How To Make Remote Work Fun (Even During Quarantine)
Five ideas to shake up your routine and get your motivation back while working from home.
For all its benefits, there’s one harsh truth about remote work — it can get boring pretty fast. Especially if you’re self-isolating or currently in lockdown.
The monotony of staying the same place, day in day out, has our brain screaming for some novelty and stimulation. If you can change location two or three times a week, it can make a massive difference to keep you motivated.
Work can’t always be fun, but you can take action to make it more enjoyable when you’re struggling with low motivation and boredom. This is something remote workers need to pay special attention to. While aspects of office work like interruptions and commute are deemed negative, they aren’t entirely without their benefits. One of those benefits is acting as a separation between your job and your personal time.
But what if you can’t just go to a coffee shop or a co-working space? What else can you do to make remote work less repetitive and more engaging?
This National Fun At Work Day is the perfect opportunity to learn how to add some novelty to your remote work hours, create a virtual community to keep you accountable, leverage your hobbies to make tasks more enjoyable, and how to gamify your work to make it more exciting.
Change your schedule
If you don’t have a fixed schedule, change it up from time to time. Especially if you’re feeling bored with your routine or unhappy with the results you’re getting from the time you spend on a task.
Many remote positions allow for some flexibility, so you don’t need to work from 9 to 5. You don’t even have to work on the same days as everyone else if that really doesn’t work for you.
Freeing up different times of the day from your usual routine can open up new possibilities. Who knows? You might find you do your best work at 6 am, freeing up most of the afternoon for hobbies or to spend with family. Or maybe you discover having a longer lunch break frees up a bit of time to rest and relax before getting back to work, even if it means starting earlier or working later than usual.
For instance, I’ve found that I do my best work later in the morning, with a peak focus window from about 12 pm to 2 pm. So, when I allow myself to do my most important task of the day I find I get more done, and the work feels more fun and satisfying than powering through the same task at 3 pm when I’d much rather be taking a nap.
Listen to audiobooks or podcasts
You can make repetitive tasks more fun by pairing them with an enjoyable book or show.
In her book “How To Change”, Katy Milkman introduces the term “temptation bundling”, or pairing a pleasurable activity with a demanding but worthwhile task to make work seem more appealing.
So, if your to-do list includes a task you’re not looking forward to tackling, pair it with something a lot more enjoyable.
In my case, I have a list of enjoyable things I can pair with those parts of the job that feel like a drag. For instance:
- Audiobooks (or even a TV show I’ve watched before) go well with tasks that don’t require a lot of focus, like social media scheduling or replying to comments.
- Sound baths and a cup of tea for tasks that need more concentration, like researching and writing.
- A new TV show for my evening workout. It might sound strange to do squats and bench presses while watching Downton Abbey, but it’s the only time of the day I’m allowing myself to watch it. So, if I want to know what happens next, I need to get off the couch and do my daily workout.
Gamify work
Gamifying boring tasks raises the stakes and brings out our competitive nature. If HR departments are using it to increase employee engagement in their companies, why shouldn’t you use it to make working from home more enjoyable?
There are a ton of ways you can gamify work.
If you work with a team, creating bingo games or badges for participants to get during a period is a fun way to motivate the team to get results or meet key metrics during stressful periods.
Freelancers and RPG fans can make the most out of apps like Habitica to add game elements to their daily work. Habitica’s productivity communities create weekly or monthly challenges for you to count your Pomodoro sessions, check in with your progress, get advice, and even win a small prize at the end.
The Utopify and Long Term Project groups (called ‘guilds’) are active communities and perfect for newbies interested in productivity.
Of course, actual games are not the only way to set up a reward system. You can do it by yourself. For instance, work on sprints with a small reward after each sprint, and a big reward at the end of your working day.
Take some time to get to know people at a personal level
Just because you work remotely, it doesn’t mean you can form strong bonds with your teammates. Share your passions and interests — a book or movie you loved, photos of your pet, or a personal achievement.
Watercooler Slack channels are perfect for this end. If you’re able to meet people in person, setting up small meetups for coworking and lunch can be a great way to get some work done and have time to know your coworkers.
As a freelancer, you might not even get the chance of sharing with a remote team on Slack or other messaging platforms. That’s where remote communities come into it.
You’ll find community ideas here https://www.unita.co/explore-communities/?sort=top-rated&category=remote-workers
Pair work with a hobby or skill you enjoy
Having hobbies you enjoy without the pressure of monetizing them or making them “productive” is crucial to your mental health. When the lines between work and leisure become blurry, a hobby is one of the last places you can enjoy yourself without worrying about results.
However, hobbies teach you skills you can use to make your work more enjoyable. So, come up with ways to incorporate those skills into your work. For example, if you have artistic skills, why not create your own illustrations for a presentation instead of using overused stock photos or GIFs?
Takeaway
And there you have it. While work doesn’t have to be fun 100% of the time, you can take steps to make it more enjoyable when you’re struggling with boredom and a lack of motivation. By getting to know your coworkers or joining communities, gamifying your work, and changing some parts of your routine, you can make working from home fresh and fun again.
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