November 20, 2022

The Great Veggie Box Adventure – episodes 1 and 2

Filed under: bloggery — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 10:17 pm

The Great Veggie Box Adventure

I asked, “People who get veggie boxes delivered. Can anyone tell me the *difference* between Riverford and Abel and Cole?” no one was able (or coal) to answer.

Thanks for everyone for their suggestions about what box to get the results were:
- Oddbox, 2, (wonky veg is extra ethical)
- Abel and Cole, 4 (minus points for ten years old bad employment practice)
- Riverford 7 votes, 6 households, (plus ethics for planting a tree)
- an indie, 1 (better ethics in fewer food miles)

I have decided to sign up for both Abel and Cole and Riverford. A box from each will show up every four weeks on an alternating two week schedule, all the better to evaluate the product.

So far, when signing up (by mobile)

Riverford
- easy to scroll through a list of box options
- no apparent way to add substitutions or even change boxes in a given week although this is mentioned somewhere.
- veggie boxes regularly include potatoes and carrots which I don’t want to buy that often
- no way to increase quantities of onions and tomatoes and peppers which I want.
- can set three dislikes (I chose carrots, celery, and celeriac – two I dislike, one I just don’t want often)
- no way to set favourites
- easy to set a 4 week recurrance
- nice text of sign up email for messaging, very non threatening and humble
-spelling of company is easy
- refer a friend code gets me £15 via friend code, friend gets £15 (tree is allegedly planted, can’t remember if this was stated on page)
- cost for small veg box with zero packing £13.95 excluding delivery

Abel and Cole (in my head Cain and Abel)
- have to click on each box option to see contents, shows you this week versus next week but overall more annoying
- no apparent way to add substitutions
- veggie boxes regularly include potatoes and carrots which I don’t want to buy that often
- no way to increase quantities of onions and tomatoes and peppers which I want.
- using app, I can set 9 dislikes for veggies (I chose carrots, celery, celeriac parsnips, squashes excluding butternut, swede and turnip – I’m trying to avoid boring root veg and I still have one slot to fill) and three dislikes for 3 fruit but I’m not ordering fruit.
- no way to set favourites
- insanely difficult to set 4 week recurrance until you download app when it is simple
- nasty text of sign up email, threatening and boastful
- instant offer to download app
- share code prominently flaggged as advert despite clicking out
- app actually much easier to navigate and control
- spelling of company breaks my brain every time
- refer a friend code gets me 50% off two boxes via friend code, friend gets nothing
- cost for small veg box £14.25 excluding delivery

The investigation continues. I was prepared to consider Oddbox in this rotation but I’ll save that for a later stage and compare it to an indie if I can find one since my original ask was the two main players.

January 16, 2022

Things I do to my hair

Eco Style Black Castor and Flaxseed Oil

Eco Style Black Castor and Flaxseed Oil

After nearly 45 years on the planet I may have finally got my hair figured out. For many years I thought of myself as someone with straight hair with frizzy and curl bits. The years I spent brushing and straightening and trying to smooth it down, I now consider largely wasted. Because inside me was a curly-girl waiting to be set free.



Click on any of the photos to zoom in and check out my hair.

Feb 2020

Feb 2020

curyhairJan2021

Jan 2021

curyhairSept2021

Sept 2021

curyhairDec2021

Dec 2021

CuryhairJan2022

12 Jan 2022

CuryhairJan2022

Jan 2022



One of my pandemic activities has been growing my hair.

  • February 2020, the photo in the orange sweater is me, pre-pandemic in the UK, on a good hair day.
  • January 2021, one year later in a pink hoodie here’s my hair agai, it’s super curly.
  • September 2021 in the grey sweater is my hair just after dying it, at home with Schwartzkof hair dye. I’m starting to have difficulty fitting it all into a selfie.
  • December 2021 in pink velvet is my hair shortly after washing when I wound it into ringlets with my fingers. It was a bit flat on top though with this style.
  • January 2022 in a purple sweater I just recently got from ebay for less than £12. It was a good lighting day for my hair.
  • The final photo is my hair today on a regular hair day. It needs conditioning.

A couple of people have asked me what I’ve been doing to my hair (genuinely, they have) and I’ve been meaning to document what I’ve done that seems to be actually working. The thing I have learned about my hair is that it absoletely soaks up conditioner. It needs conditioning every day. That’s a lot of product.

