Author: Maren Deepwell

Lunch break ideas for hybrid workers

At this time of year, it’s easy to focus on ever busy work schedules instead of activities that help with balance. Here in Cardiff the weather is dreary and grey, and not particularly inspiring even in the lightest hours of the day. Leaving my desk and screens in favour for a proper break feels much easier on sunny days.

When I came across a book called Gone for Lunch: 52 Things to do in your lunch break (by Laura Archer), in the library recently it felt like a great opportunity to find some inspiration.

Here’re my 10 favourite ideas for lunch break activities, inspired by the book but specifically adapted to the needs of hybrid workers. The ideas in the book are divided into for sections: activities you can do while sitting, being active, inside and outside.

As most of us hybrid workers probably spend enough time sitting inside already, most of the activities on my list involve being active and/or outdoors, but there are two exceptions and I’ll start with those:

1 Take a nap

This is also in the book, and there are some useful tips here: aim to nap for between 10-30 minutes, don’t forget to set an alarm, and make sure you nap before 4pm and no later, to avoid disturbing your sleep in the night.

One of the nicest upsides of working from home is that there usually are much better places to nap than in an office or on campus, and, in my case, the presence of willing pets who are just as keen to cuddle up for half an hour as I am.

2 Meditate

The book includes tips of trying desk yoga or to focus on ‘wish, pray, hope’ , so inspired by that, I am going to include meditation as a lunch break idea. There are plenty of apps out there like Calm or Insight Timer that offer free recordings, breathing exercises and timers to help engage in mindfulness and meditation.

Personally, I find coming to a complete stop and resting in stillness for a few minutes is a powerful way to reset for the rest of the day, no matter how or where I do it.

3 Green spaces

I really like the idea of visiting green spaces. The book suggests that “spending as little as 40 seconds looking out over green space can boost concentration” and goes on to explore other benefits for our physical and mental wellbeing of spending time in nature.

Depending on where you live and how much green space there is around you, looking at some maps of your local area will help you discover new green spaces close by, and help find new routes that you do not usually take.

4 Local Café

Adopted from the idea to visit local markets included in the book, you can visit (independent) local cafes which are close enough to where you live. Many of us find remote working from home can become quite lonely over time, and visiting local cafes or delis for an hour can help us reconnect with people and offer a change of environment.

5 Listen to a podcast

As a big podcast fan, I enjoyed reading the suggestions in the book for listening to podcasts during lunch breaks: start with short podcasts to find out what you like, look for podcast recommendations on blogs or sites you usually use, rather than charts within podcast apps to get more personal recommendations and make use of the broad range of subjects on offer to engage with different interests.

One problem I encountered unwittingly with podcasts at lunchtime, is that I gravitated towards ones related to work. Listen to podcasts became more like professional development or catching up with things I hadn’t had time to read or listen to during work, which was productive, yes, but didn’t provide the break that I need at lunch to recharge. If you are looking to disconnect from work and really relax, choose a podcast with a relaxing topic unrelated to work.

6 Take a photograph

As an avid taker of photographs, the idea to take a “take a carefully considered photograph” really chimed with me. The idea is to really focus on the colour, form, shape and composition of the photograph, and to take time over it. Practical tips include turning on gridlines, focusing on a single subject, using reflection and so forth.

This is an interesting activity as it’s completely flexible and can happen indoors and outdoors at any time. One I am going to try out for sure.

7 Local Wildlife

Another suggestion is to explore local wildlife, which could include taking part in activities like an online national butterfly count or bird watch, anywhere from gardening containers on a balcony, a nearby park or field.

8 Play with a pet or care for a plant

The most ‘local’ of animals for me are our dogs, and one of my favourite things to do during my lunch break is to play with the dogs in the garden. Hiding small treats for them to sniffle for or playing with their favourite toys and really focusing on them is a brilliant way to relax, and gives me a great sense of connection.

Given that I am also devoted to my plants, another way to take a proper break from my screen is to care for my plants. Regular watering, dead heading flower pots… whatever it is on any given day really helps me to stay away from my screens for a while.

9 Go for a wander

This one probably doesn’t need much explanation, and can easily combine with several of the other activities… walk while listening to a podcast, walk a dog, wander in a green space, explore your local area and so forth.

Or… for a complete change try a mindful walk. Really focus on the activity itself and avoid distracting yourself from what your senses tell you about your environment. Breathe easy and follow your feet.

