UrbanUpdate

Working from home has become the new normal during coronavirus lockdown, at least for the lucky people who are still employed and haven’t been designated “essential.” We’re all adjusting to professionally Zooming where we’re personally Tiger King-ing. And without a commute, it seems one of the most urgent challenges is turning off at the end of the day, knowing where “work” ends and “home” begins.

Of course, in the digital age, disconnecting has never been straightforward: when your channels of communication—and, subsequently, you—are always on, leaving work at work is going to be a struggle. But if you’re accustomed to working in an office, then at least you used to have physical separation between your professional and personal life—now coronavirus has collapsed that space. Add the fact that being in that same collapsed space day after day (after day) is already taxing our mental health, and you’ve got a true anxiety cocktail. The need to turn off is both more difficult and more urgent than ever. But how?

First, it helps to understand the importance of boundaries, which are as much about internal orientation as they are about external separation. Erasing the space between your office and your home doesn’t just eliminate a physical barrier—it also deletes the space between your personal and professional identities, which can be confusing, psychologically.

“You need to have your mindset reinforced by various cues,” says Nancy Rothbard, who chairs the Management Department at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and who warns that “segmenters"—people who prefer a sharp line between personal and professional selves—are going to have a more challenging time than people who are “integrators,” and don’t mind a messy blurring of identities. “What you’re wearing, where you’re sitting, how you’re interacting [with people], these are cues to yourself about what identity you’re enacting in that environment.”

Why does that identity matter? Because you bring parts of yourself to work that you may not even be aware you’re bringing, parts that can be primed to emerge by physical cues and spaces. It's “almost like training a dog” says psychotherapist Barry Michels, psychotherapist and best-selling author. “No matter what you do for work, there's an element of creativity. Even if it's just the creativity required to work for another hour when you're exhausted, you need creativity in your work to keep it fresh, to come up with new ideas, to keep yourself going. And creativity doesn't come from the conscious mind; it comes from the unconscious. Think about it: if it pops into your head, it's got to be coming from a part of you of which you are unaware.”

Turning off those parts—and letting them recharge—is as important as turning them on. Here are three ideas that might help you.

Switch your context

James Clear’s book Atomic Habits is, effectively, an instruction manual for building better habits, assembled from Clear’s keen insights into the intricacies (and shortcomings) of human behavior. Among his chief lessons is the idea that physical spaces have behavioral biases. Do something over and over in a place, then each time you're there, you’ll find yourself pulled towards repeating that behavior. So one way to reestablish a border between your “work” and your “home” is to do just that: reestablish a physical border as much as you can. Designate certain spaces for certain behaviors. Clear calls this “one space, one use.” It's a way to wall-in your work, rather than letting it happen everywhere you live.

Of course, this is easier to if you’re quarantined inside, say, a house, which not everyone is. But even if you’re not quarantined in the Friends apartment, you can make micro adjustments: sit in the same seat at your table every time you’re answering emails; move a chair into a different space in the apartment and designate that the only area where you read or do creative work.

If you have absolutely zero flexible space, then try to create barriers in other ways. Clear has a friend who only writes on his desktop computer, only reads on his iPad, and only uses his phone to communicate. Michels suggests creating a temporal separation if you can: start and end your “work day" at the same time every day. Rothbard floats the idea of separating visual forms of communications (like Zoom) from auditory ones (like phone calls), choosing one medium for meetings and one for catching up with friends.

Maybe you’re thinking: I get that this will help me with structuring work, but how does it help me turn off? Because at the end of your work day, you’re able to remove yourself from the physical spaces in which you work—a switching of context cues that will help your brain transition more smoothly into post-work mode. As Rothbard puts it, it’s meant “to signal to yourself: This is something different. This is not a continuation of the endless stream of work.”

Create a “shutdown ritual”

Though changing your physical context can be a powerful signal to yourself that work is over, you can amplify its impact by creating a “shutdown ritual.” That’s a term used by Cal Newport, whose book Deep Work explores the practice of highly focused mono-tasking. He often does that deep work from home, and thus knows a few things about pulling himself out of a deep work hole.