Right now I’m using about 6 main products for my hair. All the links below are Amazon associated links. Feel free to use them or not, if you do I get a tiny royalty. If you don’t like Amazon just use the names of the products to source them from somewhere else.

Hair care shelfie

Hair care shelfie (click on the image to zoom in)

  • I wash it in As I Am Coconut Cowash (ust under £10 for 454g)
    instead of shampoo, finger combing it in. Typically while in a bath because this takes some time to work through. I only wash it once a week, or twice at most.
  • I condition it with Garnier Banana Hair Food  which says it is vegan (£3.40 for a tub of 390ml)  which is pudding-like, which I also use as a mask or cream. I also sometimes rub a shea butter product into the ends but I’m planning to stop doing that when the bottle runs out, it makes my hair too greasy.
  • My main daily product is the Eco Style Black Castor and Flaxseed Oil stylying gel. I get the big tub (£18 for 2.4l) but there’s also a smaller one. (473ml for £4.75.) Most days all I do is use the Eco Style, that’s why there’s such a lot of it, comparatively.
  • I can add more curls with the Catwalk Curls Rock (£11.50 for two bottles of 150ml) amplifying mousse, which is just about worth the price for curl volume, although too much risks it getting crunchy.
  • I smooth some of it with Aveda confixor gel. This stuff is expensive (£25 for the 250ml bottle) tricky, it’s easy to use too much and I get lazy with it. But used well it can define curls.
  • I sleep with my hair in a silk bonnet, ideally research a black-owned company for this, tied up on top of my head in a velvet scrunchie. I also wear silk lined hats. My sister got me one from Black Sunrise.

I never brush or comb it, except very occasionally when its wet and fully conditioned and I am aiming for a particular style. I haven’t straightened it in over two years.

That’s a lot of writing about my hair. However it took very little time to write compare to the time I have spent on my hair in the past two years.

January 27, 2021

Pandemic post: beyond the short and medium term

Filed under: adventures in the world of today,bloggery,living in the future — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 8:42 am

I’ve been thinking about crisis situations and what it means to think about the short term, medium term and long term.

In the first days of the pandemic almost a year ago, I think most of the people I know were focusing on “taking each day as it comes” just putting one foot in front of each other and keeping going, even when we were frightened.

Now we’re used to the pandemic, or at least experienced at it. We’ve made accommodations in our lives to work around the absences and we’ve evolved new habits like when we go shopping and the pocket we keep our face masks in.

And yet it’s still not over, the government says we have a “long long long” way to go before lockdown can be lifted. The death rate is high, and even with the comfort of the vaccines being deployed we’re all exhausted, our mental health is frayed – and I say this as someone lucky enough to have a job and a secure home and a partner and cats to keep me company.

So what does it mean to think not just about the medium term but the long term? I’m not saying the pandemic will never end. It will and we will reestablish our normal. But we’re long past the short term reaction and a year is more than medium term, it’s a year of our lives spent in this strange half life. So how are we thinking now?

For me, large parts of my life are on hold. Not just seeing friends and family and going to restaurants, but my creative work and fun projects are all on pause. I can do my job and I can do housework, because those are clear and obvious tasks, but I struggle to enjoy myself. Which doesn’t mean my life contains no joy – I have cats! – but that for me the fun things are harder to engage with than work. And with my exercise, I know I’m not progressing, I’m just trying to maintain an acceptable level of fitness.

I usually make New Years resolutions and this year I wonder what it’s sensible to resolve. I like to set goals and to achieve them. But what is realistic? People keep saying “be kind to yourself” which I actually find a bit frustrating because I am kind to myself, I promise, but I also want to set high standards for myself and meet or exceed them.

And so I’m contemplating the year ahead and wondering, what goals should I set and where do I want to be a year from now? Out of the pandemic, obviously, but what about the things within my control, where should I set my targets, beyond the short term exercise of getting up each day and living my life. (No judgement if that’s still all you can achieve, I’m so over judgement.)

Where are you at and how do you feel your horizons have shifted over the course of the last twelve months or might shift in the next twelve?

August 18, 2020

Working from home: pandemic edition

Filed under: adventures in the world of today,articles,bloggery,living in the future — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 1:55 pm

My workspace

My workspace

On 18 March, at the start of the pandemic, before the UK lockdown, I shared some advice about working from home. Let’s review how well I’ve kept to my own top tips! The original post is in blockquotes and the reflections in plain text afterwards.