10 Visit a Cemetery

My favourite moment reading the book was when I spotted “visit a cemetery” in the list of activities. Clearly, this is my favourite given that I spent years as an anthropology student in graveyards. For me, any opportunity to visit a cemetery is welcome.. so if you, too, like a bit of an explore through such spaces, then find your nearest one and enjoy your lunch break.

10/02/2023
Tranquillity by Tuesday
I’ve really enjoyed reading Laura Vanderkam’s Tranquillity by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. From an anthropological perspective, it’s interesting to read a book rooted in the experiences of a group of people putting the productivity and time management ideas into practice and I especially enjoyed reading why things did and didn’t work for particular individuals. I found it helpful to read about their experiences alongside the expert guidance provided, as it helped me think through how and why certain things might work for me or my coaching clients.

Being on a journey of trying to work less hard and find more balance made this book appeal to me more with a central focus on calm and wellbeing alongside more traditional productivity techniques. The first ‘rule’ that I put to the test for me is Rule Two: Plan on Fridays.

The basic idea is to plan for the week ahead on a Friday afternoon and the chapter goes into explaining why this is a helpful practice and how to do it. I already plan on a weekly basis, but it was still interesting to read more about why this is effective. Two things jumped out at me:

Plan across three key categories: career (which I took to be short-hand for all types of work, paid and unpaid), relationships (which encompasses partners, family, friends, any we care for and spend time with, including pets) and self (this is the category that is easy to overlook).

Plan on Fridays: there is a good section on why Friday afternoon is a good time to plan (provided you follow a Monday – Friday work or school schedule):
1. there is little opportunity cost: for many of us, Friday afternoon is close to the weekend, it’s not a good time to start something new and this less busy time can be extra productive if used for planning;
2. You can make Monday productive: start the week knowing what your day is going to bring and focusing on it;
3. Upgrade your weekends: making more time to make plans for leisure or family time or self care rather than using the weekend for planning;
4. Calm the ‘Sunday scaries’: meaning that going into the weekend with a clear plan for the following week helps you switch off and stop worrying about or planning for what’s ahead.
This last reason resonates with me in particular, as I usually do planning on Sunday evenings and I have definitely found that to have downsides.

So, that’s the strategy I am planning to adopt from Tranquillity by Tuesday, and if you are interested in exploring more, I’d definitely recommend this as a very well written, interesting read which comes with a lot of resources which are free to download on the book’s website 🙂
07/02/2023
Wakelet from #LTHEchat 254: Hybrid working: new frontiers in professional practice

It was a great pleasure to return as a guest to the wonderful #LTHEchat for a conversation all about hybrid working.

For #LTHEChat 254 we shifted our focus from learning to work. We discussed ways in which learning and teaching practices can inspire a more sustainable and equitable hybrid workplace. If you haven’t yet seen it, read the original post on the #LTHEchat site.

I was very curious to hear different perspectives and see where this conversation would leads us, and it was a very fast paced, lively discussion on the evening. I found it hard to do more than read, and like or retweet during the live conversation, and I also wanted to give as much room as possible for everyone to express their views and share their experiences, instead of dominating the conversation.

It’s been such a pleasure to work together with the amazing people who organise and support this important community activity, and I am so grateful for their support and guidance before, during and after the chat.

The chat in action

Here are the questions we explored:

Q1: What is your experience of hybrid working? #LTHEchat
Q2: How has hybrid working made a positive impact in your institution? #LTHEchat
Q3: What can we learn from hybrid learning to develop effective hybrid working? #LTHEchat
Q4: What role should staff play in the hybrid learning/working skills development of students? #LTHEchat
Q5: What do you see as the biggest challenge for the future of hybrid working #LTHEchat
Q6: Share one hybrid working tip that you would recommend to others (and why). #LTHEchat
LTHEchat 254

There was a lot of rich conversation and I am still reflecting and delving back into various exchanges, which I hope to write about more in due course. For now, here are a few moments that jumped out at me on the day:

It was inspiring to see how many different answers everyone had in response to “What is your experience of hybrid working”. It’s easy to loose sense of how different contexts impact on our ways of working, both personal and institutional, and this opener to the chat provided a vivid reminder of the broad range of hybrid working models that are happening across this community.

Another aspect of hybrid working that came across strongly was the enduring importance of social connection. This is something many contributors mentioned in a number of ways, regardless of whether they had long term experience of working in remote and distributed team or whether they were relatively new to it.

