Home Office Rituals, Revisited

Among all the changed habits of working from a home office, there are a couple that I’ve been enjoying quite a bit.

I miss a (short, walkable) commute! I miss eating out with more, different people! I miss having an office to leave office-y stuff at (who wants those folders at home…)

But here’s a few things I’ve really enjoyed and consciously try to foster as a habit:

• A brief walk in lieu of a commute in the morning, with a freshly brewed coffee and sometimes a podcast.
• Eating lunch out and taking a walk afterwards. Again, sometimes with a podcast, sometimes with my mind more on a current problem that needs tome thought.
• And, a bit to my own surprise, sometimes a gaming session after lunch: I hadn’t been making the time to play a lot of video games over the last couple of years, but a quick game after lunch has been quite refreshing for these last few weeks. (It has to be a reaction-driven, fast-paced game, nothing that needs thinking. Pure cognition/reaction is what seems to do the trick for me.* Probably because my work consists of slow analysis and this is the opposite mode.)

* Writing this reminds me of the clear-headedness after playing a pinball machine. As a teenager I had gotten one off of a local yard sale and it did the same thing. So maybe there’s something there to explore.

So: I can heartily recommend giving it a shot if that’s your jam. It feels indulgent (it is!) and it can be very refreshing.