Balancing Writing with a Work From Home Job
When I’m working in the office, I’m able to draw a solid line between work and writing. I can get a little bit of writing stuff done in the morning before my work day starts, and during my lunch break. But now that I’m working from home full-time (and have been for a couple of weeks now), it’s a little harder to use those same pieces of time for writing. In the mornings, I’m staying in bed a little longer (a benefit of no commute), and during my lunch break, I’m often doing chores around the apartment.
Then when the day ends, I don’t have my commute home, but it means I’ve got some more time for chores, and since I’m doing more cooking from scratch, making dinner takes a little more time. Normally, I’d then sit back down at my computer after dinner and do some writing. But even though I switch between my work laptop and my personal laptop, it’s still sitting in the same spot I’ve been sitting all day, just staring at a slightly different screen.
These days, I’m finding I can get work done a little bit better if I can get away from my computer for a bit. I printed out a copy of a novella that I need to clean up, so if I take that and sit in a different part of the apartment, I can still work on a writing task while not being in front of my computer. This doesn’t work for the majority of my writing tasks, but at least getting that little bit of a change is a helpful thing. And I could draft longhand, as well, which would also be a change of pace.
My next step may be to set up a completely different workstation for my two laptops. They’ll still both need to use the same keyboard, so I can only really use one at a time, but I’m hopeful that the act of physically moving from one to the other (rather than always being in the same seat) might help reestablish that separation between work and writing!
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