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Professionally speaking, many of us have been skin-starved for hugs and handshakes, wondering if these warm and comfortable social norms will ever return or if they have disappeared forever. Many of our introverted colleagues have declared that they have been waiting for this their entire lives ... working from home, with fewer social obligations, and milder and more manageable levels of stimulation.
Still some of our introverted cohort has admitted that enough is enough, and that even they are ready for some F2F (face-to-face) time. Here is the answer. Not yet. No movies. Be careful with restaurants. Still best to do take-out.
Don’t touch the gas pump. Forget travel. Especially Europe, as it doesn’t want us anyway. The message hasn’t really changed ... stay home as much as possible and put your mask on when you leave. You could get sick and die.
Oh, and, this year’s holiday party has been canceled. Maybe next year.
Instead, we have now become expert Zoomers, navigating our new meeting place and common room with optimism and hope that this will indeed be temporary. We have learned how to make the best of a really sucky situation, showing up to meetings with Mount Everest behind us, the French Riviera, or the Star Trek Bridge ... doing our best to go with it and embrace this new weirdness.
In addition, many well-intentioned managers have created “Zoom coffee breaks” and "virtual happy hours" in an attempt to incorporate a social component to the workday. Though this worked for a while and the efforts were appreciated, many of us are plain and simply Zoomed-out ... we are at max capacity for cyber-collaboration or socializing in any form.
We have learned how to maintain some of our sanity in these seemingly endless meetings with side conversations in the chat box, much like passing notes in middle school, hoping that we remembered to send this message individually and not to everyone. If the teacher sees it we could be in trouble.
Of course, the flip-side is that we are grateful for technology now more than ever, as if this pandemic had happened prior to the tech revolution, more than likely the world would have come to a screeching halt.
The paradox; however, is that the vast amount of mandatory screen-time is affecting our well-being. Human-beings, regardless of where we land along the spectrum of introversion and extroversion, still need some face-to-face interaction. Add to this the pandemic brain-fog we have been managing since March, and it is no surprise that we often find our mood has sunk after a Zoom-a-thon.
Here are some tips that may help:
- Set the bar at “do your best,” no more and no less. This will help prevent burnout.
- Take lots of short walks outside in between screen-meetings.
- Phone in when possible so that you can walk around while in the meeting rather than being stuck sitting in the same position for hours.
- Create a designated workspace if possible. Ideally, it is best to avoid working where our minds associate with relaxing. Even in a small living space, create a corner of the room that is inviting and that you use only to work.
- Schedule two times per day to answer email. The rest of the time fight off the urge to even peek as you will get swallowed up whole. Stick to this. The world will continue to spin.
- Draw a line in the sand as far as a time of the day when all screens are off. Commit to this and accept that what you have done for that day is it. The rest can wait until tomorrow.
- Call in "well." If you begin to smell burnout in the air, call in well and get off the grid. Send an out of office email just like you would have pre-pandemic.
- Carve out at least 15 minutes to call your own each day. Schedule this like you would a dentist appointment and do something enjoyable.
- Be grateful you have a job. Though working and learning virtually have been challenging in many ways, remind yourself that lots of people would trade places with you in a New York second ... you are still getting a paycheck.
- Breathe deeply. This is an immediate reset for the brain.