His shutdown ritual involves planning for the next day (if he still has the energy), “closing open loops” (checking your inbox to make sure you didn’t miss anything urgent and looking at your calendar for the next day, two things that “give your mind confidence that it’s okay to stop at the moment”), and then saying a phrase that indicates work is done until the morning. In his case, it’s “schedule shutdown confirmed” (used somewhat facetiously, he says).

“You want to change your energy. I don’t mean in some kind of woo-woo way."

According to Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist who works at Stanford, rituals are important, especially right now. “In an unpredictable, difficult world, they enable you to have some prediction and control over what happens in your life, some structure in what could be a completely unstructured time,” he says. His shutdown ritual? He and his wife walk the dog, spend some time in the hot tub, and make a martini.

The important thing here isn’t what you do (maybe you have a cocktail shaker, but not a Jacuzzi), but that you do something to replace and simulate your commute, which is a built-in shutdown ritual. Have a regular dinner time. Go for a safe, socially distant walk. Change your clothes.

“A ritual is a set of behaviors—sometimes it involves sacred or special objects—that signifies a crossing over from one state to another state,” says Michels. He cites a marriage ceremony or saying of grace before a meal—nothing substantively changes, but an important shift is signaled. “It’s a way of signifying that we are ending one activity and beginning another. The reason that’s significant and helpful is that, again, it cues the unconscious: ‘Okay, this is a stopping and a crossing over into another activity, for which I may not need you at all, or for which I may need you in a completely different way than I needed you before.’” It gives you permission to relax.

Change your energy

When you're working from home, work-breaking situations happen much more abruptly. Your child freaks out about the crusts on her sandwich just as you log on for a noon presentation—or you have to go straight from a tense Zoom meeting to making a grocery list with your partner. Either way, you’re less present, less able to deliver 100 percent brainpower to the task at hand. “Research shows that if you’re stressed out in a meeting, it’s harder to focus on the next thing,” says Rothbard. “You have to regulate that negative emotion, and that’s distracting.”

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Hence the importance of the third step of effectively turning off. After you’ve switched your physical context and engaged in a shutdown ritual, don’t rush into whatever’s next. Allow yourself some space and time to gracefully transition.

“You want to change your energy,” says Clear. “I don’t mean in some kind of woo-woo way. When you’ve been working for four hours and you start to feel fatigued, a lot of the time that’s when people order a pizza or binge shop online.” There’s nothing wrong with finding comfort in food or retail therapy at a time like this. But Clear’s point is about intention: you don’t want to let mental fatigue habitually aim you toward unhealthy behaviors that you may regret. He remembers one time, tired at the end of a long work day, when he was preparing to order a pizza for dinner. Instead he decided to do one set of push ups. He ended up doing three sets, splashing water on his face, and realizing he actually didn’t want pizza. “My realization was, oh, all I really wanted was to feel differently. I just wanted to get that fresh start.”

But changing your energy isn’t really about winning the war against pizza. It’s also about more effectively doing your work. Like anything else, work reaches a point of diminishing returns. At some point, switching to “off” mode will make you that much more effective when it’s time to turn back on. You'll come back restored, with your brain having ruminated on issues that came up during the day—a key (but, in our overworked, productivity-obsessed culture, uncomfortably passive) step in the creative, problem-solving process. (You know this is true if you’ve ever turned a problem over and over and over in your head, given up, gone to do something else—take a shower, wash the dishes, get some exercise—and BOOM, the solution comes out of nowhere.) It’ll also help you sleep better, and sleep, of course, helps protect both your immune system and your sanity.

“There is research that shows that what you do before you go to sleep has an impact on the quality of sleep, and your engagement, your ability to focus, the next day,” says Rothbard. Passive leisure activities, like watching TV or reading a book, were associated with better sleep than doing something like answering work emails. “If you continue doing work emails right before you go to bed, they stay in your head as you’re going to sleep.”

And if there’s one thing none of us need right now, it’s emails in our sleep.

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