Working in the Pandemic

I have two phones to deal with my routine works, one is for domestic business, and another is for overseas. During this pandemic, I worked at home every day. So, energy management matters. Why do I call Time Management as Energy Management? That is another big topic, and I would like to talk about it later in another article.

I have plenty of work to do even though I don’t need to go to a place so-called an office for work. I’m in charge of our rehabilitation solution development, and it includes at least four clients run on different platforms. Besides, some other small projects need to design and implement for our clients. So, time is never enough.

But I’m not a robot, and I will feel tired after a long time coding. This is a small start-up team, and we don’t have much money to hire enough people to help us. We have to make things happen quickly then we may make our clients happy. I think this is a common issue that most start-up entrepreneurs face. Yes, it’s suffering!

In the beginning, things became a mess. The progress grew slowly, but I felt tired so frequently, and work seemed will never be accomplished, even I worked over 3 AM every day. No difference between working days and weekends as every day is a working day. After half a year, I had shingles.

The doctor warned me to stop working like that, and I know this is unhealthy, but if any task could finish itself, I would be very appreciated!

After this illness, I think it’s time to change. I remember the doctor told me that the shingles are just a warning, and it only comes once, so, if I don’t make any healthy change, something more horrible will come to me next time.

Then, back to the beginning of this article. I have two phones, so I set two count-down timers, a timer for each phone. I can set up both timers on one phone, but I prefer not to change or switch duration values every time, so I would like to use both phones. The timer for working is 2 hours long, and during this time, I will refuse anything except urgent ones and only concentrate on the single task I need to handle. I make my plans, split the whole big picture into small pieces, and each one needs about 2 hours to deal with or gather some tiny tasks into a 2-hour duration. And after every 2 hours, I have 15 minutes to rest, then I can read, watch videos or do anything else I want, but no more than 15 minutes. As you can see, this is a simple loop, and after 5 or 6 times loop, I will be off duty.

Truthfully, this is hard to insist on at the very beginning. Sometimes you will not want to stop working even the 2-hour timer is done, and sometimes you feel that you need more rest after the 15-minute timer. But you have to make yourself obey the rule and believe that you will be used to it only after a few more times.

Once you get used to it, you will feel you are so powerful. You can do more than before, and you probably will not feel tired so easily. Now, I’ve finished lots of tasks of our system implementation, and I can even gather materials for my own writing plan.

You have 2 hours to finish current work, and any other things out of the plan will not be allowed during this time, you made the deal, and you knew it, so, no excuse. Finally, you will realize, the most important thing is not the time but the concentration.