Think of yourself as Pavlov’s dog, and train your brain to follow some simple routines. Creating new habits or modifying old ones isn’t easy. Try to include new routines little by little to not overwhelm yourself. It takes time to readjust but it can be done.
Routine is a remoter’s best friend
These are my routines, why I follow them, and how details have impacted my productivity and personal-professional balance:
I see friends on holidays trying to do activities away from screens, or trying to fight the attention span issues that leave them unable to read anything longer than a headline.
What if we could know how many people consuming social media are silent?.
When I use social media I get a mix of happiness for other people's achievements, entertainment, food for thought and a pinch of imposter syndrome. I attribute the last part to what I've called the Peephole distress
Imagine you live in a crowded building and you look through your apartment door peephole during the day. You'll get to see a lot of your neighbours going in and out. Maybe some of them go in and out multiple times. If you think about it you know you are not seeing everyone that lives in the building, you are only seeing the ones outside their houses. But your brain gets a conglomerate of all of the people out there and produce a message like: "People are coming in and out all the time and I'm not".
Working remotely is my default status, and even I forget sometimes to interact with humans in real life.
When you work in an office, you take for granted lots of everyday things. If you drive there or use public transportation, you’ll look at some other person’s eyes, navigate the space to avoid crushing, and eventually have to talk to somebody.
Discussing projects at meetings, going for a coffee with a coworker, standing by the water cooler or just getting to the office and say Good morning makes you interact with your peers and exercise your social skills.
If the price of two products is similar, aren't you more prone to consume things that have a smaller carbon footprint, less wasteful production process, better worker conditions, or made of a durable material? Of course! >No one wants to impact the world negatively because of a pair of trousers. The thing is: we don't usually have that information on hand, but we can use the internet to look for it. Thanks to a better informed society, people's sustainability expectations on products is growing by the day.
Some fashion industry giants have been so wasteful, polluting, and worsening their worker's conditions, that they now have their own definition: Fast Fashion.
Brands like Zara or H&M are following an unsustainable operational model. The current speed of retailers to move their collections from runways to stores, and their accelerated manufacturing production process creating a collection every two weeks have lead to brands using fashion FOMO-Fear Of Missing Out-as a business model. Of course, in most cases without hiring more people or paying them any better. Fast fashion is contributing to the global climate crisis with its waste while profiting from vulnerable places.
Once upon a time, buying clothes was limited to a particular time of the year
Due to poor quality and manufacturing, the benchmark for fast fashion companies is expected to last 10 washes until an item no longer holds its original quality and subsequently falls apart. Approximately 500 million pounds of textile waste exist in Canadian landfills.