How to work remotely without burning out

While many of us have done some remote work in the past, the way we’re currently experiencing work and working remotely is entirely different. Whether you were always in the office before or you worked from home once a week or even if you were already fully remote, being remote in the times of covid-19 is bringing up all kinds of issues we’ve never faced before. 

Now, when people work from home (or other remote locations), they’re not just working remotely. They’re working in quarantine, with their kids, with their significant others, with their roommates, or all alone with no other humans coming within six feet for weeks or even months on end. 

They’re trying to keep up with their normal workload while also teaching their kids long division, which by the way, they don’t remember how to do. They’re trying to carve out space to work for themselves and their significant other, and now they’re working standing up in the kitchen with their laptop balanced on an old amazon prime box. They’re trying to show up to meetings ready to solve problems and get things done but they’re also feeling demotivated because they haven’t seen another human face in ages and all they want to do is eat ice cream bars and watch old episodes of Bones.

People are anxious and overwhelmed right now. They’re not sleeping well. They keep going to the kitchen to get a snack even though they’re not hungry. They’re working on the weekends and in the evenings because they’re not getting enough done during the day. It’s hard to decide what to spend their energy on, and once they do, it’s nearly impossible to focus, because they keep wondering if they should be doing something else instead. 

If you’re feeling super burned out from working remotely, you are not alone. But you also don’t have to keep feeling the way you’re feeling. 

You can eliminate remote work burnout. 

The way to do it is to take things moment by moment. 

Taking things moment by moment means dealing with each situation on its own rather than stacking all the situations up into something too big to handle. 

When we don’t know how long something will last, we imagine it lasting forever. We imagine having to deal with it over and over again with no breaks, improvements, or resources. 

Taking things moment by moment pulls us out of this tendency and reminds us that in any moment, all we have to handle is THIS moment. It’s not about telling yourself that the moment isn’t hard. It’s ok if you think the moment is hard. It’s ok if you have negative feelings about the moment. But it’s also reminding yourself that all you’re dealing with now is this one moment.

In real life, it looks like this: reminding yourself that you will not always be working from home standing up in your kitchen balancing your laptop on an amazon prime box. That might be what’s happening today. And it might happen tomorrow. But you don’t need to handle today and tomorrow at the same time (and spoiler alert: you can’t). All you need to do is handle it today. All you need to do is handle it for this 30-minute meeting.

And you can handle it when you take it moment by moment. 

Think about it. If you knew that things would go back to normal tomorrow or in a week, you would be like, ok, I can handle this until then. You might not prefer it. But you could handle it.

It might seem like having that end date is what solved your problem, but it’s not. What really solves your problem in this scenario is that you stop obsessing about the future and come back to the current moment, which is always handle-able. 

When we imagine things lasting forever in the future, we overwhelm ourselves by accident. 

In the one moment, we can figure out how to handle the situation. But when we imagine all those future moments of stress and struggle, we overwhelm ourselves. It’s like the difference between thinking about writing one email and imagining writing all the emails we’ll ever write in our whole lives. 

Of course the second one is overwhelming. But it’s also not real. We never need to write ALL the emails at once. We just need to write the emails we need to write today. And we write them one at a time, one sentence at a time, one word at a time. We don’t need to overwhelm ourselves imagining the hundreds of letters and minutes that will be required. Likewise, we don’t need to know how to handle all the remote work. We just need to handle the current moment as best we can. 

It looks like this. First, take a deep breath. Most of us aren’t doing that enough right now, and breath helps to calm the body. Calming the body helps us be in this moment we’re actually in, instead of letting our brains spin out into terrible, imaginary futures. 

Next, look around you. Notice what’s actually happening in neutral terms. You’re in your kitchen. Your computer is sitting on a box. You’re standing or maybe you’re sitting down. Even if this is not the reality you prefer, it’s actually ok. Even if you’d rather be in the office, you can be here now. You can be here, take another breath, give your two cents in the meeting you’re currently attending, and carry on. 

Notice the difference between what’s actually happening in this moment and all the shit your brain is saying about it. The difference between, I’m standing in my kitchen and this is terrible and will never end. One of those is the real, current moment. The other one is just your brain freaking itself out. 

Tuning into what’s real and true in the now will help you take things moment by moment. 

And taking things moment by moment will get you anywhere you need to go. It will get you to the other side of this pandemic, and it will also get you through negotiating a new salary. You can use it to work remotely without burning out and you can also use it to tackle that really hard project at work. 

Try it today. It will change everything. 

And if you want to learn how to implement this tool at hyperspeed, I’m currently accepting 1:1 clients. After six months of coaching with me, my clients are more resilient at work and at home. They have better relationships, create more meaning in their work, and take on new, exciting challenges. Sign up for your consult here: https://www.korilinn.com/work-with-me.