We know that you are all working at home now. (Stay home – Stay healthy!!) And for many of you, this is a big adjustment.

As someone who has worked at home, taught online, done research online, supervised employees who worked online, and more – I can say that it’s not always easy. But with a few basics, it will not be much harder than going in to your office every day!

Set a schedule

You have probably already heard this, but it really does help. Your schedule can be a strict 9 to 5, and that’s fine. Or it can be two hours in the morning, doing kid work/other things for a few hours, another hour or two, and then an hour or two at night. You may need to be deliberate about scheduling those hours on weekends, to be sure you are getting things done, when you have a lot of other things going on around you.

And, of course, your workplace may have a defined schedule for you for at least part of the day. Hopefully they can cool it with trying to dictate schedules unless necessary – that does not help people adapting to a new schedule.

This is a great time to use a pomodro method, and that really works for me. Set a schedule to work 25 minutes, and take a five minute break; repeat that all day. Or, work 45 minutes and take a 15 minute break. It’s enough to get something cleaned, fixed, straightened, or otherwise handled, but still lets you get back to your main tasks for the day.

Try to set up something that generally works for you, and stick to it most of the time.

Make a list

When you have a busy schedule of story-times, movie watching, doing dishes, and also doing some work – it’s easy to forget what you need to do. It’s also easy to lose track of priorities when days all blend into each other.

Write things down for the week. I like to use multi colored pens, so I have a lot of different blocks of tasks to get done and I can easily see that. But you make a list however you think will be most effective for you.

When I have a lot of repetitive tasks – small things that have to get done every day, I get excited about making charts with boxes to check off. You can do this online, or write it out on paper. (I have charts stuck to the wall, so I can see when I’m hitting daily goals, and when I’m missing them. The shame helps to keep me moving forward!)

Don’t celebrate too early

I like to celebrate things, literally anything. I love all those little fake advertiser-created holidays for “national daffodil bulb day” and “national peanut butter chip cookie day” or whatever. I’m ready to celebrate anything, pretty much any time.

And when you are home, especially if you are alone, it can be easy to want to celebrate a couple of good hours of work with a TV episode, or some other reward. This is where having that set schedule really helps! When you are new to not having colleagues around you, who will notice that you are slacking off too much, you need to focus on getting things done.

And add “celebrate today’s successes” into your schedule! Even if your biggest success was getting out of bed – celebrate that! Take a walk around your neighborhood (social distancing still in effect!). Watch 20 minutes of Kitten Academy on YouTube. Do something else fun for yourself!!

(As a side note to a daily celebration, you may not want to make it “eat candy” or “drink whiskey” each day. Even when you have good relationships with these things, being home all day/every day can skew perspectives. So ponder for yourself whether small amounts of potentially difficult things are reasonable every day. A nice walk or some other positive activity might be a better celebration.)

Don’t Let Perfect Wreck Your Good-Enough

When you are not used to working at home, and may not have all your materials you usually use, and it’s harder to get into the online material you need – things can be hard. They can move slower than you think they should. They can be more trouble than they should. And they can require more people to jump in to assist than usual.

That’s okay. That is how it works. Don’t feel like you are doing a bad job because it’s hard. Starting an entirely new set of tasks and responsibilities is HARD!

So don’t try to make everything perfect right now. Do a good job, get it done, and move on without (too many) regrets. Usually, it will be more important for you do get material shared, or to have a Zoom conference, or to do whatever else you need to accomplish, than it will to make everything look completely perfect.

Everyone understands. Especially right now, we’re all finding our way. So: just do things. Get them done and out into the world. Don’t wait until you love everything about the work – send it along and keep moving forward.

For Supervisors: Don’t Micromanage

This shouldn’t need to even be said – because it’s the sign of a poor supervisor that micromanaging ever happens!

But when people are working from home, I have heard too many supervisors fretting that they may not know whether someone is REALLY working. And I’ve seen reports of staff who are getting hourly phone calls from work, and other such inanities.

You hire people and train them to do the best job they can. And then you let them go.

Will everyone be 100% Amazingly Productive every hour of a standard work day? Nope. It’s just the same as in-person working.

Is that reason enough to drive yourself and your staffers bonkers with incessant demands to “prove” work is being done? Hard “no” on that!

