Remote work exhaustion: 13 tips to reduce fatigue

But simply transitioning every in-person meeting to an online environment—and even piling on more virtual meet-ups to “make up” for lost face-to-face time—may be negatively impacting your employees. Don’t feel guilty and anxious because you are feeling fatigued some days. Rather, apply some of the ideas here to help you reduce the remote work fatigue, and perhaps even avoid it sometimes. Restrict most, if not all, your work to certain hours when you feel productive (for most people, it’s the morning). As odd as it may sound, consider some less efficient habits. Another potential burnout issue for freelancers is that they can jump from project to project, client to client, in a matter of months. In that case, most of their communication will involve people who are unfamiliar with their personality.

Workplace bonding is good, and I must note that I met many of my closest friends through work, which is next to impossible on a remote gig. That seemingly useless office chitchat is good for you; you are forced to take a break and interact with other people. However, if you are a remote workaholic, you can get up in the morning, start working, and utter your first words of the day when you go out for remote work fatigue lunch, or worse, order takeout. It is also important to distinguish between hard-core nomads and people who just like to extend their holidays by a few weeks. If you spend a few years on the road, sooner or later you’ll start to detach from old friends and lose the familiarity and certainty of home. Basically, you can turn any place into your home, but at some point you won’t feel at home anywhere.

Meet Up With Colleagues in Real Life

For example, I became anxious about driving months before I figured out what was wrong, which would have been a much bigger problem if I was supposed to commute https://remotemode.net/ to work. I might have caught the symptoms earlier, and consequently, addressed them sooner. My failure to act on these early symptoms made things worse.

That’s because exhausting your brain’s focus circuits drains your energy. Research shows that focusing when you’re tired without taking breaks can erode your self-control, make you act more impulsively and become less helpful to your teammates.

So What Can Remote Workers Do?

Consider the option of taking calls instead of video chats so that you feel less drained and have the option to walk around or get moving while you talk. Sleep pattern that include insomnia, or on the other side of the spectrum, chronic fatigue. For individuals who typically experience anxiety or depression, these symptoms may be exacerbated, or show up for the first time. 45% of US full-time employees were working from home and benefiting from eliminating their commute, reducing the stress of being in the office, and having more time with their families. Develop ways to make sure every employee feels heard, valued and included. In fact, being too hard on yourself is likely to sink your morale further and make you work even slower. When your work from home days become a slog, the solution may be to back off instead of doubling down.

• The research about working from home has long shown that most people are less physically active when working from home.
• A key to having energy is to reduce fatigue early in your workday.
• As leaders, we need to model the healthy habits we want our employees to practice, and communication certainly tops the list, whether your team is sitting in the same room or scattered across the globe.
• As leaders in the midst of a public health crisis, it’s our responsibility to encourage our team to share their burdens, professional and personal, and do what we can to help lessen them.
• For instance, set up a desk in a designated area of the house.
• Caffeine, stress, and sugar are a bad mix; caffeine can make anxiety worse, mess up your digestive system, lead to more sweating, urination, and so on.
• Work from home is not always as fun as you might have expected.

Or you can use the same virtual meeting software, but tell everyone you’ll be using voice instead of video. This should become your new virtual call ritual, just like you’d silence your phone or set your Slack status to “away” before walking into an in-person meeting. The more you can prepare for and eliminate distractions, the more focused you’ll be during your video call. If you have to take multiple virtual calls, try to space them out in your day by leaving at least 1-2 hours between meetings. You’ll be able to recharge and give each call your full attention.