M. Suzanne Terry

This year has been a test of what some call work-life balance. I have spent most of 2020 working from home, and I have become intimately acquainted with the home office. A room that used to be for books and writing (when I could find the desk) but mostly storage has become a workable space that I love. And it’s a good thing I do, because not only do I regularly spend my 40-hour full-time work week and my 15(ish)-hour part-time work week here, I also use the space for zoom meetings with church and friends and for binge-watching Schitt’s Creek and The Good Place.

When work and home are the same place, you have to draw clear boundaries around rest. I recently read Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s book on the subject and found that the author’s findings match my experience pretty well. I can do about two or three days of doing almost nothing but then I start to get restless. During longer breaks (such as the one I’m on now), the things I find rejuvenating are more active:

• Exercise
• Free-form writing
• Piano practice
• Dance
• Reading
• Napping (okay, that’s not active, but it’s soooo good)
• Deep cleaning

My days are more free-form. They start later and end later. But there is more to them than just lying around doing nothing, and that is what gives me true rest. Physical activity demands that I just do one thing at a time, and it makes me more alert. It also helps me sleep better than I do during the busy weeks when I claim to not have time to work out.

Working from home has made stronger boundaries necessary but it has also given me the luxury of less transition time between working hours and downtime, erasing the illusion that I don’t have time to do the things that I want to do. Simply not commuting hasn’t added many hours to my workday, but being at home allows me to take more frequent breaks during which I can sneak in a quick 75-second plank or a couple minutes of kickboxing throughout the day. Maintaining active rest breaks instead of just vegging out for five minutes a few times a day has made me so much more productive. I still stick to the 40 hours I’m paid to work at my full-time job, but I have cut my hours down from 20-25 a week to about 15 at my part-time job, and I wrote just as many words this year as I did last year.

Just reading that gives me a little jolt of joy.

I’m writing about chasing joy for the 31 days of December. Click here to see the whole list.