Set up a dedicated workspace

This could be tricky if you don’t have a lot of space in your home. The ideal situation is a home office but not everyone has that luxury. Have a look at the spaces you do have. Can a corner of your kitchen or living room be repurposed to become your new home office? Even if you have to pack it away at the end of the working day to make room for other activities, consider what space you could use during usual working hours. A kitchen table is a good height for a desk – although consider other advice in this post about avoiding uncomfortable positions and repetitive strain.

I am fortunate enough to have a home study/office but I also found after long sessions at my desk I tired of the same environment. Because I have more than one source of work I ended up dividing my work into different spaces. Most of my marketing and comms work and professional admin happened at my desk but my writing moved on to my laptop and in the living room.

Writing in a different location on a different device had the side effect of making me invest more in cloud storage and engage with various issues (here by ‘engage’ I mean ‘get annoyed by’) related to keeping my work in the cloud.

I also set up a Zumba studio in my house by dismantling my living room in the same way before every online class and reassembling it after. My sofa is not enjoying the experience and I now have a new deep desire for wood floors over carpet.

I did succeed in keeping all work files on my computer rather than spilling everywhere because so much was digital. However, I found it useful to keep a paper notebook next to my desk to make a few running notes about things I was asked to do. It was sometimes faster than opening a new electronic note or building a task in the project management system.

Get dressed

This may seem counter intuitive. Isn’t part of the fun of working from home that you can do it in your dressing gown? Yes and no. For me, wearing a dressing gown never makes me feel as though I’m at work. It’s okay for a quick email or jotting down an idea. But as you begin your new working from home life, get washed and dressed. Comfy clothes are fine and if you feel liberated from dressing up in business attire feel free to embrace your athleisure wear. Alternatively if you don’t feel like yourself without putting on makeup and wearing your suit, that’s okay too. But get out of your nightwear, you will need clear divisions between work and home life, boundaries are your friend.

I largely stand by this. Sometimes I do find myself writing in my dressing gown when I wake up and I feel inspired. But for most of my professional work I prefer something other than nightwear.

I did change the way I dressed during the pandemic. Business on the top, fitness party on the bottom was my rule. I wanted to be ready to exercise and I tried to take regular exercise breaks (initially anyway) which meant I wore more active wear. Also, I tried to look as business professional on Zoom as I would in person – from the waist up.

By June I was always appropriately dressed for business calls but I think more casual and with less creative flair. I only ever wear makeup occasionally and that remained the case but I’d been actively experimenting with cosmetics (a new year’s resolution) before the pandemic and I stopped after lockdown. My web cam’s better than most people’s anyway – I don’t need extra enhancements! (Ten years old, shout out to Logitech. And I was lucky enough I already had one because they went out of stock fast.)

Plan your week

If you’re an organised person you’re probably doing this anyway and now looking at a calendar full of cancelled meetings and endless seas of “working from home” perhaps punctuated with “conference call”. I start my week with “thinking and planning time” as I consider what’s coming up, where I need to go to offsite meetings, when I’m on calls and when I’m doing design or serious work that requires a lot of concentration like stats or some kinds of strategy. Start filling your diary with plans for carving up your work into different chunks. It keeps your brain active and engaged to move from one type of work to another. Keep a record of your colleagues’ hours and use their calendars to plan 1:1s or team standups to catch up with them. Plan in breaks – I’ll discuss these in more detail next.

What I’m talking about here is diary management, But I was wrong to think a calendar of cancelled meetings would be the norm. Everyone I’ve spoken to who works professionally found that the amount of meetings rapidly increased. Everyone now had to plan for something they’d not been prepared for and that requires a lot of extra discussion. And instead of grabbing a colleague for a quick chat a lot of things now have to be scheduled.

My team instituted a new standup meeting every morning which has evolved and shifted focus in various ways during the pandemic but the new instituted tradition has defined our pandemic experience.

When I wrote “keep a record of your colleagues’ hours” I think I meant “be aware of their work pattern”. Catching up with colleagues 1:1 is good and our team proposed that each new starter had an informal online coffee meeting with an existing member of the team which I think would be good practice for every team (physical or virtual).

Ability to plan your week including breaks is obviously subjective. But my option is that when you sacrifice strategic planning time for operations you become reactive, you are no longer in charge of your workload, it is running you.

