So you get up early in the morning and begin your daily routine of showering, dressing, eating breakfast, and driving to your place of work to start your day of work. You're often inundated by distraction after distraction. There's workplace drama, talk around the water fountain, questions about your fit within the company culture and how your values align with your co-workers and C-suite. There's an uneasiness, an unspoken weariness, especially when you first join an organization, that you just want fit in. There's the lack of work-life balance, spending so much time at work that you miss the most important moments in life. You become slave to the pursuit of happiness, struggling to become the purest, truest, highest form of yourself, never self-actualizing or maximizing your full potential, living to work, rather than working to live. To be fair, every workplace is different and every situation is different and not everyone shares the same experience. However, we have just experienced one of the greatest shifts in employment ever, the Great Resignation, and many of the reasons cited in this paragraph have been cited as reasons for finding alternative forms of employment or work.

Remote work used to be the auspices of door to door salespersons, such as Tupperware, Herbalife, Kirby, or insurance agents. Doctors used to go door to door as well, providing care and checking on their patients. Remote work was sparingly used and then only in the most extreme of cases. But then COVID happened and people were separated from their offices. Businesses nationwide implemented remote work capabilities, Zoom and Slack became 100 million-plus dollar companies, online collaboration software became commonplace and a vital part of the work experience.

Coming from customer service/helpdesk/IT support, I had already made the transition to working from home. My work from home journey began in 2015. In 2015, my father expressed that he was having some issues with his health. To give some context, in 2002, a CAT scan revealed that my father had only one functioning kidney. Since then we had been dealing with the diminishing use of his functioning kidney and its long term implications, which included gout as well as a cyst that was slowly growing on the nonfunctioning kidney. At the time of his admission, he stated that he was having some trouble breathing. We took him to the doctor and they provided him some medication for bronchitis to prevent it from developing into pneumonia. I was working 40 hours a week as a call center representative. Due to my dad's health, I decided to take a more active role in his health. My job at that time did not provide me with the flexibility to provide for his needs. Later that year, my 18 month old son began having epileptic seizures. In January 2016, he was diagnosed with Steven Johnson disorder, which is an allergic reaction to his seizure medication. Spots developed all over his body and his little body ran temperatures in excess of 103 degrees and was hospitalized for two weeks. On the day my son was released from the hospital, my father was rushed to the hospital. His oxygen level had dropped below 20% and we thought that he was going to die. The hospital ran tests after tests trying to determine the cause. All of the tests came back inconclusive. Eventually he recovered. He spent three weeks in the hospital and another 2 weeks in a recovery facility, relearning to walk and function in a normal capacity.

Those health problems with my son and my father urged me to quickly embrace the work from home revolution. Work from home is not for everyone. If you are not comfortable with being alone and isolated for large expanses of the day, then working from home may not be for you But to make the best of your work from home experience. I want to provide a few tips to help you get started.

1. Find a dedicated space. This goes without saying. Having a space that is dedicated to work frees you from distractions and allows you to focus better on

2. Reduce your electronic footprint. Unless it is absolutely necessary, place your phone in Do Not Disturb mode and turn off all notifications.

3. Treat your work from home environment as if you were working on premises.

4. Make sure that you take an adequate amount of breaks
5. Make sure that you have proper lighting.

6. Make use of screen filters. Constant, focused screen time can be an issue to people, especially to people with a history of seizures or neurological disorders. Screen filters help to reduce the strain to the eyes.

7. Multiple screens are a good thing. Multiple screens can increase your overall productivity by reducing context switching.

8. Get physically active. Too much sitting can take a toll on your body. Get up. Move around. Stretch.

9. Keep healthy snacks around. Don't feast on junk food. It will definitely tell on you later.

10. Take some time for yourself and for your family. Learn to separate work time from family time or time spent with friends and family. Don't make any compromises when it comes to that.