Photo by iStockphoto.com/Morsa Images
It may already be your third week of working from home and sheltering in place. But things aren’t necessarily feeling much easier: Increased childcare responsibilities, less-than-ideal work setups, and the pressure to be productive during a global pandemic aren’t easy to adjust to.
Here are some tips and tricks from Sierra Club staff about how to make that transition a little more manageable. It’s not meant to be a generic list about how to set up a home office or look better on Zoom: Those are all over the internet, and we’re sure you’ve already found them. Rather, it’s a guide to getting a little more nature, a little more justice, and a little more humanity into your work-from-home routine.
1) Take a walk during lunch or before or after work. You don’t have to drive to a national park to enjoy nature -- in fact, it’s probably not a great idea right now. As long as you can keep six feet away from others, you shouldn’t miss this chance to enjoy the springtime sunshine and check out your neighborhood birds. With less human-made noise, it may be easier to hear them singing.
2) If walking outside feels too risky, or you’re just having a hectic workday, get your nature in digitally. Check out the Sierra Club’s Twitter and Instagram feeds for shots of mist flowing through forests, the surprisingly beautiful long-tailed weasel, and many other wilderness delights.
3) Eating a plant-based diet is a powerful method of decreasing your impact on the planet. But when you have to prepare lunch every day for work, it’s easy to fall back on eating sandwiches with sliced meat and cheese, pasta with cheese, or really anything involving cheese. Try using your time at home to prepare an easy plant-based meal.
4) Consciously make space for the human interactions you enjoyed when working from an office. Set up video socials and happy hours with fun themes. At the Sierra Club, we’ve had cat-centric coffee breaks, an origami social, and an opportunity to share the art that inspires our activism. If your workplace doesn’t yet have a Slack channel devoted to pictures of your coworker’s pets, fix that!
5) Make sure you have a comfortable work setup, complete with monitor, keyboard, and a good chair. And make it a place you like to spend time: Try putting up pictures of your friends and family, or things that make you laugh. You can also set up a windowsill garden using scraps of lettuce, garlic, or green onions. In this period of uncertainty, watching something grow can be deeply comforting.
7) Work as if we’re in the middle of a crisis. Because we are.
You are not working from home; you are at your home during a crisis trying to work."
I've heard this twice today. I think it's an important distinction worth emphasising.March 31, 2020
Sierra Club staff have a lot of practice working with a crisis at the top of our minds, whether it’s a massive oil spill or the climate crisis. We’ve learned it’s important to give yourself time to process and grieve, instead of relentlessly pushing yourself toward productivity. Right now, taking care of ourselves and one another is the most important work we can do. Building a better world after this pandemic is over means spending time building stronger bonds between ourselves, our neighbors, and our communities now.
8) Engage in mutual aid efforts outside of your paid work. It’s painful to watch this crisis unfold and feel powerless to stop it. But the truth is, we can all play a role in mitigating the worst impacts of the pandemic. Consider donating to local grassroots organizations coming to the aid of families and individuals struggling to survive these unprecedented times. Or check out this list of mutual aid projects across the country.