Working from Home: How do I get my energy and focus back on track?

Working from Home: How do I get my energy and focus back on track?

by Apr 30, 2020

Working from home

 It has now been exactly 7 weeks since I started working from home. In the beginning this went with full energy, but now gradually the energy and the focus on the work is starting to drain.

Keep Calm and Stay Focused

I’m the only one in here? I’m sure, I’m not.

I regularly hear this among colleagues. Despite the traffic jams, the car ride to and from the office also brought relaxation. You now have to find this relaxation in other ways.

Where I was in Teams meetings all day at the beginning of the Lockdown, I now try to limit that and put more focus time into my agenda. This is not quite 100% successful but the beginning is there.

My children are a bit older now and they don’t find it easy to go to school online, but need little or no supervision with their school work. But colleagues with younger children also have to help their children with school in addition to their work and then it becomes completely difficult to keep combining everything, work, school, entertainment, all in all a tough job. Fortunately, my employer helps and supports these colleagues well.

What have I learned for myself recently:

My day starts every day between 7.30am and 8:00 am, not much different then my normal office hours.
My hourly meetings become 50 minutes and meetings of half an hour 25 minutes, this way you can recover before you go to the next meeting. But try to get away from your screen.

File => Options => Calendar

calendar

I make blocks in my calendar:
An hour in the morning to exercise.
An hour at lunchtime for lunch and walking.
30 minutes in the afternoon, away from screen time.

I plan regular coffee moments with my team.
I dress like I normally would go to the office.
And the spontaneous phone calls are not missing in the above.

In addition to the above, together with colleagues (facilitated by my employer), who want to participate, we have 3 Virtual Gym Moments(20 min) and of course the Friday afternoon drink with music, pub quiz or something else in terms of entertainment.

Where I have not found immediately a solution for, how do I end my day? Often after dinner I go back to work, at that moment I have a lot of focus and because of that it often gets quite late. I’m still looking for a good ending of the day, that used to be the moment when you got into the car at a customer site  or office and you drove home. Any suggestions?

Oh yes, and taking a day off to do nothing at all is also wonderful.

Applying the above points gives me more focus and energy in my work. Which points do you apply? I look forward to hearing your response in the comments below.

Feel free to leave a comment

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

4 × three =

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Goodbye 2021, Hello 2022

Goodbye 2021Recap First of all, I would like to wish everyone a very beautiful and healthy 2022. We are now 3 days on the road into the new year and it is always good to look back at what happened last year. It's certainly been an eventful year, topped off with my MVP...

Control my Nest Thermostat on my Domoticz Server running on a Synology DiskStation

Control your Nest Thermostat  in DomoticzNormally I always write Azure related, but today I'm writing about something different, on how I can control my Nest Thermostat on my Domoticz Server (Home automation). A while ago I have upgraded my  Nest Thermostat to login...

My Sessions at DataSaturdayNL 2019

DataSaturday NL 2019Date: 5 th October Location: Pathé Leidsche Rijn Data Saturday Holland is the new name for SQL Saturday Holland. A new start a new location and wow what a top location, Pathé Leidsche Rijn. A cinema with 7 screens and ranging from 180 to 668 seats....

Azure Purview March Updates

Azure Purview updatesAnnouncements Last week during SQLBITS, quite a few new updates were announced. I would like to include you in these announcements.March updates Support for SAP Business Warehouse (Preview) Blogpost:...

Calculate Workingdays including Holidays with T-SQL

Calculate Workingdays between 2 Date columnsRecently I have been getting some questions from my customers, can I calculate the number of workdays between 2 dates? Of course my answer was, yes you can. But I do want certain closing dates and holidays of our company not...

Restore a accidentally deleted Azure SQL Database

Help I deleted my Logical Server​OOPS Have you ever experienced that you accidentally deleted your Logical Server in Azure?  Because, for example, you made your Pipeline wrong. Surely. And of course you didn't have a backup in your storage either.Well I must confess...

Collection of all ADF Mapping Data Flow videos

ADF Mapping FlowDid you use the Dataflow preview functionality in Azure Data Factory? This has recently be renamed to Mapping Data Flows.  All video's which the ADF team has created, are collected. Start Here: ADF Data Flow: Overview ADF Data Flow: Data Flow...

Service Health Alerts in Azure

Maintenance and Service Healths in AzureI get often questions, is there no maintenance in Azure. Like every data center, the Azure data center also needs maintenance. You can even be notified when a specific service, in a specific data center, has scheduled...

LEAP 2018

Lead Enterprise Architect ProgramFrom the 4th of December until the 6th of December I've joined the LEAP (Lead Enterprise Architect Program) 2018 Data/AI from Microsoft NL. Three  days on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond joining business and technical sessions from a...

How to use concurrency in Azure Synapse pipelines?

How to prevent concurrent pipeline execution?Concurrency This week I had a discussion with a colleague about how we can now make sure that a Pipeline does not start when it's already started. He then indicated, have you ever thought of the concurrency option?  I've...