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Roughly a quarter of the way into 2020, I found myself forcibly thrust into a work from home situation. The initial surges of Covid-19 in the United States pushed most office-based workers into remote employment and many of us are still there. Within a week or two, I found myself feeling constantly agitated, irritated and disorganized. My sleep schedule was getting worse and by mid-April, I felt less productive than I had in years even though I was ‘working’ more hours than ever.
Despite being somewhat of an introvert, I have never enjoyed working from home. I’ve always found that having other people around has helped me focus my thoughts in a way that can be a struggle when I’m in a quiet room by myself. I’ve often found myself feeling very focused in a busy coffee shop but daydreaming while trying to do the same work at home. I’ve also never been bothered by time spent commuting. I always looked at my commute as a nice time to read, catch up on news and be ‘alone.’
As time passed, I forced myself into a better sleep schedule and the weather in Chicago got progressively warmer. March and early April felt unusually cold, windy and rainy. (Was that in my head? Probably.) By the end of April, the sun had started peeking through and it felt pretty damn good to get outside even if the temperatures were only in the 50’s. I found myself falling into what I thought was a bad habit: smoking a cigar almost every evening, sometimes two.
I’ve been an occasional cigar smoker for a while, mostly while playing golf or on a special occasion but I never came close to the frequency I started hitting by May 2020. I realized pretty quickly that on the nights where I was able to smoke a cigar, I felt much more relaxed and clear-headed. That is especially surprising when you consider the effect tobacco has on your heart rate while smoking. Medically speaking, cigars really shouldn’t have settled me down.
After some thought, it hit me: the cigar as a signal to my mind that I was done for the day. I stopped thinking about work when the cigar was lit and typically didn’t even look at my computer afterwards. I was turned off for the evening.
That led me to think about whether I could do something similar in the morning. If a signal in my routine worked at night, why not in the morning? I tried getting up and going for a run every morning, but I’ve never really liked running. I do like reading. So, I tried reading every morning and made sure to get up early enough to give myself time to do that. I found myself running out of fresh books to read, so I got my first newspaper subscription (digitally). I now had a ready source of new things to read every morning and I found that setting aside time each morning helped keep my thoughts clear throughout the day.
Unconsciously, I had a routine before that was put on me by others. I was expected to be at the office at a certain time and had a goal to be home by a certain time. All the rituals that came along with that gave some structure to daily life. When that disappeared, I felt somewhat adrift and needed to fall into a new routine before I figured out why. What I stumbled on wasn’t exactly mind-blowing. A lot of people would say that following a good routine can enable success. I doubt most of those people would say that I’d developed a ‘good’ routine. My advice: If it’s within reason, don’t put too much pressure on the ‘good’ part. Find a routine that works for you and helps balance your mindset. If it isn’t perfect, that’s ok, as long as it helps you get things done.
Those of you reading from the Chicago area just got dumped with about a foot of snow and might be thinking: Are you still going out to smoke a cigar? The answer is no, I started eating a small bowl of ice cream every night after dinner instead 😊.
Photo by Valiant Made
