BENGALURU: It was almost a routine for Monalisa Panda, a client solutions professional, to spend a good time to get ready for office, and she loved it too. Not any more. Panda is now working from home because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and that routine has changed. “I feel as if I am working far more now,” she says. Panda is not the only professional echoing this thought.
More than a week into quarantine, many employees of various firms, especially women, say the new experience, with lack of compartmentalising time between professional and personal work, binge eating and no workouts, is challenging to say the least. “Earlier, if I had a meeting with a CEO of any company, I used to plan in advance about what to wear, but now all those calls happen when I am in my pyjamas,” says Panda. She adds that since she works in a creative field, she needs to ideate a lot, which is not easy to do while working from home.
“Just so that I don’t reach that creative block, I have made a small work place in my balcony,” says Panda, who is also having to juggle her office work and taking care of her 11-month-old daughter now. While Panda indulges in bit of self-pampering to beat the monotony of continuous work, Nagashree Gururaj, who runs Pixie Yard Couture Studio, says you can always keep it stylish even if you are working from home, “You don’t have to be in your pyjama all the time. You can wear comfortable trousers or joggers or even a good flowy summer dress just to lift your mood,” she says.
Work from home might come with perks like people getting more time to spend at home, but it can be detrimental to health too. Simrun Chopra, a nutritionist and fitness expert, says work from home mostly turns out into sitting in front of the computer for longer hours which has adverse effect on body postures too. ‘In office, we take time for breaks, so all the meals are divided. We also get time to get a bit of stretching the limbs,” says Chopra, adding that one of the thumb rules of working from home is having a designated place for office work.
“The biggest mistake I see people doing is that they settle themselves on the bed with their laptop. It’s downhill from there. People also underestimate the power of workout. It will not just keep you energised the whole day but also build up your immune system,” say Chopra, who also emphasises that another side effect of work from home is binge eating. To avoid that she suggests having a whole nourished meal to remain energised.
Quarantine with care