Transcript:

Welcome back to the Smash assistant podcast. I’m your host, Nino Prodan. This week, I want to talk about something you may be going through right now. And that’s working from home a little over 10 years ago, I was kind of in the same shoes as you. But for me, I was working at my nine to five at the time, and they wanted me to do data analysis and do data cleanup on a whole bunch of research that we were doing. We had a whole team of people putting together data from a whole bunch of county website documents, and this is like 100, hundreds of thousands of documents. So this is a huge project that took years to do. And when I first started doing it, I was trying to clean up the numbers, clean up the data, run the analysis on it during the day, but I wouldn’t get the results from our team until the end of the day. So I really didn’t have enough time to do all this. So I stopped started doing it at night while I was at home. And I will give the reports every morning. And the people I was working with actually like this. They thought this is working really well. Let’s just keep rolling with it. It worked for me really well, because I’d liked being a night owl. So I work all night, give the report in the morning. And then I get to go to sleep and kind of be a vampire for most of my life at the time. But what I didn’t understand at the time, was the blessing that I had, that I no longer had to get dressed for work. I no longer had to commute, which is like my least favorite thing to do in the world. Especially when I lived in California. You know, I started to be able to enjoy my mornings. I was able to start my day off the way I wanted my day To start off, not rushing around trying to get everything done before I had to commute to work. Instead I could actually relax Take it slowly do the things that I wanted to do for myself. But I also started butting up against one big problem. And that was that work, instead of being left at the office started bleeding into the rest of my life, and instead of work being just limited between nine to five, while I was at the office, not only did I work all night, but I’d also have to answer emails during the day, take calls during the day, and it was like I was working 24 hours a day, rather than just limiting myself to eight hours a day. At first, I didn’t mind it because my days were running at my pace at my time. My schedule was kind of flexible, so I could do things when I felt like it. As long as I got those reports done in the morning, I could do the work whenever I felt like it. But the problem was, people always wanted to talk and ask questions. And when they call, they wanted me to answer the phone. And when they sent an email, they wanted to response immediately. And of course, I felt obligated to live up to that expectation. I thought, wow, you know, I have this opportunity to work from home, there’s no way that I can leave them hanging when I don’t have to be at the office. So although I was free of the commute, free of always needing to look presentable, so I didn’t do video calls. My whole day became dedicated to working my nine to five, which now became a nine to 5am, not a nine to 5pm it was like everything but six hours of my day was work. And instead of creating more freedom for myself, I shackled myself even more firmly to my job, and as I started realizing this, I realized that I needed to do something, because this wasn’t the way that I wanted to live. And I’ll share with you more about that tomorrow.