Pooh Bear’s lack of pants doesn’t seem to bother anyone. He’s a bear. Bears don’t wear pants. Sure, but bears also don’t wear shirts. Yet, we see sweet Pooh searching for honey, reaching for honey, getting in all kinds of sticky (sorry) situations because of honey, all while wearing a bright red shirt and nothing below the waist. Lately, I’ve resembled Pooh Bear more than I care to admit — both in wardrobe and in gluttonous behavior. I blame my virtual office. You can too. But there are actions we can take, practices we can enact, that can break our cycle of Pooh Bear procrastination. Here are five.
1. Get Dressed
Let’s start with the hardest one. The modern-day mullet is no longer a hairstyle with business up front, party in the back. It’s an entire outfit that’s business up top, sweatpants down low. And yes, it’s more comfortable. And yes, it works for Zoom meetings.
But it also makes it impossible to get our mindset out of relaxation mode and into get stuff done mode.
Putting on pants — real pants, like with a zipper — is the simplest first step to moving toward a mentality of work and productivity. No one outside of your home will see that you’ve taken the extra effort today, but you’ll know. And shouldn’t that be enough?
2. Eat Breakfast
While we could walk through the litany of reasons why breakfast is “the most important meal of the day,” the nutritious benefits are actually not the only reason we need to eat breakfast. Our body was built for rhythms.
One rhythm that you’ve probably heard of is circadian. And while that 24-hour cycle most commonly relates to how you sleep, when you eat also has an impact on the ease (or difficulty) with which your body responds to whatever life throws at it.
Need we go through the list of what life aka 2020 has thrown at us? The fact that “murder hornets” are the least of our concerns should tell us everything we need to know.
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That’s why something as simple as a three-meal routine where your body knows when it’s going to be replenished is crucial to staying both physically and mentally healthy.
3. Use One Screen at a Time
Is the Tour de France on my TV as I write this? Well, it was. Until I realized I hadn’t moved past the Pooh Bear paragraph for 45 minutes.
We’ve all checked Twitter during a Zoom meeting or had a show on in the background while we “worked.” But our brain wasn’t built for that.
While multi-tasking is often praised as a skill and a virtue, it’s more of a vice. Why? Because we have a limited amount of cognitive energy.
When we try to do two things at once, our brain is forced to block out one thing so it can focus on the other. This takes an excessive amount of cognitive energy and leaves us more vulnerable to shallow thinking and simple mistakes. Multi-tasking is just incessant task switching, which is the opposite of productive.
4. Get Something Big Done Early
Mark Twain once said, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”
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What does this have to do with a virtual office? Everything.
With no one around you motivating you to do your work, no boss or co-workers in your physical surroundings, self-motivation is now a must-have for employees of any level.
And the best self-starters know that it’s not about getting a million tasks done in a day. It’s about picking the one task that will start the cycle. Because if you get your big hairy audacious task done in the morning, you’ve already accomplished something. Your day could technically be done, but in reality, it isn’t. It’s just getting started. Because productivity begets productivity.
5. Stroll Instead of Scroll
Another function of the workplace that we’re missing is the little interruptions throughout the day — the conversations and chats, walks down the hall, and even just the passing soft smile from a nearby cubicle.
The easiest way to replace this in a virtual office is on social media. But scrolling aimlessly, looking for nothing but a breather or a break, gives us neither.
Instead, taking a walk outside, or even around your apartment, gives your body a chance to breathe and move and replenish the endorphins that are dying painful deaths as you sit immovable at your desk.
Using social media to turn off your brain isn’t all bad, but if you can replace one scroll break with a quick walk, you’ll come back to work feeling better than when you left.
Now, this list was supposed to stop at five, but this sixth one is on the house: forgive yourself.
When you wake up tomorrow having completely forgotten everything you just read and you find yourself hungry and half-naked at half-past noon having done a whole lot of nothing, let it go.
We get as many fresh starts as we want. Take them. Use them. Give yourself grace, not because you deserve it — none of us do — but because you need it. I know I do.