Working from home is not Obvious

Transcript by Sean Jackson

Aidan Cammies (AC): Hi and welcome to Brainstorm - the podcast exploring how our minds work, how work affects us and how we can best deal with it. We are Aidan Cammies 

Damiano Tescaro (DT): and Damiano Tescaro. Explorers of the office jungle and mental health aficionados. Buckle up, because ideas are about to get wild.

[Episode recap]

DT: Hello everyone, Damiano here, in this episode we’re going to talk about working from home, but as you will see there were so many ideas and so many topics that we wanted to touch on that we decided to do a bit of a summary at the beginning so help you understand which topics we’re going to touch. Hopefully this will be helpful and help you find your way during the episode.

AC: First of all, I’d like to plug my blog post which has come full circle. That blog post is all about working from home, some bits we struggle with, somethings that help make it easier. Working from home is not the same as working during a quarantine or lockdown. It is a completely different thing from remote working in so many ways. It is OK to not be this unrealistic perfect person.

We’ll talk about the four stages of cue, craving, response reward, if you want to know more about that, I highly recommend James Clear’s book Atomic Habits which summarises lots of excellent stuff around habit forming. And you recommend a book by Barbara Sher (I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was) which is all about building rituals and routines, making it so you don’t have to think ‘I need to do this, I need to do this’. We suck at things that we have to consciously think about. No one wants to stand-up, go to the gym, do this, but if you can give yourself a reason why and make it a habit of ‘I’m only going there for five minutes, I can do that, then it starts to get easier over time. And do check-ins - ask each other how you’re feeling.

DT: Absolutely, check-ins all the way. I think it is one of those simple habits that can really make a difference in the day to day of video calls. We also talked about this passion for all the people who work from home in busy environments, because working from home is different to working at home in a pandemic.

Episode starts

DT: Hello Aidan

AC: Hello Damiano, how are you?

DT: Well, it’s a very hot day. But it is one of those hot days that helps you feel energised. Because after the bad weather last week [in Germany], we can celebrate sweating profusely and because I am at home, no one has to endure this besides myself. How are you doing?

AC: We have not quite got the sun [in the UK] so I can’t so I can’t use the same photosynthesis, sun-powered excuses as you, though it’s not an excuse, it is a wonderful thing to be out in the sun. I am looking out at some very grey clouds. It’s grey but a little bit warm, and I think that kind of describes how by week has been. I’ve had some bits of sunny productivity and flow, where I’ve been like ‘yeah, woo, OK, I’m getting energy, let’s do this, let’s do this’.

But there have definitely been some parts where I’ve noticed that I’m in my workroom doing stuff and trying to do stuff and I’ll go and get myself a drink of water from the kitchen, because y’know hydration is key, so I get some water, then I’ll be in the lounge and I think ‘I may as well sit on the sofa just to sit and stretch my legs out a bit, I’ve been cooped up sitting at a desk, and I may as well pop something on the TV, just for five minutes, y’know, it’s close to lunchtime, I need a bit of break, I’ll just watch it for five minutes. Ah, there’s a great Brene Brown Ted Talk on the power of vulnerability, I’ll watch that, it’s great, I’ve seen it before but it is really relevant to a workshop I’m doing later this week.’

Two hours later, I find myself watching Unexplained Ocean Mysteries. How did this happen?! And I’m just sitting there going ‘I need to stop doing this, I have to go back in and do the things’ but I’m not moving and I’m going to myself ‘Aidan, you have go to move, you need to do the things’. But the legs aren’t moving, and my head is going ‘ooh, I wonder what is happening at the bottom of the Mariana Trench right now’.

DT: Exactly, how many mystical sea creatures are still to be discovered. I must check out this documentary. I know exactly what you mean. Do you still feel you were able to be productive, or do you feel there was some guilt in those moments?

AC: Yeah, so the guilt is definitely there, even when I do manage to break that cycle and go ‘OK, cool, I am aware of my thoughts is step one of this.’ If I’m not aware of it and am just sitting blissfully smiling thinking ‘this is fine, I’ve got nothing else to do’. That is blissful ignorance. So the first step is being aware of the fact that you’re distracted, the second step is going ‘OK, I recognise this, I recognise that my brain is going ‘we need distraction because we need dopamine, give us serotonin right now’. But is good to recognise that you don’t need to be chasing that instant gratification. That is a whole big problem for me with ADHD it is quite difficult to break that. But what I am trying to work on at the moment is after realising I’ve been distracted and going back into work is actually being able to do that work without ruminating on what I’ve just done. Actually stopping and going ‘yes you got distracted, you can’t change that, that has already happened, but what you can change is you can do some work now. Instead of thinking, ‘oh if I came back an hour earlier, this would be so much easier, I’d have so much more time to do this.’ It doesn’t help.

