‘Should-Be-Working’ Space

[Telework, and other suffering]

You should be working. But you’re not. And so, you can’t stop working, because you should be working.

There’s a particularly sticky problem in working from home, which is that it’s easy to only sort of be.

But you should!

Hours get sacrificed on the altar of should-be-working. It’s that vague, fuzzy space where you’re in your workspace, or staring at your inbox, or sitting in front of your computer, but you’re not quite there, not quite engaged, not quite doing anything.

Work days can get longer and longer in the space of should-be-working. Are you allowed to stop at 5pm if you spent four hours should-be-working?

You never get to recuperate if the should-be-working doldrums take the day away. And so how can you talk yourself into starting work again if you know you’ll just get into should-be-working space? But how can you stop working, if you never really got any work done?

There’s some set of people who are very susceptible to this pattern. There are huge changes they can make to fend it off: only taking highly structured jobs, or working under very tight deadlines. But in unstructured environments, the should-be-working returns. For instance, hypothetically, during a global pandemic that converted most office jobs into telework.

The work day is essentially an agreement between Morning You and Afternoon You.

Morning You will start work, because she knows what to get done, and knows that if these things get accomplished, Afternoon You will stop work and go do other enjoyable things.

Afternoon You will stop working, because work has been done, and that’s the obligation required for the work day.

At some point, these two people stopped trusting each other.

Afternoon You isn’t starting the fancy dinner/Netflix/bath because it only gets to do that when Work has been done. The next day, Morning You has no good reason to get engaged and focused, because Afternoon You can’t be trusted to stop, once Morning You has dipped their toes in the water.

Now you’re stuck in an enormous and ineffectual tug of war between two bits of your brain: the part that wants to get shit done so that it can have fun, and the part that believes that even if you try, the work day doesn’t end. That’s should-be-working. It’s not working, but it sure as hell isn’t relaxing.

Most of the time, people respond by being more and more frustrated with their Morning Self. If only I started working, then I could get things done during the day and relax.

This…does not work.

The trick is to make Afternoon Self more trustworthy.

Take an experimental time period—at minimum a week, at maximum a month—and absolutely, and without question, stop every single day at then end of your ‘usual’ workday. (When you’d go home from the office, or a time between 4 and 6pm). This is the only change you can make. No matter when you actually moved into productive, focused work, the work day stops at that time, without adjustment. This is practice following through as Afternoon Self. Morning Self gets to do whatever. You’ll try to start your workday at the appropriate time: being fed and awake in your work space, but otherwise, no added pressure.

If you were spending time outside of your usual work hours in should-be-working (or the close cousin, should-be-catching-up), more time will be yours for refueling. You’ll have demonstrated to Morning Self that working leads to free time, rather than opening a portal to endless limbo. At the end of the experimental time, you can start being more forceful in your attempts to start work…but often you won’t need to.