Do You Find Yourself Wasting Time When You WFH?
In The Pajama Effect, you are vulnerable…you’re in your pajamas, for heaven’s sake…the next step is naked. You’re vulnerable to the new, to the changing, to the different, to being alone, to being remote, to being vulnerable. One of the first steps to getting comfortable working in your pajamas is to get comfortable with yourself. You cannot set and enact priorities if you are not willing to take responsibility.
To be authentically productive, you must get past the idea of doing things in a prescribed way. One of the greatest things about the pajama workplace is that it gives you the freedom to create. You can create your own environment. To some extent, you can create your hours. You can even create the dress code. You have flexibility and you have choice. You have the freedom to work in your pajamas. We are wired to do things the way we have always done them. We are comfortable with what we know and very uncomfortable with what we don’t know. I have seen very intelligent engineers, scientists and university faculty balk at the idea of communicating with new technologies. Nothing makes the individual feel more vulnerable than a new technology.
You have freedom so long as you get the job done. All this freedom will also let you procrastinate. If you want the freedom, you need to be able to trust yourself; then other people will rely on you, too. The proof is in the doing. The buck stops with you. You know when you are achieving what you want to achieve and you also know when you are not achieving. You have the freedom to create the life you want in the virtual environment. That is one of the reasons most people want to escape the constraints of the cubicle in the first place.
The virtual workplace is results-oriented and demands authentic productivity. There is a great deal of discussion these days about authentic thinking and learning. But the real question is…authentic to whom? Authentic means authentic to you. You must get past the idea of an objective right reality and move on to your best subjective effort. Being authentically productive requires using your creativity and applying your talents (Psychology Today, 2013).
There is no age limit to The Pajama Effect. This is not generational. In order to qualify, you must be continually willing to learn. Creativity requires that you stay “open at the top.” You want to step out of the box you know as you and into the box called the unknown. You are carving out a path in a new frontier, setting the rules and creating the regulations in a new work environment. As your understanding of the rules of living in the virtual world evolves, so must your continual curiosity to know more. You can never stop learning in the virtual workplace. #VirtualWork #RemoteWork #PJEffect WFH #NSFW #ThePajamaEffect