Take breaks from your desk

A sedentary lifestyle was not, as it turned out, very good for my health. Desk work can make you unfit and it’s bad for your posture too. Plan some breaks in your schedule. Tea breaks are good, just for a change of scenery and a chance to adjust your posture. Try to get some extra steps in while you’re about it. If you have a garden or access to outside space; go outside and get fresh air. Get steps by going up and down stairs or walking back and forth through your home. Resist the urge to start doing a lot of domestic jobs but it’s okay to put a load of laundry on or hang one out – it takes five minutes. Do some stretches, touch your toes. Don’t go directly from your computer screen to your phone, disconnect if only for five or ten minutes. Any longer than ten minutes starts to become a distraction; read more about avoiding those further down.

Keeping active was much harder than I expected. I did quite well at scheduling in exercise (mornings and after work) and one break (lunch – occasionally used for exercise) but the real challenge was moving away from my desk for the requisite amount of time for Fitbit’s 250 steps an hour target.

Back to back meetings running every hour on the hour seem to be the norm among many of my professional colleagues. Please don’t do this. New piece of advice – no meeting should be allowed to go on for an hour. Take ten minutes between meeting to walk, breathe and recompose yourself.

The part about not going from computer to your phone is true but I broke that rule a lot. I even used my phone during Pilates sometimes.

Zoom fatigue is real. When everything is done over a screen you don’t get a visual break. My desk work (writing, marketing, management, communications) was already primarily screens. Then meetings became screens, so did family and friends, fitness and about 80% of my life. My eyes got tired.

One thing you can do is make a Zoom or other video chat background saying “excuse me I have to step out” etc and I’ve chosen to list some possible reasons why I might have had to move away from my desk (refill water, call of nature, phone call, parcel person etc).

Recently I’ve started keeping more informal notes, thoughts and ideas in a paper notebook for a visual break. Also reading paper books, playing with cats and taking walks outside to look at the horizon.

Ergonomically assess your workspace

Working at a desk can be bad for your posture. Even if you have a good desk chair, have you adjusted it correctly? Is your keyboard at a good angle for your hands, is your monitor the right distance away? Search online for how to create a healthy desk set up and do your best to emulate it. If it’s not working, keep adjusting. Take those breaks I mentioned and use them to stretch and correct your posture.

All true. But it is genuinely hard to remember to take breaks. And any workspace, however ergonomic, will wear over time. I worked in different locations for a change of scene, see above.

Take lunch breaks

It’s very tempting to work through lunch but whether you’re in the office or working from home this isn’t a great way to be. You will work better if you do take those breaks. Take a half hour or an hour’s lunch break to step away mentally and physically from your work. Personally I’d also advise against the easy sandwich option. It doesn’t take long to cook a stir fry or assemble a buddha bowl. I got very bored of sandwiches in my days of grabbing a quick lunch and they weren’t good for me either. This is all easier if you have time to meal prep. One relatively easy way of doing this is make an extra portion of every meal you make for dinner and save it to be heated up for lunch later in the week. (Not necessarily the next day, freeze it and wait until you’re excited to eat that meal again.) If your work permits it, try to get a bit of exercise in during that break as well – at least on some days.

Lunch breaks depend on your team culture. I managed to block out a large slot (1 hour 30 minutes) in the middle of a day for a lunch break. I did on occasion use it for work but mostly for food, exercise, dealing with eyestrain and Zoom fatigue and providing outside time.

The privilege of having a garden became swiftly evident. Outside space made a tremendous difference to my mental health. You can see why it’s such a factor in prison narratives.

Manage distractions

It can be nice to have the radio or the TV on in the background while you work. It is a sort of company. But if you end up paying more attention to what you’re seeing or hearing than to your work, then you’re not really working. That’s especially true right now when the news is frightening. I personally like Radio 1. I like chart music and you get regular news updates as part of Newsbeat which is one of the better news programmes and works hard to offer mental health advice along with distressing news.

One big distraction that’s not easy to manage is kids or pets. Dogs need to be walked, kids need entertainment, even my cats are demanding when I work from home. The best advice I can give here is to figure out a plan. How much will you have to step away from work? What is an emergency, what is important, what is urgent, what can wait? Enlist your family in figuring this out. I was trained at age five at how to call an ambulance and by seven I knew how to take a proper telephone message (you need name and number even if you get nothing else). Your family, pets and other responsibilities are not the enemy taking you away from work. Especially right now, they are your loved ones and a source of strength. Think about how you can benefit from them (in those breaks you’re supposed to take) and not find them a burden.

