11 March 2020 – probably all of us will remember that day when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 pandemic. It has been almost two years already and it seems we have learned to live in a world full of restrictions. However, there is an aspect of the pandemic reality that has still been quite troublesome for some of us – home office.
How to maintain work-life balance in your flat?
There is no doubt there are some benefits to working from home. For many of us it means no need to commute which saves both time and money. There is also a visible environmental impact. According to some research, working from home has led to reduced greenhouse gas emission and consumption of fossil fuels. But how does it actually affect us at a psychological level? Many of us might feel overworked, stressed and even burnt out. Since the line between work and private life is blurring, we may feel as if we were at work all the time. That is why it is important to stick to some strategies that will help us draw the border. They may include using separate devices for work and private life, defining areas in your home office that serve only for work tasks or scheduling time in our calendars exclusively for private activities.
Change from work-life balance to work-life integration
But maybe it is not always that bad to feel frustrated while working from home. Maybe all the negative emotions could be the push to some life-changing decisions. For many people pandemic and lockdown created an opportunity to rethink what they expect from life and whether what they do makes them happy. Some have decided to slow down, quit their corporate jobs and even move out of cities. For others it has been a great chance to look for new career paths and develop in the areas they have never thought about before. In many cases people have also shifted from work-life balance to work-life integration which involved blending personal life with work life and came with a lot of flexibility.
How about English at work in post-pandemic reality?
And since the pandemic forced most of us to work from home and some of us have redesigned our careers, it has become more possible and popular to change jobs and work for companies located in other countries. We may be thousands of miles away from the headquarters and the cooperation can still be smooth. The only thing we usually need, apart from good Internet connection, is…knowledge of English which for many years has been gaining importance and now is treated by most employers as a must-have. As we know, changing a job is always a stressful experience, but it’s much easier once English is the area you don’t need to stress over, just because you’re good at it.
We have all been struggling with the reality we would never expect to face. It’s not easy to adjust to something so different from what we know, but it’s not impossible and maybe, just maybe it’s a good opportunity to learn as much as we can about ourselves and turn it into something good. Remote work allowed many of us to have online calls with foreign clients and, subsequently, motivated us to improve our English at work.
Signing up for an English course is just one of the way to do that, you can do so by clicking here: https://talkersi.pl/dev/oferta/
