Work from Home Tips with Joy, Stella, and Victoria
Work from Home Tips with Joy, Stella, and Victoria
On this episode of Financially Naked: Stories from The Financial Gym, our host is Joy Liu, Level 2 Trainer. She is joined by Stella Gold, Level 3 Trainer, and Victoria Sechrist, Level 3 Trainer, to talk about tips for working at home.
Podcast Notes
Stella and Victoria have been working for The Financial Gym for 15 months, and they both have been working from home since October 2019. Joy has been with The Gym for several years, as she was the second employee, after Bridget. Joy has always been remote, because she lives in North Carolina.
The biggest adjustment for Joy, when she started working from home, was creating a routine for her time, because when she lived in New York, she commuted and worked in an office.
Stella makes sure “morning ritual” is in her work calendar. This includes making a to-do list of what to anticipate. She makes sure every white space in her calendar has a purpose. She updates her calendar on a daily basis, because things change so quickly.
When Stella worked in an office, she was always on and she didn’t schedule time in her calendar to prepare herself. She thrived on that, because more serendipitous things would happen. Now, she does her morning routine for a half hour to set the tone for the day and then the next half hour she plans out her to-do list and what to expect.
Victoria’s commute used to be two hours one way with no WiFi. Now she can take more meetings. Her morning ritual is to do her daily Bible readings. She uses blessedisshe.com as a guide. Since she has no commute, she has been able to volunteer to do more late night appointments for people on the west coast or in Alaska.
Victoria has found a lot of freedom blocking time in her calendar for lunch or a buffer between meetings.
Like money, if we don’t dictate what we do with our time, we will still spend it on something. Without a commute, Victoria has more time to meal plan and meal prep.
When working from home, it is easy to work too much. Stella puts an alert in her phone and does a body scan every three hours with the Mindful app. Progress not perfection.
Victoria needs to do tangible things to stop working. She doesn’t allow herself to check her work email when she is in bed, because it is hard not to respond.
Victoria’s goal is to be done with work at either 9:00 pm or 10:00 pm every night and then relax. She recently decided that if she is wearing her Financial Gym shirt she is working and if she isn’t wearing it, she isn’t working.
Joy doesn’t have her work email on her phone. Her laptop is just down the hall and it is very easy to get to. She also turned off notifications on her work calendar.
Stella feels better when she gets ready for the day, like she is going out, because she feels like she is in control of her day. When she doesn’t get ready, she feels lazy for the whole day.
Victoria hasn’t worn makeup on a regular basis in about 10 years, because it saves so much time, and she doesn’t normally do a lot with her hair. She is more concerned with feeling comfortable in her clothing every day. You need to figure out what you need to feel ready for the day.
The term work/life balance has been debunked years ago. Joy has gotten used to integrating her work and life and thinks it is important to think of her clients regularly. Her work is her life and it isn’t a good or bad thing.
Team members at The Gym use Slack to connect. They post memes and interact through this platform. One Trainer told coworkers to block time on his calendar so he could get to know them. The last Friday of the month, remote Gym employees host a happy hour called Wine and Win.
If working remotely is something new and something you want to continue after COVID-19, document all of your wins and share those with your supervisor. When Stella switched to remote work, she found that she had a lot more time to work and is more productive.
It is normal to feel isolated when you work from home. It takes creativity to work through that.
Think about your non-negotiables, outside of work, that you need to do before you go to bed. This could include spending time with a spouse, movement, getting outside, etc.
Resources Mentioned
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