The Balancing Act of Hybrid Work and Writing
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
My day job has recently implemented our hybrid work plan, in which we work from both the office and home, depending on our position and needs. For me, that means that most weeks, I work from the office three days and from home two days. (My schedule is slightly flexible because my editing work is often more efficient to do from home, so I occasionally get to work from home three days a week instead.)
It also worked out that because of other things on my schedule, I work from the office on the days when typically I get the most writing done during the week. But now that I’m back to my normal commute, I “finish” my day almost an hour after I finish when I’m working from home, which cuts down on the amount of time that I have to work on writing. In addition, working in the office and commuting often takes a larger toll on my energy levels than rolling out of bed half an hour before I start work and moving to the other side of the room at the end of the day. So I’m finding that I need to rebalance my expectations of what is possible to do on a weeknight on the days when I work in the office.
This also means that my weekend writing time is becoming more valuable to me, as I can often get a larger chunk of time to write, and I can often do several of these chunks with just short breaks in between. So I might be able to work 45 minutes to an hour on three or four projects, whereas on weeknights, I’m lucky if I can do 15 to 30 minutes on each project.
What this looks like, then, is only giving myself one or two tasks on weeknights, and saving things that work better with longer chunks for the weekends. It also means that weeknights may be better used doing business of writing tasks rather than putting words on virtual paper. Because I do time tracking, I should get some good data over the next few weeks that I can use to really see how I can most efficiently use the time I have. So my current plan is to try out this slightly different schedule and see how it works. And then, if it’s not working, I can adjust again!
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