Especially for now, just concentrate on getting the big, important things done. Know that this is an adjustment for everyone – and we aren’t always going to get it all correct. It’s okay.

And really: look back at the first paragraph here: Managers who micromanage are showing themselves to be insecure and weak. Just don’t do it.

Wrapping Up:

Keep focused on the things you know you can do. You know your work, you know the kinds of information you already share, you know the content of your job. That’s the important part. Now, a lot of people are doing it in a new environment, using new tools. Try not to let that get overwhelming.

You are doing fine. You’ve got this. We’re here to help you. Just keep going, and it will work!

Welcome back to the show. We are so glad you are here, joining us for the book group discussion! You can find our full show notes page here. All the links we share are there, to the beverages we enjoyed, the books we discussed, and the resources we discussed.

Each week we talk  about books and about different genres, and provide useful information for people who want to talk about books. There are so many books out there that it’s tough to be an expert on all of them. So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre! We want to help you find new books for yourself, and to be ready to share them with others.

This week we are celebrating libraries!  We like libraries, and there are so many interesting books out there about them! So we are going to admire books about libraries, specifically history and mysteries.  (More library genres will follow.)

This week our returning Guest Host is Violet Fox, a Dewey Editor. 

Thanks so much to you for joining us this week for the book group! It’s always better when you are here with us. Join us on Patreon, to get some behind-the scenes secrets after every episode. Official Office Dog Lady Grey appreciates your support. (She’s paid in treats, and a portion of your support goes directly to rewarding her for being such a good doggo!).

Be sure you are subscribed to this podcast to get every episode, genre, and book suggestions dropped right into your favorite app. And if you prefer to stream them, every episode we have created is on our website.

Crafting is a great program to hold in the library, and also to do at home. We know that most of you are at home right now, and may be also working with kids in person or online. So our weekly crafts will be more kid-friendly, to be sure everyone can participate!

You might want to write some poems in crayon, or to draw pictures that go with some poems. And of course you can use any crayons for this. But if you have a bunch of old, broken, or worn down crayons, this project might be a good way to make them into something cool.

You can find all the information, and a lot of good pictures, on this blog site.

This is one way your new, remolded crayons could look when you are done! You will melt crayon pieces, add some glitter, and come up with some cool shapes to mold your crayons.

We hope everyone is adjusting to being at home, and sharing your work with your community members online. It’s a big change for a lot of us, so be patient with yourself and just give yourself time to get settled into this new lifestyle.

You can do it. We’re here for you.

If you have not seen the resources we have available to libraries, we are collecting them here. Anyone can take these things, add them to your website, send them out in social media, email them in newsletters, talk about them in Zoom chats – whatever works for you.

As a multitype library system, our job is to support all types of libraries: school, academic, public, and special. We want to give you as much material as possible, so you can be spending more time on the other important work you need to do right now!

And we can use your support too!

Are you spending a little more time than usual shopping at Amazon.com? We hear you – it’s happening here too!

This is a link to some collected material from Amazon for Schools and Teaching. If you click on that link, and buy anything in this category, or anything AT ALL from Amazon – they will give us a small percent of the profits on your purchase. This is a way Amazon helps to support non-profit organizations like ours.

You don’t have to do anything extra. You don’t have to give any additional information.

All you do is just do whatever you were going to do, and if you were going to buy things at Amazon – that is enough to help support us.

Thanks so much!!!! We really appreciate your help!!!!

Have you been enjoying our book group podcast Reading With Libraries? Are you sharing it with your library patrons? (It’s fine to do that! Your patrons already like books – give them another resource to help them find more books!)

If you want to help support the podcast, you can join our Patreon! (It’s right here.)

Angie made the graphics. Official Office Dog Lady Grey posed for pictures. And it’s just a teamwork operation of support! For $1 a month, we will send you a postcard signed by Lady Grey. (She did such a good job, we are really proud of her paw prints on the postcards!)

Other rewards are available at different levels of support. And every week, Patreon supporters get a secret behind-the-scenes fact about the episode. (It’s worth the 25 cents a week it would cost to support at $1 a month!)

And if you want to send in an email, card, or letter to tell us about a way that CMLE has helped you, and your library, that would be great! We are collecting stories of support, and would love to hear from you!!!

Stay home, stay healthy!

We’re here for you, and we appreciate your support too.