How to Work from Home like a 5th Grader
Ah, 5th grade. I was a beast in 5th grade, completing homework assignments like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I remember sitting down at the time with one of my good friends, Henning, who struggled to complete his schoolwork and wasn’t performing too well on tests. I naively offered my foolproof advice to him: “School is easy. Just do the homework, study for the tests, and you’re good!”
Now decades into a career as a knowledge worker, I feel like I’m in Henning’s shoes. Work is laborious! How do people stay so focused and productive all day? My mind wanders, my To-Do completion rate leaves a lot to be desired, and after a full day of “work,” I often feel I have little to show for it, but for a handful of ad hoc replies to emails and terabytes of dubiously useful info stuffed into my brain, care of the internet.
Our country’s Work From Home (WFH) mandate amidst the Coronavirus has only exacerbated these tendencies.
How can we work from home as unthinkingly productively as a 5th grader?
Easy. Treat your day and your work as if you were actually a middle schooler.
Schedule your day
Start by building a schedule for each day. Some executives like to time-block days and many of us have meetings sprinkled throughout our weekly calendar. But when is the last time you proactively specified what you were going to do every 45 minutes of the day?
I remember watching episodes of Super Nanny where the host, Jo Frost, would swoop into an unruly family and immediately kick butt and start taking names by first… implementing a schedule.
She would take a large piece of poster paper and work with the misbehaved children by collaborating with them on planning out their day. Time would be allotted for having breakfast, picking up toys, reading, play time, and so forth.
Working from home, I’m intimately aware of my children’s schedules during remote learning, as are they. They know exactly when they have Reading, Math, Social Studies, Recess, etc.
My day, on the other hand, is simply one large chunk that starts when I wake up and ends when I go to sleep. It’s like a giant bag with no compartments. No wonder everything spills into everything and little gets done!
So lately, I have begun writing out my daily schedule by hand. For example:
7:30 am to 8 am: Read the news
8 am to 8:15 am: Journal
8:15 am to 8:45 am: Reply to emails
8:45 am to 9:30 am: Work on business development
9:30 am to 10 am: Craft new email newsletter campaign
And so on.
Respect your schedule as if each time block were a class
If you were a 5th grader and Reading would end at 8:45 am, would you continue to sit in reading class at 8:55 am? No, you would not. You would scurry your butt off to Social Studies, which should have begun at 8:50 am.
Similarly, it is important that you stay on track with your daily schedule. If you only allotted until 8:45 am to read news from the internet, then what are you doing still reading the news at 9:15 am? That’s it! Cut it! Move on to the next class.
You might even try to physically relocate yourself to another part of your home, if you have that luxury. Treat your time-delineated tasks as classrooms you need to move in and out of.
The art of thinking without thinking
The problem with most knowledge workers is that their knack for being obsessive compulsive, research-oriented and over-thinking has become bastardized beyond utility. What was once a secret sauce has become an over-concentrated formula.
I saw this phenomenon in myself, going from being a good expository writer in high school, to an effective persuasive writer in college, an overwrought analyzer in law school, then a completely neurotic spewer of legalese as an attorney.
People who are the most effective at getting knowledge work done do not overthink. They think to a point, then they ship. They achieve Pareto optimality, then they harvest.
When the neural network that governs your work life has been reinforced with a +1 every time you apply more thought to something, the end result is a monster who overthinks everything to the nth degree. Every research query must approach the asymptote of total knowledge on a given subject (oh, the wasted hours!) and most of these knowledge gains carry an enormous drag coefficient on your individual productivity.
So stop the madness, and deliver work that is good enough! Be the 5th grader who is unbothered by eraser smudge marks, wrinkled homework and minor typos but hands the dang thing in.
Bruce Lee taught the art of fighting without fighting. Here I implore you to do thinking work without thinking.
Assigning yourself homework
When you’ve completed your workday according to schedule, pat yourself on the back. Giving yourself a little bit of appreciation and love is a good thing.
Because you flitted from “class” to “class,” you likely have extra homework, items that just couldn’t get completed during class time.
No worries — that’s what time after school is for! From, say, 5 pm to 7 pm, you can return to those items that need caretaking.
But when you’re done with your homework and have handed it in, it is time to rest. The work will never fully be done (this is a good thing), and you need to reserve your energy for more growth and more output the next day.
Living proof
This blog post is proof of the efficacy of a 5th grader’s mindset towards getting professional work done.
I scheduled 45 minutes to write this blog post and got it done. There are portions I would fix, and I have half a mind to delete the whole thing and file it under “Nice try.”
But I think there is utility here, and it’s time to harvest.
I’m going to publish this post and hope there are other Hennings out there who may find this just uplifting and empowering enough.