I don’t think anyone anticipated back when I wrote this how challenging the lockdown would be for parents. I did expect challenges here and I had my own with giving my pets sufficient attention.

On reflection though this idea should have explored the experience of the single person and the mental health implications of going without any human contact. This piece of advice didn’t get as far as talking about what you do when your home isn’t full of family, friends and pets. Things people should really not do is tell single people “I wish I had some peace and quiet” or people with kids “this is a great opportunity to really engage with them”. Have empathy for people who are having *different problems* to yours even if their problem would be your dreamlife.

Drink water

I really wonder if anyone is well enough hydrated. Water is good for you. It’s good for your health, it’s good for your skin, it’s a way to stop and think and be mindful of yourself. Keep a bottle of water on your desk and drink from it. As soon as it is empty, go and fill it up. Drinking regular water has been transformative for me.

Three months on I have rarely seen anyone on video chat drinking water and I seem to be perpetually chugging the stuff. I even have a “gone to get water etc” Zoom screen. Why does no one else drink water? Maybe they’re not on as many calls as me and take breaks – good for them!

Stop at the same time every day

When working from home you can get on a roll and keep going and going and going. If you don’t have kids or a partner or pets is there anything to stop you working through the evening and working into the night? even if you have all those things maybe they don’t feel able to stop you. So you need a cut off time. At 5pm or 6pm or whatever time works for you, stop working. Dismantle your home office, shut down or send your computer to sleep, walk away from the keyboard and that tantalising project. It will be there waiting for you tomorrow and you can return to it refreshed.

I was pretty good at this. But I didn’t discuss what you do if the rest of your team is working unsustainable hours. It’s hard to be the maverick. I believe that people going home on time is as important as arriving on time (or more so) but do you, does your boss? What is the purpose of a boundary or a break?

I once wrote “you are not a dragon hoarding leave like gold; you are a plant and annual leave is like water”. This is still true. Breaks will allow you to return to work replenished. Please try to model a culture that sees breaks as essential to a healthy workplace, not just for yourself, but for your colleagues.

This concludes my post pandemic working from home reflections. If you have reflections of your own, please share them in the comments.

May 13, 2020

Thinking about writing

Filed under: bloggery — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 7:50 am

I’ve reached the stage in my current novel where instead of ploughing on to the next chapter, I’ve reached one of the thinking bits. The planning document has posed a series of questions about how to handle this chapter – although I know what happens in the next three after it. This means that I find myself in the sunny garden, supervising the cats and thinking about writing.

And, as a tangent, thinking about thinking about writing. My friend Liz made a post the other day about how mostly when she is knitting she is performing the act described as knitting, but when she is sewing, there’s a lot of other stuff (cutting out, pinning, etc) that is not itself the act described as sewing.

Writing is a bit like sewing. Some of it is sitting down and banging out the words – if it wasn’t, the books would never exist. But there’s a lot of other stuff. Deleting the words you wrote the day, week, month or year before is a big part of it. Writing notes and making structure plans is, for me, essential. Writing words you know won’t be part of the book like character sketches and histories is a form of writing, and it adds to the quality of the books you produce but isn’t exactly the same as writing the book. And then there are the thinking parts which involve a lot of cups of tea or baths (if you’re Douglas Adams) and, for me, a lot of staring into space. Sometimes I reach for the keyboard or notebook and then put it down again, sometimes I write a paragraph and delete it. But eventually, assuming the book is going well, the thinking crystalises into decisions and then you can get back to writing.

This isn’t even touching upon the business of being a writer which involves a lot of things to help your book sell which are not in any way writing. That includes school and library visits, conference speaking, the construction of marketing material and keeping up a social media presence, judging competitions, meeting rights buyers and film agents and fans. There’s a whole bunch of stuff which can be very enjoyable and satisfying in its own way but is really ‘being a writer’ rather than ‘writing’.

Producing blog posts is somewhere between the two. My blog exists as part of my website which is a promotional tool. But writing it feels more like writing than some of the other business promotion things I do. It gets a thought out of my brain and on to the page, and then into the world. Unlike my fiction, my blog posts are not carefully considered, edited and rewritten. They’re more like the first draft of an idea where I start writing and see where I end up.

And now I need to get back to that thinking, I have a cup of tea and some space to stare at – so I’m all set.

