching me. Compiling my personal learnings and sharing them, I feel that I somehow encapsulate our group wisdom.
Looking back, I see recurrent themes in my emails. One that has been very present during this long pandemic has been reminding my team to stay healthy, providing them with some working from home tips. Find below some extracts from those emails:
Aug 2021 -----------------------------------
...one thing we've all lost with not going to the office is the transition times we used to have to think, catch our breath, and reset. We don't typically commute or have walking meetings or water cooler informal chats. It's easy to get pulled into back-to-back calls. For our own well-being, we need to create breathers in our agenda. Blocking time in our calendars, asking for a recording instead of being in every single meeting if we are not required to be.
June 2021 ----------------------------------
...If we organize ourselves, we can make time for self-care. Enjoying nature, exercising, traveling, reading, listening to music... spending time doing things that make us feel good. Prioritizing ourselves above everyone else. Only by being the best version of ourselves, we’ll be able to be that version for others. Downtime is necessary for us to recover. There are weeks with peaks of work and weeks that we can take a break. Let's take the necessary time to recover and re-energize.
May 2021 -----------------------------------
...Zoom fatigue is real. One thing that is helping me and I want to do more often is assessing how many meetings I really need to be at my working desk for and getting out of the house when I don't. Taking a notebook and the phone, going for a walk, and switching the camera off. It works wonders and gives our eyes and mind a rest.
December 2020 -----------------------------
...More than ever in a virtual setting, each one of us has been faced with having to balance compassion and containment. Compassion for having to deal with isolation, health concerns, job insecurity, workload, and changing priorities. Containment to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and holding each other up to high standards of performance. For accepting changes, saying enough is enough, and get moving.
Managing our own minds is the toughest program to master. And it’s one that will continue to be here, asking for our energy and resources. Let’s stick together, celebrate each other, be grateful and recognize the good in others, be compassionate and contained. In this way, we’ll continue building our resilience, making each other better and our teams stronger.
---------------------------
What have you learned and have been applying during the pandemic that is helping your holistic health? Any other working from home tips?