The Freedom That Comes With Routine [4/5]

Mark: But my next question is obviously, about the organization of your day. A lot of students are now at home, and we were just talking before we started off air there, just about this idiosyncratic work, where we’re not necessarily asking students to stick to the time table that they had at school. With our teachers at work or at home, they’ve got a myriad of jobs to do, that they need to get to their students at a certain point. What advice would you give about even just understanding what you should do with your day? You’ve got this certain amount of hours and what do you do with all those hours and how do you get your job done still, when you might just want to watch Netflix all day.

 

Rocky: This is super important. And I’ve got a 15 year old and we spoke about this, but thankfully she’s a little bit motivated. So she came up with this herself and it’s definitely something that I would recommend. When you would go to school as a student, you had a timetable and it was a very structured routine. And when you’re at home, that can go out the window. And I can tell you that, I work from home as a business person, and it’s important to have structure or otherwise, things just get away from you. And I would actually say that it’s important to try to get up. I think one of the worst things that can happen right now, is that you go, “Oh, I don’t have to go to school.” So you stay up later and then you get up later. And I think that would be one of the worst things that you can do.

Now, here’s the big problem right now, Mark. Human beings are creatures of habit, so whether we know it or not, we’ve got a whole bunch of habits, good and not so good. And all of those habits have been completely upended and torn apart. So if you were someone who would go to the gym, or who would play sport or who would do whatever, that’s now all stopped. So it’s super important that you don’t fill that space with just sitting and binge watching Netflix. Now, I just want to say to you, I binge watch Netflix too. So cool, binge watch Netflix, but there should be a certain time that you do that. You might say, “From this time to that time, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to do three hours of Netflix.” Great, but you’ve scheduled that.

And I think you’ve got to have a schedule. So I would say to all of the people who are working from home right now, student and non-student, come up with a bit of a timetable, come up with a structure of what you’re going to do. The people who are working from home, you could be sending emails at nine or 10 o’clock at night, because you’ve been not doing that much throughout the day. Does that make sense?

So it’s really important to have a time and place for all of this, so then you can just switch off and say… Otherwise, where’s work and where’s home? Where’s work and where’s relax? Because, now it’s all one space. So go into a particular space to work, have certain times where you do that. And then when you don’t, get out of that space and relax and do whatever you want to do.

 

Mark: Rocky, you just reminded me, I’m going to share a little story of a really good friend of mine, Tony  Lopez. He is the creator of a comic strip called Insanity Streak. And he’s published in the Daily Telegraph every day and the Sunday Telegraph’s. Essentially a fairly famous guy, right?

But his job is to work each day from home, creating a comic strip and drawing it and getting it ready to send off to different publications. So when he initially did this job, he said to me, he goes, “I’d just get out of bed. I wouldn’t get changed. I’d sit in my room. I’d watch stuff.” He said, “I found it really difficult.” This is extreme, but obviously things were going okay for him. He built an office in his backyard. And then he said to me, he goes, “Once the office was built and ready.” And he goes, “I got up every morning, I changed, I walked to work. It was about 12 steps, but I still took those 12 steps.” And he goes, “It was a total game changer for me, to feel like I went somewhere and went to a space that was work and then walk back and I was home.”

So I love what you said about – it just reminded me of what you said about separation. We need to be pretty considerate of creating whatever schedule works for us. But then we need to have some separation between, where our work life ends or our school day ends. And our leisure time begins, because you’re right, we could find ourselves doing nothing during the day and then about nine o’clock going, “Wow, I’m so far behind.” And then, like you said, we’re not going to sleep on time and everything starts to unravel.

 

Rocky: Exactly right. That’s exactly right. Yeah.

 

Related Links:

Part 1:

https://humanconnections.com.au/blog/your-emotions-are-friendly-messengers/

Part 2:

https://humanconnections.com.au/blog/managing-your-emotional-state/

Part 3:

https://humanconnections.com.au/blog/reframing-responding-to-what-is-3-5/

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