April 18, 2020

Those caterpillar blues

Filed under: bloggery,how I write,things Rhiannon does not like,things Rhiannon likes,Zumba — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 10:50 am

This morning I was feeling pretty low, the way you do when you wake up knowing you ate too many biscuits the night before. I am usually very disciplined about food and fitness but this has not been the best week for that. It has been a week much like this funny image someone shared on Facebook of what I think of as a Very Hungry Author, credit ScaryMommy. (Vegetarian version of course.)

I am also a very goals driven person and I think what has been especially hard is feeling as though I’m not progressing on any goals. This feels like just marking time: waiting for life to restart. Waiting to make plans, waiting to make progress, waiting for the peak for the crisis to pass, waiting to see what the aftermath looks like.

It is so hard to write right now. And although I’ve been trying, it is tough going. I think the particular difficulty has to do with the fact I’ve been working for two years on my master work and now I’m worried it feels irrelevant to the post coronavirus world. Will anyone even want it? And before you ask, no I can’t just put a reference to the virus into it, it doesn’t work that way, it grew organically out of a pre virus world. And the nature of the book is such, I can’t avoid the topic without essentially saying, this book is set in an alternate universe.

So anyway, I know it’s a first world problem. But these are these are the kind of issues I have. I know I’m very lucky in this current situation, it could be and is a lot worse for lots of people than me. My issues are things like difficulty writing, and missing my gym routine and the personal training I was going to have. And worrying that I am losing my disciplined grip on my own lifestyle. And I was feeling sad.

I am now feeling more cheerful. The first reason is that i had a lovely video call with my dearest Mum, both of us still in our PJs and she did a really good job of cheering me up by agreeing that it does indeed suck and also telling me funny stories about her memoirs, which I am looking forward to reading. Also, I did the washing up while we talked, so at least that is done.

Then my partner also had a go at cheering me up by pointing out that I have actually made progress against at least one goal. I have now taught six Zumba classes online and teaching Zumba was one of my New Year’s Resolutions. And, as I’ve blogged about before, I wouldn’t have had the courage to start teaching as soon as I have if it wasn’t for the pandemic which put smaller anxieties into proportion. So that is one area in which I have made progress and continue to make it.

And I also do accept, because it’s what I’d tell anyone else, that just keeping going counts as progress right now. Everything is very hard, everything is stressful, everything is overwhelming. It takes strength just to keep your old life ticking over. Today I am a caterpillar, munching through one leaf at a time (and maybe too many chocolate biscuits) but someday I will be a social butterfly again.

March 31, 2020

My First Class

Filed under: Zumba — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 10:22 am

I got my Zumba qualification at the end of February and I was feeling a bit anxious about trying to teach my first class. There’s lots of instructors in the area and I was still researching venues when Corona arrived and now we’re in lockdown.

But I’m in lots of online fitness groups and people are putting their classes on Facebook (yeah I know that’s not allowed) and Zoom and Skype. People are dancing in their kitchens and living rooms. People have sound problems and camera problems and they’re teaching anyway.

Now I don’t feel so anxious about it. There are much bigger problems than my inexperience. And inexperience is a problem that time and work solves. I’ve got my playlist almost ready, I have one song left to learn.

I teach my first class online this Saturday. Wish me luck!

March 18, 2020

Working from home

Filed under: adventures in the world of today,articles,bloggery,living in the future — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 2:20 pm

Desk bike and elevated monitor

I’m incredibly lucky that my current role is primarily working from home. That is even more true in the current crisis where there are many people who don’t have that luxury; who have customer facing roles, roles in industry or entertainment, or laboratories; or thousands of other jobs I probably have never thought about. But I am primarily a desk worker in a professional services role, with a career in the creative arts also as a desk worker. As such I have spent a lot of my life working from home.

So it occurred to me I could share my top tips with people new to this working environment. These are what works for me and feel free to ignore any or all of them if they don’t work for you. But I hope they will prompt you to think about what could work for you, to try new ideas and get your home office functional and perhaps a bit better than that.

Set up a dedicated work space
This could be tricky if you don’t have a lot of space in your home. The ideal situation is a home office but not everyone has that luxury. Have a look at the spaces you do have. Can a corner of your kitchen or living room be repurposed to become your new home office? Even if you have to pack it away at the end of the working day to make room for other activities, consider what space you could use during usual working hours. A kitchen table is a good height for a desk – although consider other advice in this post about avoiding uncomfortable positions and repetitive strain.

