Tips for WFH when your partner is also WFH

WFH sounds a lot like WTF doesn’t it?

My sister-in-law, who is currently homeschooling her grandchildren (!), posted this question on Facebook this morning: "Who’s great idea was it to change math!!??" Sandy gets it. Humor is how we are going to adapt to the new how-could-this-possibly-be normal. 

A friend recently sent me some advice about working from home (WFH) with your partner or spouse. She suggested we each create an imaginary officemate upon whom we blame the annoying things our partner or spouse does, as in: “Louise left her lunch dishes on the coffee table again...” My husband John, who teaches online university classes and yoga from two of the rooms in our tiny condo, has taken this imaginary-friend advice to heart and has claimed Vermont Governor Phil Scott as his imaginary friend. He’s got the blaming thing turned around a bit though, as we both appreciate what our governor has done for Vermont. In John’s case, his imaginary friend blames him for the annoying things. 

Humor has been my greatest companion in this quarantine. Second and third on my WFH survival list are music and earplugs. These two might seem incongruent together, but they are not. 

William Congreve was right when he wrote that music has charms to soothe a savage breast - even one in quarantine. Music also has charms that uplift. For soothing, I tend to go for baroque, for uplift, I’ve taken Rising Appalachia - Resilient as my new anthem. Check it out:

​Earplugs, at the other end of the spectrum, are high on my WFH list as they afford me the audio solitude that is essential to my work as a writer. Earplugs work well in other professions, too. 

What are your top three WFH survival tips? Share them here. You’ll find, as I have just done, that helping others is really the best way we will get through this. ​