The LTHE chat to me always feels like a valuable opportunity to connect with folk in and of itself, but this topic brought this to the forefront of my mind more than usual. It was amazing to glimpse a little of what folk feel is the reality of their home office life, office days and travel.

A lot of posts sounded very positive about hybrid work, with many contributors feeling more productive and seeing many upsides to the increased flexibility. But we also spoke about a lot of challenges: from equipment and connectivity to the lack of leadership, appropriate policies and lack of trust.

There is so much more to dive into.. have a look at the chat for yourself.

Explore the Wakelet

You can now explore the whole conversation on the Wakelet: https://wakelet.com/wake/hx_8tyRERoRoSUhq-AFyj

06/02/2023
Personal reporting in Asana

In my last post, I reflected on the benefits of a monthly newsletter as a tool for reflection and monitoring progress. For example, I shared how looking at my blog posts for the month gives me a chance to think about aspects of my work I have enjoyed and want to do more of, things I’d prefer to spend less time on, what I want to focus on in the coming month and what is going on the back burner or stopping all together.

This kind of approach, focusing on what to stop/start or do more/less of is generally helpful, but I find it particularly effective when I review what I have been working on and can use specific examples. Now, in my CEO role, my team and I have started to use Asana last year to support collaboration and reporting across the organisation. I found it extremely useful from the start, but transferring all of my personal to do lists and productivity habits into a new platform has taken some time. As I became more confident in the platform, I found new ways to manage my workload and to review my own progress.

One example of this, is that I have started to use Asana more for my weekly work planning, and I wanted to share some tips about how I do that:

1. Reporting

The reporting menu in Asana comes with a “My first dashboard” set up, and I have used this to set up a personal view of tasks by going into each one of the charts and adding a filter that selects only me as an assignee of the tasks being reported on. This way, I can see all of my tasks at a glance.

It’s the first time in my career that I can analyse my workload at this level of detail, and it’s fascinating to compare my own sense of how things are going and what I am spending time on with what the dashboard view captures. It’s a useful exercise for me to consider what’s not being captured and why.

Most of the time, I find leadership related activities are absent from the reporting. Although I have both shared and private plans that capture most of what I do “think about staffing problem” or “ruminate on difficult email response” type tasks are not always easy to quantify.

2. Unscheduled tasks

One of the key priorities for us as a team in order to make the most of Asana, is to ensure ALL tasks we add have a deadline and are assigned to someone. I get a lot of tasks assigned to me, and using the reporting feature helps me identify the proportion of tasks that are currently without a due date and thus falling off my radar.

I love the discipline and accountability a tool like Asana brings with it, particularly as it helps you capture what you are doing wrong (planning work without giving it a deadline or a lead) as well as what you are doing right. It’s fascinating for me to reflect on why this is happening in certain areas of the work we are doing, as it often points to a lack of communication or clarity elsewhere, which in turn helps me understand what I communicate effectively and what I need to do better to get across.

3. My Tasks

In Asana the Board view of My Tasks is starting to feel more helpful to me. I have set up a “To do this week” section, which I add tasks to at the start of my week. That helps me get a sense of whether my workload is reasonable or not.

I have also set up a CPD section for myself, in which I dump all CPD related stuff. I then have a recurring monthly task that reminds me to review this section. I intend to use this section as a short-cut to complete my CPD list during my next appraisal.

Here is a glimpse at my personal dashboard:

04/02/2023
The benefits of a monthly round-up
It’s long been my practice to regularly record what I am up to, and I update my personal archive with links to talks and podcasts and resources that I have contributed to or published elsewhere.

I find it useful to have a list that covers most of what I do for reflection, the annual appraisal process and professional development. It’s also a great short-cut for compiling my monthly newsletter, which in itself provides an opportunity to reflect on my practice.

Using my monthly newsletter for reflection

It’s useful to get into the habit of taking a monthly look back at what I have done, and review what I have worked on and published. Usually I have a lot of different things on the go at the same time, and it’s easy to forget something that’s happened all together.

Looking at my blog posts for the month gives me a chance to think about aspects of my work I have enjoyed and want to do more of, things I’d prefer to spend less time on, what I want to focus on in the coming month and what is going on the back burner or stopping all together.

This kind of approach, focusing on what to stop/start or do more/less of is generally helpful, but I find it particularly effective when I review what I have been working on and can use specific examples: for instance, in the past month I blogged a lot about two topics specifically related to my coaching practice, but posted five or six posts that are more reflective on a diverse range of topics.