DT: Yes, you’re dragging the guilt with you as you move forwards, but you’re living in the past.

AC: So yes, I’ve been very much on an instant gratification angle. … I’ve gone straight into a big monologue here Damiano. Welcome to being my involuntary therapist.

DT: Which is the perfect introduction to today’s topic which is working from home. Before we start though I wanted to say “thank you” to all the listeners, and the people who took time to write to us, because the inspiration for this next episode came from people who suggested it as a topic. Because it is such a relevant, major thing that we all have to deal with. And Aidan [in this blog] has given a great breakdown of what a lot of people are going through.

When I think of working from home, there are two macro categories, and I would love to hear what you think. Ever since we started working from home, the space is the same - it is our home. But there is the personal sphere and time and there is work time. And because of lockdown I think both of these spheres of our lives have been affected. I know mine have. Has it been the same for you, do you feel as though everything has merged into a twirl of just one thing?

AC: Yeah absolutely. It is a trend that has been going on for many years this blurring of the lines. If we travel back in time to a long time ago to industrial revolution times, if the work is in a factory, when you’re at home you’re at home, when you’re in the factory you could be there for 12 hours a day, but as soon as you step outside the factory you’re done for the day, you can’t take bits of assembly line back with you and go “don’t mind me, just going to manufacture some car doors in my bedroom”. But now you can answer emails when you’re supposed to be making food in the morning, you can check on whatever instant messaging platform your team uses when you’re supposed to be spending time with your family at dinner.

All this happens sometimes when you’re on your way into the office, but now we don’t have a natural transition, where you used to wake up on the morning, get ready, get on a train, car or bike or bus into the office, that gives your brain a cue of ‘we are going into work right now,’ we’re getting ourselves ready, we’re having a change of environment to go into a workplace. And when you’re leaving you can mentally refresh, you can tell yourself you’re leaving and you’re on the way home, you might be thinking about how you need to do the dishes, wash your clothes, but you can compartmentalise and leave work behind. And at the moment, that ain’t happening.

DT: Would you say overall working from home suits you or is it more challenging than going into the office?

AC: It does not suit me at all!

DT: That is super interesting, you know why? Because I really enjoy working from home - we did not plan the episode this way … it’s great that we have the two sides of the story to talk about today. Fantastic, I am really excited.

AC: There are definitely pros and cons. But before this all happened in my home there was no real work association. When we first went into lockdown I was living in a different flat where I had a room in a flat sharing with some wonderful housemates. In my room I had a bed, at the foot of which there was an inch or two of space then my chair and my desk where I worked.

DT: I imagine most people can sympathize with that.

AC: Yeah, I doubt I am alone.

DT: Yeah, think about our colleagues in Paris where the square metres in the flat is sometime 30 or 40, like a studio apartment, it is hard to fit in a desk, so I completely understand, it is a big challenge.

AC: It can be very difficult, but luckily I have now moved flat and I now have a separate area for my desk, which is great, it means I can compartmentalise things. It is still far from being a magical solution, where when I enter the space a wave of wonderful productivity washes over me, and for 10 hours I sit and type and the words flow out of me. No, it’s not a Disney moment like that, but the change in environment does help. I recognise that people in places like New York, London, Paris, other different places around the world, there’s less room. Less square footage and space to yourself.

We can’t always change the physical environment, but we can change some of the cues. I have been doing a lot of reading around habits recently. (Mainly for personal reasons because I love reading a good book or two. And I love to procrastinate.) A great way to visualise how habits work is the four stage model by Charles Duhigg. The four stages are i) your cue, ii) craving, iii) response and iv) reward. And this applies to everything we do as human beings.

The cue is the thing that prompts your brain think ‘I see the chocolate bar. Your brain goes ‘ooh sugar, sugar is good, we need sugar to survive and it gives us lots of energy’. 

DT: So stage 1 is the cue. You see the cue and your brain perceives it.

