Home Work and Staying Sane

When I became an RA (House Fellow) in the early 1980s I had my first foray into working where I lived. Back then, it was a dorm room. Now, it is a nice campus residence on Oakmont Court as a perk of being the Dean of Students. In all of those intervening years I have learned a thing or two about living where I work. I write this post for my many colleagues who are now working where they live.

1. There is no one way or one right way to do this.
This first period of adjustment provides opportunities to experiment with different approaches. The truth is that employers want employees to maintain productivity and serve their students/clients/customers/colleagues. How it happens is less of an issue than just making it happen.

2. Live a life with balance and boundaries.
There is no shortage of advice on-line from experts: get up at a regular time, dress up a little, segregate work and play, have a space at home that can be for work and the rest is for play. We tell this to our students too: Study at the library or CSI and use your residence hall room, with all its distractions, for down time. This is a great idea, until you get sleepy, or hungry, or distracted, or the dog wants to play poker. The other option...

3. Embrace the integrated life.
Accept it, right? You will sometimes be working weekends or at night, or peruse emails with your first cup of coffee and a smoke (oh wait, different era). The upside to this is flexibility. Take a longer lunch to exercise, cook dinner, or organize that out of control spice rack (shape, size, then alpha - just sayin'). You can be good at work and be good at home life. You can wear your wife's pink bathroom and no one will care, except maybe her. The downside is that you don't know where work you and home you begin and end.

4. Be strategic managing young kids.

When my sons were little and we were really broke my wife did freelance writing. This was in the era between typewriters and Macs (she suuuper old). She recently recounted sitting in the bathtub talking on the phone (long cord) to do interviews while cuing up Barney tapes for the boys to distract them. That went well. Today, employees are dealing with kids at home during work hours and sometimes doing so while they are doing remote learning. There is no easy answer here. Between just giving up and working in the bath tub there are some things you can try. There are Zoom meetings that you have to be part of. But there are lots of other hours in the day. Try doing what you HAVE to do when you have to and be flexible with the rest of your time later at night, or early in the morning - whenever the kids are sleeping, hungover, or watching cartoons. This is REALLY hard. But you have to have a plan to get the work done, however you do it (see number 1).

5. Don't judge yourself or let yourself be judged.
Feeling pressure to be productive for work? Feeling the need to produce and care for the family? Experiencing crushing self-doubt about your value? STOP. We all suck. (Got ya.) Listen, you have enough to do without being hard on yourself. Act like you are a millennial. I sometimes go in late in the morning because I have had night time commitments the previous day. I used to want to shout to people "I WAS AT STUDENT GOVERNMENT TILL 10PM LAST NIGHT." I had to get over it. I knew what value I was adding and let it go. You should too! I have had great bosses over the years who knew what I was doing. Want to get them on your side? Tell them your approach. They will appreciate knowing.

I'm sure there are many more pointers out there that I am missing. In these different and most remote of times, do your best, go easy on yourself, and live your values through your priorities. Now get back to work. Those reports won't write themselves. Or maybe just fold the laundry.