So, you are quarantined-up (or voluntarily practicing social distancing, which is good) and ready to take on your first day as a stay-at-home artist!
Here I am, coffee in hand, kinda awake, ready to start my workday… But… Something feels off, I don’t really find myself in the right mindset to get any work done…
The task for today is very simple, get out of your god damn pijamas and put some work clothes on! While pijamas are great, cozy, warm and cuddly, they by no means transmit an “I’m ready for business!” mentality.
Changing clothes in the morning before you start working on your art career might seem like a silly thing to do, but it will help you feel ready to start off the day, it’ a mindset thing, it’s like telling your head, ok, we are up, we had breakfast we took a shower and now it’s time for work, no more goofing around!
Finding some sort of routine is a very important first step towards facing these next weeks of staying at home. That mindset change is crucial and challenging, especially if you don’t have any previous work-from-home experience, it might take some time to get used to it.
It’s not because it’s done at home that it’s less work! So here are 3 little ideas to help you get on the right mindset.
- Start early with a morning ritual
When we are working at the studio we usually just fall out of bed, drink some coffee, eat something quick and head out to the outside world and hope that our daily commute will help us fully wake up as we get there! Well, guess what, you don’t have a daily commute anymore so you will need to use this time to get your brain from ‘just woke up’ to ‘i’m ready for business.
What’s been working really well for me is establishing a morning ritual, a little set of actions performed in a particular order to start off my day, it goes a little bit like this: I wake up, around 7.30, snoozing up until 8. After that, I get out of bed and stretch for a while, then I drag my sleepy-ass into the kitchen for some coffee and breakfast which I enjoy in the balcony. With the coffee already in my bloodstream and a little bit more awake I then meditate for 10 minutes and take a shower. By 8.50 I’m sitting at my desk, going over the tasks I need to start doing at 9 am, the official start of the business day.
What’s important to note is that each step of that routine plays a specific role in getting me in the right mindset to tackle my day and makes my body slowly aware that the workday has started.
- Build a schedule
One of the main challenges I feel with working from home is not losing focus, I’m an easily distracted person,, so if I on top of that I need to be ‘figuring out’ what I should be doing at any given point of my day, I would be wasting a lot of time each.
With that in mind, I run my day on a very strict schedule, that specifies my starting time, lunch breaks, timeslots to work on each project and even takes into consideration my afternoon run.
Its something like
9 – Start working on Project A
11 – Coffee break
11.15 – Start working on Project B
13.15 – Lunch break
14 – Start working on Project C
16 – Afternoon run
17 Work on leftover tasks from Projects A, B, and C
18.45 Answer any last email and prepare tasks for the upcoming day.
19 – Dobby is a free elf!
- Get a dedicated workspace.
For more successful results while working from home, I would recommend taking a day off to prepare yourself for this new work situation, start off by assessing where you are going to work from, creating a working space will surely make a difference at putting you in a working-mentality. Try working from a proper table and avoid the temptation of working from the couch, that ain’t gonna help you get work done!
If you don’t have any dedicated table or area that you can use for working, make sure to clean up the workspace before you begin, to avoid unneeded distractions. So if you are working on the kitchen table, clean up the breakfast before you start.
These are my initial ideas on how to getting that work at home mindset!
I know that some of these points might need adjusting depending on your own personal needs, so let me know how you are coping with this issue of working from home, so please write down your experiences on the networks’ page!
See you guys tomorrow,
Stay safe, healthy and wash those god damm hands!