AC: The craving is your brain saying ‘OK, I am aware of the thing’ and then it tells you to eat the thing, eat the thing to survive, we’ve got to eat the chocolate bar. Our response is what we actually do, so the process of picking it up, unwrapping it and then eating it. Reward is what we get afterwards, this could be a chemical reward, so your brain going ‘good job, you ate the thing, here’s some happiness hormone in exchange’. And that’s how everything works 

So it could work for exercising. So if you wanted to do more exercise, you’d make those cues more visible. So I have my yoga mat in the middle of the room. So when I turn my alarm off, I have to physically walk into the middle of the room. So the cue is, it’s there, I need to do that.

DT: Maybe the craving is not that present so early in the morning?

AC: Yeah, so I wander around a bit and bounce off the walls.

DT: How does it work if you manage to build a habit of doing yoga in the morning, is it the habit that creates the craving? Or is it a self-induced craving enough though I don’t actually crave it?

AC: It ends up going into a positive cycle. For that cue you want to make it obvious. You can’t miss it, it’s a bright blue yoga mat in the middle of the room. The second way to induce the craving (and you can do this for good and bad habits) is find a way to make it attractive (if you’re trying to create a positive habit), you need to find a way to make yourself want to do the yoga. For me I recognise I want to do yoga because I spend a lot of time sitting down and my back hurts, I am happy when I back doesn’t hurt. I will be happy when at the end of a yoga session even if it’s only five minutes, I feel a bit more awake, I feel blood going around and when we exercise our brain release endorphins and that’s good and I recognise that is good.

Not some much the instant gratification of checking my phone - which is something that happens quite often, I can find myself swiping through Facebook or Instagram or wherever. I might get an endorphin hit, but then afterwards I will feel bad because I spent half an hour on it. So you need to find ways of making the good habits attractive. So focus on the ‘why am I doing this long term?’

The third bit, the response, so I see the yoga mat, I know that doing yoga is good, now I actually have to do it. So here you need to reduce the friction, reduce the amount of steps that are involved in doing it.

So I have my yoga stuff on the mat. I’ve got some super funky bamboo leggings for my eczema, when I’m wearing those I get into the mindset of ‘oh, I’m going to do some yoga’. So I put those on the mat the day before, so I don’t have to worry about fetching them from another room and get changed. I have a glass of water there ready, I’ve got the TV remote, so just one click and it powers up, I’ve got YouTube and Yoga with Adriene ready. So all I have to do is, walk into the room, press a button, put on some clothes that are already there and I’m ready to go. So I’ve reduced the barriers.

The final bit is the reward. So make it enjoyable, perhaps tie it to a reward that you enjoy. That might be something like ‘after I’ve finished yoga I can have a lovely sugar-filled cereal’. And if I get that after I do the yoga, or it could be as simple as just writing a big tick on a piece of paper that says ‘I did yoga today’. … er… how did we get onto this track Damiano?

DT: I think we started out by talking about working from home. I think the theme under all of this is the rituality. I think that is super important when it comes to working from home. In general in life we’re creatures of habit. But this is a good example of you setting your routines. It is interesting because I’ve read many times things about making sure you prepare your running shows at the foot of your bed, you’ll wake up and just go. It never ever worked for me.

It just doesn’t click. I sometimes feel as though I’m outsmarting myself because I know I am trying to cheat my own decision making process, so my subconscious mind is laughing saying ‘I will remember that you tried to fool me, but I will hijack this immediately’.

AC: It’s like you’re playing chess against yourself.

DT: Absolutely you’re trying to trick your future self. There is a system that I have found that works for me, although it is very inconsistent. But that’s the magic. It comes from an author that I really love, Barbara Sher,  who wrote a phenomenal book called I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was. It kickstarted my journey abroad. It gave me the courage to leave Italy and move to Ireland without a job. She is a wonderful life coach, but she’s not just all about being positive, and amazing. She is a very practical person.

There’s a video on YouTube where she says inconsistency is the key, your odds of surviving - which is the natural game your body tries to do - the whole reward mechanism from a chemical perspective is exercising is very low because there is no threat that we’re running away from, whereas with eating our body is trained to say ‘well, I should eat more because maybe winter will come and I won’t have any food. So she says that being inconsistent in your habits, even the healthy ones is a very good way to square the odds in your favour, because you might take vitamins some days and some days you might not, then you exercise a couple of days and then you don’t, and you create a pattern that is statistically inconsistent but still works in your favour.

So with me, I like doing yoga, but I hate starting to do yoga. I bought a pull-up bar to try and teach myself pull-ups.

AC: Yes, I’ve got one of those… in the wardrobe.