Get dressed
This may seem counter intuitive. Isn’t part of the fun of working from home that you can do it in your dressing gown? Yes and no. For me, wearing a dressing gown never makes me feel as though I’m at work. It’s okay for a quick email or jotting down an idea. But as you begin your new working from home life, get washed and dressed. Comfy clothes are fine and if you feel liberated from dressing up in business attire feel free to embrace your athleisure wear. Alternatively if you don’t feel like yourself without putting on makeup and wearing your suit, that’s okay too. But get out of your nightwear, you will need clear divisions between work and home life, boundaries are your friend.

Plan your week
If you’re an organised person you’re probably doing this anyway and now looking at a calendar full of cancelled meetings and endless seas of “working from home” perhaps punctated with “conference call”. I start my week with “thinking and planning time” as I consider what’s coming up, where I need to go to offsite meetings, when I’m on calls and when I’m doing design or serious work that requires a lot of concentration like stats or some kinds of strategy. Start filling your diary with plans for carving up your work into different chunks. It keeps your brain active and engaged to move from one type of work to another. Keep a record of your colleagues’ hours and use their calendars to plan 1:1s or team standups to catch up with them. Plan in breaks – I’ll discuss these in more detail next.

Take breaks from your desk
A sedentary lifestyle was not, as it turned out, very good for my health. Desk work can make you unfit and it’s bad for your posture too. Plan some breaks in your schedule. Tea breaks are good, just for a change of scenery and a chance to adjust your posture. Try to get some extra steps in while you’re about it. If you have a garden or access to outside space; go outside and get fresh air. Get steps by going up and down stairs or walking back and forth through your home. Resist the urge to start doing a lot of domestic jobs but it’s okay to put a load of laundry on or hang one out – it takes five minutes. Do some stretches, touch your toes. Don’t go directly from your computer screen to your phone, disconnect if only for five or ten minutes. Any longer than ten minutes starts to become a distraction; read more about avoiding those further down.

Ergonomically assess your workspace
Working at a desk can be bad for your posture. Even if you have a good desk chair, have you adjusted it correctly? Is your keyboard at a good angle for your hands, is your monitor the right distance away? Search online for how to create a healthy desk set up and do your best to emulate it. If it’s not working, keep adjusting. Take those breaks I mentioned and use them to stretch and correct your posture.

Take lunch breaks
It’s very tempting to work through lunch but whether you’re in the office or working from home this isn’t a great way to be. You will work better if you do take those breaks. Take a half hour or an hour’s lunch break to step away mentally and physically from your work. Personally I’d also advise against the easy sandwich option. It doesn’t take long to cook a stir fry or assemble a buddha bowl. I got very bored of sandwiches in my days of grabbing a quick lunch and they weren’t good for me either. This is all easier if you have time to meal prep. One relatively easy way of doing this is make an extra portion of every meal you make for dinner and save it to be heated up for lunch later in the week. (Not necessarily the next day, freeze it and wait until you’re excited to eat that meal again.) If your work permits it, try to get a bit of exercise in during that break as well – at least on some days.

Manage distractions
It can be nice to have the radio or the TV on in the background while you work. It is a sort of company. But if you end up paying more attention to what you’re seeing or hearing than to your work, then you’re not really working. That’s especially true right now when the news is frightening. I personally like Radio 1. I like chart music and you get regular news updates as part of Newsbeat which is one of the better news programmes and works hard to offer mental health advice along with distressing news.

One big distraction that’s not easy to manage is kids or pets. Dogs need to be walked, kids need entertainment, even my cats are demanding when I work from home. The best advice I can give here is to figure out a plan. How much will you have to step away from work? What is an emergency, what is important, what is urgent, what can wait? Enlist your family in figuring this out. I was trained at age five at how to call an ambulance and by seven I knew how to take a proper telephone message (you need name and number even if you get nothing else). Your family, pets and other responsibilities are not the enemy taking you away from work. Especially right now, they are your loved ones and a source of strength. Think about how you can benefit from them (in those breaks you’re supposed to take) and not find them a burden.

Drink water
I really wonder if anyone is well enough hydrated. Water is good for you. It’s good for your health, it’s good for your skin, it’s a way to stop and think and be mindful of yourself. Keep a bottle of water on your desk and drink from it. As soon as it is empty, go and fill it up. Drinking regular water has been transformative for me.

