#askanofficemom | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

askanofficemom · 2 years

Text

Take a break!

You already know that taking a break is essential to reducing stress and preventing burnout. But if you’re like me, you likely take all of your breaks at your desk. If your workplace is the usual kind, that means that your supervisor or a colleague nearly always walks up behind you when you’re reading your email or social media or chatting with someone. So don’t just take a break when you need to breathe (but do that too!). Define your break.

If you work someplace sane, then they likely don’t care about your breaks if you get all of your work done in a timely fashion. One of my coworkers (now retired), an extraordinary educator who is an expert on pedagogies that actually work, pointed out that psychological research shows that procrastination can help get the work done better. https://professional.dce.harvard.edu/blog/the-perks-of-procrastination/

Not everything can succeed when you’re procrastinating. If someone can’t do their work without your help, that’s not something to put off. If you have a defined due date, that’s not something you can put off either -- it affects your team, your company, and the people waiting for the finished product. But if you’re working on a project and brainstorming isn’t helping, it’s time to take a break that will refresh you. But try not to do it at your desk, and set expectations for yourself and your colleagues as to when you’ll be back.

Most supervisors and colleagues take breaks at their desks as well, and it’s even expected if it’s not extreme and doesn’t interfere with work. It does, however, mean that your break is likely to be interrupted, especially if you’re an office manager or other administrative professional, and even more so if you’re entry-level. Not only that, but most good administrative professionals are only noticed when something breaks. So you need to be obvious about when you are and are not doing work. The last thing you want is a complaint that you’re never available or always on your phone or reading social media. (If your job involves social media, you need to be even more obvious about the difference between personal and work times.)

If you’re working remotely, it’s very easy to take a break when you need to, but equally difficult for your supervisor or colleagues to tell if you’re working at all. Hopefully your office is using a communication system like Slack or Microsoft Teams. Set your status to “on break” when you’re on break, and put it back to “available” when you’re back. You never want to have someone looking for you and not being able to find you at all.

Here are some things I do:

Since I work part-time, I arranged with my supervisor to take a long lunch on remote days so that I would be available at the beginning and end of everyone else’s workday. I also take my phone with me and answer Teams messages with one or two sentences; these sentences might include “I’m at lunch, I’ll check back with you in an hour” or “oh, you can find that in the such-and-so server folder” or “that’s an emergency, give me a second to get back to my desk.”

At the office, however, I have a more limited time, leaving the house after my kids get on the bus and getting home within an hour of them getting home. That leaves only 5-6 hours depending on traffic. But like any human, I still need breaks.

I find that the most refreshing break is to take my smartphone outside (or to the sofa, on work-at-home days) and chat with friends on Discord. It’s a little slower because I am terrible at thumb-typing, but it does help. More usually I take my smartphone to an empty office, which while not as refreshing does clearly mark the boundary of break and not-break.

I also use a browser plug-in called StayFocusd on my work web browser and set it to a very severe 30 minutes to make sure I don’t go over my break time. I don’t block my email, because I’m a parent, but I block everything else but work pages (in my case, QuickBase, QuickBooks, Bill.com, Office.com, Exchange email administration...). And I never have my personal email and my work in the same browser, using Chrome for one and Firefox for the other.

I wish I could say that I always take my own advice, but of course I don’t. Even on an in-office day, I might need to print out some school paperwork and then scan it back, and I need to do that while logged in at my desk.

One thing I always do away from my desk, unless no-one else is in the office, is to take a personal call. Maybe it’s a telehealth appointment that I couldn’t change to a different day, maybe it’s a random call from the school, my spouse, my roommate or a doctor. The answer may be “I’ll call you back” or, in the case of family members, I’ll cancel the call and text back “is it an emergency?” The kids are more likely to text me, and the answer is often “my sympathies, we can talk about it at home.”

I hope this ramble was helpful. Don’t forget that the ask box is open!

#askanofficemom #mental health #remote work #office work #procrastination #personal space at the office

25 notes · View notes