DT: Exactly. That’s how it works. What happened was instead of saying ‘today I will do three pull-ups, what I try to do is, everytime I walk past it and I see it, if I feel like doing one pull-up, I will do one. It does not have to be three sets of 15 pull-ups. It just has to be one pull-up. If I see the yoga mat, or even if I don’t, then I feel like going into downward dog because I want to stretch my back, I don’t do the full salute to the sun for 20 minutes, I just do downward dog for five breaths and that’s the end of my yoga session. I’ve found that mentally this really helps me, because it removes the barrier of starting. Does that make sense?

AC: Yes, that’s so close to touching on something that James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits,  which is you’re making it easy, which helps our response part. You’re not saying to yourself every day I will do an hour of running and I will become a super ultra-marathon runner by the end of the year (which is what I tried to do, and what I did was I completed a marathon and completed having a completely busted knee.)

DT: Wow, a double achievement.

AC: Yeah, one of them was more painful than the other. What I should have done was go for the little and often approach. Now, I have a habit that I try to do is 10 push-ups every day. I know that if I did 50 a day, I could start doing push-up challenges, where you do them every day and get muscles on your muscles, you’ll have muscles on your eyeballs and you’ll be super jacked. That doesn’t work. You do it one day and then you’ll be exhausted and you never do it again.

If you say “I’m going to do one push-up per day” and you’ve got somewhere to do that push-up, that is easy. Even I can’t come up with an excuse to not do that. I can usually come up with reasons that I need to do, this, this and this, and if I’m the one trying to trick myself into doing something. I know I’m in the driving seat. But I can do one push-up. Even if my stomach feels bad or I’ve just eaten food and I tell myself that I shouldn’t exercise after food, I’ll get indigestion or I’m really tired, surely I can do one push-up. And once you’ve done one push-up, while you’re in the push-up position, you might as well do one or two more. Let your baseline of success be really low. You can apply the two-minute rule for really big things. Just say you need to spend two minutes doing something and that’s a success and everything else is a bonus.

DT: OK. Going back to the original working from home topic. Because there are so many things that belong to working from home. In your experience what is the most common difficulty that people have shared with you that is worth talking about or highlighting?

AC: One of the main things for me is the environment, I remember now where I was going with this before going off on the wild habit tangent, is finding ways to change the environment. These could be little things like playing a specific song or playlist. I could hit ‘Hot beats to relax/study’ or ‘Binaural beats’ which is something I’ve been researching recently, they help prime your brain, and it can help you associate that with work. Or a coloured light bulb, so if it’s green you’re on work mode, if it’s red you’re on distraction mode.

Someone recently reached out to me and said that it is very easy to get distracted, it is very easy to constantly contact Switch, that’s something we associate with being in an office and being hard at work, writing up a presentation and someone taps you on the shoulder and says “Aidan have you got a minute?” All of that wonderful stuff, those mental models that I’ve built in my head is just gone. On average it might take 20 minutes to refocus.

It also happens when you’re at home alone, you are surrounded by distractions. You use your phone for work purposes, but if you have it right next to you on your desk, and you’re halfway through an Excel spreadsheet and you get stuff, then you notice a notification on your phone, and you just think you’ll check your phone for a minute, then an hour later you put your phone back down.

Getting rid of the distraction is one thing, recognising when you’re not getting into the state of flow is another. I think accountability is key. When you mentioned earlier that you struggle to get into something, for me something that worked well is reaching out to people, say at the beginning of the week these are my intentions for the week, this is what I want to get done by Friday and I’ll write that down.

DT: Like a buddy system?!

AC: Absolutely, having the buddy system where you say exactly what you want to happen by the end of the week. And if I don’t get it done, I attach something of significance to that. I heard a story about someone who wanted to publish a book by the end of year, if not I will donate £500 to a Neo-Nazi rally. Obviously they were staunchly opposed to that, they did not want to support that organisation. They really did not want to do it, but they had the cheque written out and they said to a friend, if I have not done this by this date please post this letter, their friend promised to do it. And that was a real motivation, they weren’t just trying to do something for themselves. They knew that if they did not do it, something that they really didn’t want to happen would happen. You don’t necessarily have to go to that extreme.

But it could be something like ‘hey Tom, if I’ve not done this presentation by the end of the week, for the next week’s worth of calls I will join wearing a rival football team shirt’. It gives you that extra bit of encouragement to do something.

