July 20, 2020 • 3 mins
With time and practice, life will get better
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to The New Corner Office,
the podcast where we share strategies for thriving in the
new world of work for location and hours are more
flexible than in the past. This week, I'll be sharing
a few tips from my new book called The New
Corner Office. It's about how the most successful people work
(00:26):
from home productively and ambitiously. Today's tip is to recognize
that working from home is a skill. Like most skills,
people aren't very good at it at first, but they
get better with practice over time. This is a reassuring
realization on those days when you feel like things just
(00:46):
aren't working all that well. If you've been working at
home for decades, it's easy to forget what it was
like at first. When millions of people began working from
home for the first time in March in the wake
of COVID Night Team, I went back to look at
some of my old musings from two thousand two. That
was when I first started working from home, and well,
(01:08):
I was kind of a wreck. I'd half work and
half served the web into odd hours of the night.
I had no idea what I was doing. I had
to learn to work in a self directed way and
to figure out how to work efficiently and create boundaries
without the normal structures and group norms of an office.
The proportion of American workers who had ever worked from
(01:30):
home literally doubled between mid March and early April. This
is millions of people. No wonder things were a little
awkward at first. Can you imagine if millions of people
decided to learn to play tennis or speak French overnight?
There would be a lot of really terrible tennis games
and French conversations for a while. Similarly, there were a
(01:53):
lot of really bad zoom meetings, with people talking over
each other or worse. A friend of mine mentioned that
getting a project approved was taking forever. Finally, someone confessed
that while he normally would have walked a proposal over
to everyone's desk for a quick check in, now he
was scheduling formal calls with everyone, whose schedules were so
packed with other formal calls that work slowed considerably. Oh dear,
(02:19):
But here's the thing with skills. People aren't naturally good
or bad at them. You get better with time and practice.
This is exactly what happens with working from home. Through
trial and error, you realize that on conference calls and
video calls you need to use people's names to indicate
who should now be talking. You learn that you can
(02:39):
just pick up the phone and call people. When you
need a quick response, you learn to declare a quitting time.
I find this is a helpful mindset, both for ourselves
and when we're working with others. Working from home as
a skill, and if you actively try to learn and improve,
you will improve. And like speaking French or playing a sport,
(03:02):
the skill of working from home will still be useful
when life goes back to normal. It will be a
tool in your toolbox which you can pull out when needed.
So what have you learned as you've been working from home?
In what ways have you improved? Celebrate these victories and
be patient when you see where others are on the
learning curve. They will get there in time. In the meantime,
(03:25):
this is Laura, thanks for listening, and here's the succeeding
in the New Corner Office. The New Corner Office is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your favorite shows.
Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to The New Corner Office,
the podcast where we share strategies for thriving in the
new world of work for location and hours are more
flexible than in the past. This week, I'll be sharing
a few tips from my new book called The New
Corner Office. It's about how the most successful people work
(00:26):
from home productively and ambitiously. Today's tip is to recognize
that working from home is a skill. Like most skills,
people aren't very good at it at first, but they
get better with practice over time. This is a reassuring
realization on those days when you feel like things just
(00:46):
aren't working all that well. If you've been working at
home for decades, it's easy to forget what it was
like at first. When millions of people began working from
home for the first time in March in the wake
of COVID Night Team, I went back to look at
some of my old musings from two thousand two. That
was when I first started working from home, and well,
(01:08):
I was kind of a wreck. I'd half work and
half served the web into odd hours of the night.
I had no idea what I was doing. I had
to learn to work in a self directed way and
to figure out how to work efficiently and create boundaries
without the normal structures and group norms of an office.
The proportion of American workers who had ever worked from
(01:30):
home literally doubled between mid March and early April. This
is millions of people. No wonder things were a little
awkward at first. Can you imagine if millions of people
decided to learn to play tennis or speak French overnight?
There would be a lot of really terrible tennis games
and French conversations for a while. Similarly, there were a
(01:53):
lot of really bad zoom meetings, with people talking over
each other or worse. A friend of mine mentioned that
getting a project approved was taking forever. Finally, someone confessed
that while he normally would have walked a proposal over
to everyone's desk for a quick check in, now he
was scheduling formal calls with everyone, whose schedules were so
packed with other formal calls that work slowed considerably. Oh dear,
(02:19):
But here's the thing with skills. People aren't naturally good
or bad at them. You get better with time and practice.
This is exactly what happens with working from home. Through
trial and error, you realize that on conference calls and
video calls you need to use people's names to indicate
who should now be talking. You learn that you can
(02:39):
just pick up the phone and call people. When you
need a quick response, you learn to declare a quitting time.
I find this is a helpful mindset, both for ourselves
and when we're working with others. Working from home as
a skill, and if you actively try to learn and improve,
you will improve. And like speaking French or playing a sport,
(03:02):
the skill of working from home will still be useful
when life goes back to normal. It will be a
tool in your toolbox which you can pull out when needed.
So what have you learned as you've been working from home?
In what ways have you improved? Celebrate these victories and
be patient when you see where others are on the
learning curve. They will get there in time. In the meantime,
(03:25):
this is Laura, thanks for listening, and here's the succeeding
in the New Corner Office. The New Corner Office is
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your favorite shows.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.