Boost Your Morale Outside the Home With Group Rest Breaks
One of the challenges of working from home – something that many of us do for the first time – is the constant compulsion to be present . Your Slack is ringing and you feel excruciating feelings of guilt if you can’t provide an answer or participate in a discussion. Conversely, it’s easy to get annoyed when people don’t respond to you.
While it’s easy to relax when working from home (pun intended), I find it just as easy to keep working, working, working and forgetting about any moments for yourself.
In an ordinary office, this is not a problem. You could go for lunch, take a stroll through the building while waiting for the coffee to cool, or wander around to chat with your favorite colleague about new Animal Crossing strategies or turnip prices. You are not chained to your desk eight hours a day, and no one should be angry if you act like a normal social person from time to time.
But digitally? You still need to shoot shit with your teammates because they are normal people too – maybe even your friends.
Use Slack to schedule small breaks for everyone
If your workplace uses Slack , and if you assume that your manager is a smart and cheerful person, I recommend setting up a bot that reminds everyone at regular intervals to take a short break for a water cooler. Whether it be once an hour (yes!) Or several times a day (still ok!), Get your team to put off their non-critical work and engage in some delicious social banter, even if it lasts longer than allowed Break Time . can work wonders with everyone’s morale. In early 2019 parlance , this practice is a joy.
There are several ways to accomplish this. The fastest and easiest way is to enter something like /remind [channel] to take a break every [day] at [time] and just repeat this for all desired day / time combinations. It takes a little time to get all of this set up, but you only need to do it once. It might be easier to integrate a third-party tool like Schedule by Zapier into Slack if you have permission to do so, which could make this scheduling nonsense even easier.
You can integrate a link to one of your company’s public video calling rooms in your post – I highly recommend that you consider that as well, because there aren’t really that many text-based “hangouts”. Some of these services, such as Zoom, also integrate directly into Slack, so you can call a quick video chat room as soon as you see this reminder by typing something like /zoom in the feed. And if everyone breaks down and really can’t spend 10 minutes chatting, just don’t type in the command that sets up the conference room. It is so simple.
Will this cure your ever-present anxiety about quarantines and your new work-from-home universe? Probably no. But it makes your artificial life feel a little more like it did before, which is all most of us really want.