The best thing about working from home? Lunch!

Well, I haven’t written a blog post in well over a year. I know it’s well uncool to write long-form content now, it’s all polls and ‘agree’ on LinkedIn now.

One of the biggest challenges from working from home (aside from child/pet/partner/Netflix-related distractions) is the bluration between work and home life. You are essentially at home trying to work, not always working from home.

I have spoken to countless people who feel home working has enabled (and sometimes encouraged) longer working hours. Maybe it’s the desperation to prove that you are actually working and you’re more productive at home. I have been hugely guilty of this and for a time went working 6am – 7pm, having dinner and then working until 11pm. It very quickly catches up with you and burnout is a very real thing. I have had periods of time where I felt like my memory was genuinely going – memory recall is such a key skill in a recruiters armory and mine was, well, fucked.

I needed to find ways to break the day up (beyond the school runs – which made me realise how scarily accurate the BBC2 program Motherland actually is).

Anyone who knows me knows my obsession with lunch (and dinner. Not so much breakfast, at all). It’s an event for me. Something to look forward to, something to enjoy, and now something to break up the day and provide some distraction and switch my mind off from work and on to making something i’ll bloody love and eat slowly (I am the world’s slowest eater).

We currently work from home 2 or 3 days a week, which gives me a good number of days to plan and create some proper decent lunches and forget about the stresses of BD and finding that rocking horse shit that everyone is after.

It also gives me an opportunity to eat a lot healthier than I probably usually would do and get more veg into my chubby body.

I have found the preparation and execution of the lunches to be an incredible distraction. The chopping of vegetables is also quite an excellent stress reliever. Having the set lunchtime also encourages me to condense my work into shorter, more concentrated stints – which has, in turn, made me more productive than doing the silly, mental hours I was before.

Treat yourself. Give yourself a lunch break and prepare and devour some awesome food. My personal favorite at the moment is incredibly simple, it’s essentially bruschetta. With loads of balsamic glaze. My breath stinks all afternoon, sure – but none of my colleagues are around to realise.