Make Headphones Your Home Office
How to find focus when working around family
Working from home has its perks, but also it perils. On the plus side, not having a long, grueling daily commute is a major mercy. And being able to turn work breaks into family time is a welcome blessing.
But being around family can also make it hard to focus. Spouses will have questions and requests. And children will want to play and show you things. These are some of the joyful burdens of marriage and parenthood, but so is breadwinning, and both deserve dedicated time and attention.
Moreover, I’ve found that when I am able to fully concentrate during work hours, I become more fully present, available, and engaged for my family afterward. Quality work time and quality family time are not at odds with each other, but are mutually reinforcing.
To preserve your work-time focus at home, it helps to have a home office, which I do. But what about family trips when you’re still working? What if your hotel room or your relative’s house doesn’t have a built-in fortress of solitude to spare?
For example, my family and I have been staying at my mom’s place in southern California. Her “casita,” as she calls it, has an open floor plan and no separate rooms with a desk. At first I tried to work at the dining table. But even when everyone refrained from interrupting, the bustle about me would still be distracting. Just knowing my family was near was a distraction, because I’d have the urge to chat with my mom or play with my little one.
So I tried working from the closest Starbucks. At first that was an improvement, but it still wasn’t ideal. The music was too loud and boisterous, as were the conversations of the workers and other patrons. Plus, a vagrant-looking fellow who frequents the place once asked me if I was there to “harvest his IP.” To allay his paranoia, the next day I tried working from the local library, but an older gentleman doing some kind of research there kept blurting out “Tired!”
I decided that the pleasant distractions of family are preferable to the bizarre antics of SoCal eccentrics and that I was better off figuring out a way to make working around family work.
The solution I landed on was to make my headphones my home office. I simply asked everyone to avoid interrupting me while I had my headphones on. I found a spot at the kitchen counter that was somewhat secluded. And, while I worked, I blocked out distracting sounds by listening to baroque music through my noise-canceling headphones.
The headphones also help me to avoid breaking my own concentration and to establish that concentration in the first place. The more I do focused work with them on, the more I mentally associate the headphones with focused work. Now covered ears equals work mode. To block out both internal and external distractions and lock in on work, I simply don the ’phones. And doing so serves as a behavioral cue for the Pavlovian response of concentration. Hopefully this psychological trick will work even with my Bluetooth headphones turned off, so I can minimize radiation to my brain.
None of these simple techniques are new, original to me, or particularly clever, but they’re helping me concentrate. If you find yourself in a similar situation, maybe they’ll help you, too.