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Like most people’s, my working life at the moment is far from normal. It’s not so much the working from home — it’s the never leaving home. I miss the familiar surroundings of work, especially my plants. I have lived in my current house for 10 years; I have worked at Imperial College London for more than 20 years, 15 of which have been on the St Mary’s campus in Paddington. And since I moved out of London, I’ve almost certainly spent more time at St Mary’s than at my house (minus sleeping). Working from home and the new routines it requires have had a massive impact on my ability to concentrate.
As I have written before, a large chunk of science is creativity. This needs time and space. In the good old days, working from home meant retreating from the endless stream of meetings and interruptions, and having some space to think about work. Now, working from home is very different. When I am not making papier mâché rockets and supervising homework club for my children, there is still plenty to do. This is made much trickier when work has to contend with the sounds of something more fun than work or the smell of chickpea and chorizo soup rising from downstairs, the robin that has made our garden its home, or basically any excuse to leave my desk.
My natural response is to get distracted. Modern life exacerbates this: the ding of the phone, the notification from Twitter, the e-mail envelope. My normal strategy is to get all of that out of the way and then focus on the work in hand — usually by allowing myself a timed ‘block’ of distraction before working. This varies: before writing this article, I tried to make a sourdough loaf (which turned out denser than a neutron star), watched the music video for ‘Acquiesce’ by Oasis and checked my son’s progress in the video game FIFA 19 (who needs real sport when you have the emotional journey of a 12-year-old trying to win a key game?). As you can see, sometimes it takes more than the five minutes I’d usually allow. However, the work blocks are now much shorter because my wife and I are rotating between work and childcare — trying to fit 50 hours of work into 20 hours — and so starting each block with 5 minutes of faffing is eating into work time. Yes, the simple solution is not to get distracted, but that is easier said than done.
It’s not as if distraction was impossible when I had access to an office — there was always a member of the team to chat to, and Oasis music videos were still within reach. But there, I had worked out ways to stay focused. I could reward myself for an hour of work by getting a treat, such as a cup of tea. But this, too, is affected by being at home all the time. Previously, I could leave the house pretty messy because I knew I would not have to see it for the rest of the day, and therefore not worry too much about it. Now, to have a cup of tea in one of my too-frequent breaks, I end up emptying the dishwasher, which is always full.
I am, for what it’s worth, beginning to develop some approaches that help. I’ve accepted that there is going to be some faffing before I get going: using my limited stock of willpower on breaking long-established habits is wasted energy. I try to cut access to my phone, ideally by leaving it in another room, but at least out of sight and reach. I try to keep my weekday routine approximately the same as before, specifically having a shower at as close to normal time as usual. I am an inveterate list maker: I have daily, weekly, monthly to-do lists. All are dauntingly long at the moment, but they still help to provide some structure and a clearer sense of what I can do with the time available. This means saying no to more things — I’m sorry to report that my contribution to peer reviewing has been minimal of late.
In the end, it comes down to accepting that I cannot get as much done as I would if I wasn’t stuck at home. But there is a positive trade-off: I am getting to spend a great deal more time with my children, which has been a real gift. One of my favourite lockdown stories is of a dog that strained its tail by wagging it too much because its owners were home all the time. Let’s just say I’m glad my kids don’t have tails.