DT: It is a really good excuse to connect with people. It is easy when you’re working from home to glide across. I have the feeling that because we have so many meetings, too many meetings, we have way too many meetings and not all of them are necessary, it can be very difficult to find the time to talk to people. You go into a meeting and you’re face with an agenda that is ‘this and this and this’, then you talk about point one, point two and point three, then you have 10 minutes back and everyone is craving the 10 minutes because they need to go to the supermarket to buy lunch. But I find it is very difficult to have the discipline to find the time for the normal conversations with people which are part of the team spirit but also help you out as colleagues.

I have tried to book time with people for just chatting, there is no agenda, it’s just that I want to talk to someone about how they’re doing, or the last song they heard. I think it’s a good exercise. It feels awkward at first, but it feels awkward in the way that something new or slightly taboo feels. Do you do that with your friends or colleagues?

AC: I have not booked time specifically, I am very aware of video call fatigue, but something I try to bring in is check-ins at the beginning of calls, which is where we’re bringing that human element back to our work lives. Rather than being in an hour long meeting where you’re talking about the numbers, or the Q4 results or something else, often it’s just one person talking and that is not a meeting, it’s a status report or monologue.

I like to bring in a check-in at the beginning. If there’s a small group of people we’ll talk, if it’s a large group I will encourage people to put answers in the chat. Which is ‘how are you doing?’ ‘how are you really doing?’ ‘What did you have for dinner last night?’ ‘What was a great song you listened to recently?’ ‘What did you watch on TV?’ ‘What book have you read or podcast have you listened to?’ 

...someone told me about a podcast called Brainstorm you should check it out …

DT: Great! Everyone should listen to it. What is the name Aidan?

AC: That’s Brainstorm … so checking in is really powerful. Not only does it gove everyone a chance to talk, it gives you a chance to be human and to connect with people. The amount of times I’ll say ‘answer the question and say who you want to go next’, so people might say ‘yeah, I’m all right, I went for a morning bike ride’ then someone else in the team will go ‘ooh, I didn’t know you went bike riding, I like that too’. It’s a great way of getting the little connections that you don’t get a chance to do otherwise.

As well as that I always encourage meetings that finish 15 minutes early because people need time to get a drink of water or pop to the loo or make food or just to sit there and have a rest before jumping into another call. I find those things help to bring people together and avoid burn out from all these meetings.

DT: I love that. I think being the voice in the meeting that brings it all together is important. As we said in the last episode, it is easy to just glide over the questions and say ‘yeah, I’m fine, great, fantastic.’

Another thing I was thinking about was I realise a lot of colleagues have children, pets, maybe they live with other people or they have their parents. There are so many things at home, especially when kids were studying at home because everything was closed down, it must be so difficult, and I have so much respect for parents working from home to be able to manage things. Especially if you have young children, you can’t just say “see you in eight hours darling, bye-bye’. They see you’re at home, they come and talk to you, and I can really understand as much as people love their children and be part of the day, it is very hard to get into the flow of work.

So if you’re trying to do something it is very easy to become distracted and to be able to keep the balance between being a good parent and being a good colleague, or husband or wife or whatever in a home environment that is under lockdown, where you have to manage all of these things at once. It can be really challenging, I don’t really have any answers! But I do want to acknowledge this because it is one of the silent challenges, that doesn’t get talked about much, but I see it on a daily basis and I am really blown away by how good people are at holding it all together and also I understand it is stressful and it’s OK to talk about it. We don’t have to constantly say ‘no no, it’s fine’.

AC: I know. There are so many articles out there that go ‘learn this one trick and you’ll be the most productive you can be’ or ‘If you’re not using this time in lockdown to learn new skills you’re a failure and you should feel bad’. No! We’re in the middle of a pandemic. It’s OK to not be doing your best it’s OK to not be OK.

DT: It is written nowhere that we need to learn how to bake sourdough bread.

AC: I tried baking some brownies the other day. These brownies I’m going to use a permanent doorstop, and that’s OK! It’s OK to fail, it’s OK to not be making all these Instagram worthy hobbies. It’s OK at the end of the day to breath a huge sigh of relief.

DT: So, Aidan. Thank you very very as usual and I am already looking forward to the next episode.

AC: Me too. We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas for what helps you work best during lockdown. Also if you have any ideas for future episodes share them, we have lots of ideas already, but if you want to hear something sooner or have any great tips yourself we’d love to hear them. Thanks Damiano!

DT: Absolutely, we’ll talk to everybody next time.

AC&DT: Remember, it’s OK not to be OK.

DT&AC: Take care everyone.