Post pandemic world has become more digital, technology-dependent. We have seen all working in distributed and remote model comfortably. This has allowed many of us to work from home.
With work from home, many times we tend to lose the sense of time. This does have an impact on our health and mental stress.
Before COVID we used to work from 9 to 6, whereas post-COVID-19 we started working from 9 to 9 or more. This was because of the comfort we get while working from home as well as an increase in expectations from the work. The current work has started the expectation to be available anytime and all time. Many started accommodating the same considering the benefits of Work from Home, No Office travel. This has hampered many who did not do time management effectively. The overall productivity and deliverables have seen improved but overall efficiency have dropped due to the unseen and indirect impacts.
If you are facing this, working overtime, not able to manage your time, see unending work then it’s not only you, many are facing this situation.
The effective solution is Time Management. We will see how we can use EI skills for time management.
1. Plan – we don’t need to plan everything 100% what could be our day. But yes, we can for sure plan the breaks, me time. This helps you to isolate and break from the continuous work. This will also help you in ensuring a healthy lifestyle. While planning, understand your work style by using the concept of “self-awareness”. If you plan based on your strengths and weakness, it would help you to make a more realistic plan to understand and implement.
2. Use a tool to collect data on your daily habits & Put discipline – Once you plan, we need to put discipline to follow it. There may be changes in the plan but discipline will help you to manage and control the changes effectively. If you allow changes to take control, everything would be out of control. Start saying NO sometimes to ensure it does not overburden you. Here while putting discipline you may get resistance from your own unintentionally. Here you need to observe emotional changes while implementing discipline to yourself. Understand and control the emotions to impact the discipline and its implementation positively.
3. Seek feedback – Many times, we have challenges in controlling emotions and putting discipline in understanding where we are going wrong. We don’t see many things which we are doing in the wrong way. seeking feedback from your family friends will help you to get feedback. Use the feedback constructively to improve your efforts, plan. At times, listening to your friends and family with an open mind provide very crucial feedback about your behaviour and habits which we miss during our self-assessment.