Alright, let's do one more deep work question. We have one here from Heather. Heather asks, how do I make a better transition from working from home to afterschool with the kids? So Heather says, pre COVID, my transition from a working mindset to mom mindset was easy since there was a 30 minute commute from the office to aftercare.

Now I permanently work from home and there is no transition. They get off the bus when school is out. She says in parentheses, we nixed aftercare since I am here, but is that a bad idea in parentheses? But I'm still getting a few things done during that hour. Thoughts?

All right. Well, Heather, my specific thought for your situation is you should not have nixed the aftercare. Work is work. Don't let the fact that the work is happening at your home make you change the status of that work to be half work. Work slash I'm also doing another job, which is taking care of my kids after they get home from school.

I mean, that's sort of equivalent of being like, I work at this office job, but for like two hours in the afternoon, I'm also serving food in the cafeteria. Your bosses will be like, well, you can't have both those jobs at the same time. Right? Like, you know, when you're in the, when you're here in the office, you can't also be serving food in the cafeteria.

Like this is your job here. Uh, but when we work from home, we blur those lines a lot more and we say, yeah, but I could do like childcare too. And can I just mix it all together? And it's very hard to do. This is why during the heat of the pandemic, when, when schools were closed and offices were closed, I kept describing the situation as a dumpster fire, because it was impossible.

When you ask people, do all your work and do all the childcare and do that at the same time. It's like being the cafeteria worker at the same time that you're trying to be an accountant. It's impossible. And we pretended like it's not. So my specific answer for you, Heather is if at all possible, financially go back to exactly the same care setup you had pre pandemic.

And it sounds like the setup you had was after school, your kids went to aftercare, which brought them to the normal end of a standard nine to five workday, and then you would pick them up. Go back to that aftercare. Yes, you're working at home, but who cares you're working till work is over.

Uh, and then you're shifting over to the mom mindset, not trying to mix the two. So if that's possible, that's what I would suggest. Let me give a more general answer here about, I think a very good point. More generally shutting down when you have a hazy boundary between work and non-work, which, which again, is pretty common, especially in these work from home days.

Uh, so you might have a, this hazy period. So let's say the aftercare thing doesn't work out. You have this hazy period where you're kind of working and you're kind of doing something else and you recognize this and you, you know, you don't schedule meetings and you know, you're just going to get a little bit done because you're also doing childcare.

You have to find how to have a definitive shutdown that still works. So even if you're in this hazy period, have a definitive into the hazy period. All right. Now I'm doing my shutdown complete. Even though the last 90 minutes I've been half shut down. Uh, I have to get my kids going with their homework, but I have to return and answer emails and I have to get snacks.

Then I'm going back and sending out these reports, even though that's back and forth and hazy, have a clear shutdown at the end of that, where you're like now work is completely done. Uh, now if possible, if you can have one that gets you out of your house and completely changes your state, I think that would be good.

I don't know your marital situation, but if you have, let's say a partner that's working, it sounds like here, maybe they're working at an office when they come back, that spells you to do a 30 minute transition to really fully change your mindset. I think exercise is a good one here.

I've been doing this some more, especially on my teaching days when I can't get exercise in earlier in the day. Uh, I'll do this when I'm with the kids in the afternoon. I'll bring, I'll set it up. So, you know, maybe once working on their homework and once playing Minecraft and I'll let my youngest, I'll bring them down to the basement to where my exercise equipment is like, okay, you can watch this video here.

Um, and then I'm going to go in the garage and, you know, do evil things to a rowing machine. And it's a transition, even though I'm kind of watching the kids, the exercise is very different. It's very different than looking at a screen. And it really is a way of, okay, now I come out of that and I physically changed my state and I come out of that, not doing other types of work.

So have a clear shutdown. Even if that shutdown happens after a period of sort of hazy boundaries.