Stop at the same time every day
When working from home you can get on a roll and keep going and going and going. If you don’t have kids or a partner or pets is there anything to stop you working through the evening and working into the night? even if you have all those things maybe they don’t feel able to stop you. So you need a cut off time. At 5pm or 6pm or whatever time works for you, stop working. Dismantle your home office, shut down or send your computer to sleep, walk away from the keyboard and that tantalising project. It will be there waiting for you tomorrow and you can return to it refreshed.

I hope some of those tips were useful. Please do comment with your own. I’m sure there’s plenty of other advice around. Let’s share our learning when we can. I’m also currently collecting information on teleconferencing, webinars and online teaching so share those links or ideas too.

Sounding like Sunday

“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.” – John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids.

It’s been a funny few years to be a science-fiction author. From the Trump election, to Brexit, to the activism of Extinction Rebellion and of Greta Thundberg to raise awareness of climate change, I often feel I’m living in a science fiction story. And to be completely truthful it does make them harder to write. Science fiction is supposed to look at the events of today through the lens of the future. How can one do that when the events of today as incomprehensible and full of fear about what the future will look like?

I always did enjoy a bit of apocalyptic fiction, if that’s what you’re in the mood for right now you’ll find my recommended titles elsewhere on my website. I’m not in the mood for it right now myself but I can’t help thinking about it anyway. As I walked to work yesterday I thought at once about the opening lines of Day of the Triffids. Yesterday was a Tuesday (as my facebook friends quickly pointed out) but the eerie weirdness of almost no cars on the roads, almost no people walking on the pavements and almost no planes in the sky meant that I understood at once what the narrator of Triffids was talking about.

Today I am working from home. Actually today is technically a writing day but I’m using it to do some re-framing and thinking about what is next. When I’m scared or sad one thing that can help is to try to do something nice for other people so I’m writing a list of hopefully helpful tips about working from home which I’ll share shortly. My team are now remote workers and there will be lots of other people starting to do the same.

I will get back to the writing, I hope. The world needs creative arts, especially in troublesome times. But right now I’m focused on practicalities. Because it isn’t Sunday. It’s the middle of the week and we have work to do.

February 24, 2020

Zumba is my happy place

Filed under: adventures in the world of today,bloggery,Fitness,things Rhiannon likes,Zumba — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 8:33 am

On the 4th of January 2018 I took my first Zumba class. “This is a happy class,” Eli, the instructor told me. “It doesn’t matter if you know the steps.” She was right about the first part. Zumba makes me smile, every time. But she didn’t know me then and it matters to me passionately to get the steps right.

A year ago today, I went to dinner with three friends, a belated birthday celebration. (I like to stretch my birthday out across the whole of February.) I was interviewing for marketing jobs and hadn’t got one yet. (Spoiler: I did get a job, and was offered three in one week.) “Maybe I’ll train as a Zumba instructor,” I told them. “Zumba is my happy place.”

I’ve always liked to dance and I went to dance camp most summers as a teenager. But after I grew up any dancing I did was at the occasional party until I got into fitness back in 2017 and discovered Zumba. “What exactly is Zumba?” a friend asked at one of this year’s many birthday celebrations. “It’s a class where you follow choreography led by an instructor,” I told her. “There are lots of different styles of dance but the four core rhythmns are reggaeton, salsa, merengue and – that one I can never remember.” (it’s cumbia.)

The reason she was asking was that I’d told my friends I’d booked that Zumba instructor training. And on 22 February I spent a day in Kingston upon Thames being taught by Caroline Crowe the science of Zumba, every class is designed to get the partipants fit and active, while making it feel like a party; the history of Zumba, which began when Beto Perez forgot his usual aerobics music and taught to songs he’d recorded from the radio; and business of Zumba, a franchise brand where instructors are licenced to teach.

And now I am licenced to teach. I’ve set up my profile on the ZIN website and I’m learning a choice of choreo for my first class. “So are you going to be a Zumba instructor now?” my Mum asked me in our weekly phone call. “Well, yes,” I said. “But that’s not all I want to be. I havem’t given up on my writing and I find working in marketing satisfying too. What I want is a lifestyle where my different skills and interests support and draw skill from each other.”

When I attended that first Zumba class I had no idea where it would lead. I never imagined I (a largely desk bound cerebral sort of person) could have a qualification to teach dance. But I do! And it brings me such happiness. One of the things I love about Zumba is that it’s open to everyone, it’s a form of fitness that’s inclusive and celebratory and full of love. I want to make other people feel as happy as Zumba makes me.

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