It’s been useful to push myself to blog regularly, as it’s one of my intentions for the year to blog more regularly and strengthen my own voice on a range of topics, and that’s resulted in me writing more off the cuff reflective posts. Blog posts about coaching generally take more time to research, draft and edit and usually include links to resources or tools that I want to share, which means that I don’t produce them as frequently.

Another insight I gained from looking at my recent activity was an appreciation of work I have done with others, such as the LTHE chat a few days ago. In practice, much of my collaborations happened tightly packed in between meetings and deadlines and often I don’t get a lot of time to full appreciate these moments until afterwards.

Last year, I struggled to make time to blog regularly, and that’s a final benefit of compiling my monthly newsletter: it helps keep me accountable to myself 🙂

Here is a look at my February newsletter

Welcome to the February edition of my monthly newsletter. I hope you had a good start to the year so far. I for one am glad that the days are getting a little longer again and that there is more daylight for after work dog walks. January has been a productive month, and hopefully there is something in this month’s updates, blog posts and podcasts that is helpful or inspiring to you.

My own domain is where I blog about all things that interest me, recent projects, coaching resources, books I have read and what inspires my professional practice. Recent blog posts:
I am really excited to share a glimpse at my next project: How to… Lead Virtual Teams – a course in ten podcasts. The course is free to join and open to all. It is designed for emerging and established leaders and managers working in a hybrid or fully virtual setting. The course offers you opportunities to listen, reflect and explore. If you are curious about what’s in store, read the preview blog post How to… Lead Virtual Teams. and look out for a new podcast episode coming out soon.

Each week I share ideas and strategies for creative and fun approaches to help you succeed and lead in the hybrid workplace. Recent podcast episodes:
Listen on Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS Feed and Google Podcasts.

Subscribe if you’d like to get my monthly updates.
03/02/2023
#LTHEchat 254: Hybrid working: new frontiers in professional practice. Led by @MarenDeepwell

Image of a team leader doing a team review with his team virtually. (Source: iStock)

I am really looking forward to returning as a guest to the wonderful #LTHEchat for a conversation all about hybrid working. I’m curious to hear different perspectives and see where this conversation leads us. Below is a re-post of the original post on the #LTHEchat site:

For #LTHEChat 254 we are going to shift our focus from learning to work. We will explore ways in which learning and teaching practices can inspire a more sustainable and equitable hybrid workplace.

Digital technologies enable remote and hybrid working in new and more connected ways, but it is by no means a new practice. Many industries have depended on home working over the centuries. In the UK we are at the beginning of a new era of widespread homeworking, prompting urgent questions about the rights of hybrid workers, working conditions, and how new working practices may increase inequality. Some workers may now have more flexibility working from home, but the pressures of competing demands such as caring for children or other family members whilst earning an income remain constant. Other issues such as the increasing digital surveillance of employees and privacy concerns around hybrid working practices further highlight the need for a careful and considered approach to setting out policies for the future of working remotely.

One indicator of the changes in how we work is new laws and policies that seek to formally express how the relationship between employers and their digitally connected and increasingly distributed workforce is changing. For example, in the UK we have not yet seen an introduction of a code that would give employees a legal right to disconnect, whilst other countries, including France (2016), Italy (2017), Spain (2018), and Portugal (2021) have introduced such policies over the past five years and others including Ireland are working towards doing so.

We invite you to share your experiences of hybrid working and critically reflect on some of the downsides alongside the positives. What do we gain when we move beyond simply translating office-based practices and envisage a truly hybrid way of working? How can we help create welcoming and warm hybrid places to work that help sustain well-being and work/life balance? How can we empower ourselves and others in making hybrid working an equitable and engaging reality that benefits the organisation and the individual alike?

We are at a watershed moment for remote working in the sense that we have an opportunity to set out a vision for what is ahead that is informed by lessons from the past, as well as, the shift in perspective that the pandemic has brought about.

In 2017, I set out to find creative and fun ways to work and build meaningful relationships in the virtual workplace. The resulting Open Access book, Leading Virtual Teams, brings together case studies and practical advice to build on. This LTHEchat #254 offers an opportunity for a conversation about current practices and how things are changing.

Join us to share your own inspiration, questions, and prompts for reflection. From recruitment and induction to establishing effective and sustainable ways of working in the hybrid workplace we will explore the highs and lows of what it means to work in hybrid organisations in the long term.

30/01/2023