I am not the first “millennial” (I really, really hate that term) who has turned their side hustle into a full-time thing. The freelance life isn’t for everyone, but if you can manage it, it can be really awesome. Unless you develop some really bad habits, like I have.
I’ve been working from home full-time for about three months now (a crazy thought because it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long). I’ve done the freelance thing before, but I had a part-time admin job that got me out of the house a few days a week. Now, it’s just me, my condo, my computer and my email. It’s not making for a great relationship, apparently. The funny thing is that I’m more fulfilled and satisfied in my career than ever (quite possibly bordering on workaholic and loving almost every minute of it), but my “lifestyle” has regressed to somewhere in between frat boy and recluse. Not. Good.
My eating habits are out of whack
Most people often fall under the camp of doing too much snacking when they’re home. I try to avoid that completely by not buying crappy snacks and buying good stuff for all my meals. My problem, however, is that I constantly forget to eat lunch or snack (even on healthy stuff) throughout the day. Since I don’t have any coworkers asking “what’s everyone getting for lunch today?” or rifling through the kitchen for their salad, I no longer have the normal cues to get up and eat and I usually don’t notice how hungry I am until I’m absolutely ravenous at which point I’ll just grab whatever’s accessible. Apparently meal prep shouldn’t stop when you make your spare bedroom your office. I won’t even tell you how many cups of coffee I drink now.
My morning routine is comparable to a college kid’s
I had this really romantic idea that I would get up early every morning (I’m one of those weird morning people, after all), work out, make a nice breakfast, shower and then start my day feeling refreshed and ready to carpe that diem and all that. In a classic case of expectation versus reality, my morning now consists of me snoozing through my alarm for at least an hour, finally waking up and scrolling through social for another 20 or so minutes and finally dragging my ass out of bed for coffee. Sometimes I’ll make breakfast and watch an episode of Gilmore Girls and eventually tackle my inbox. I try to avoid articles titled “what successful people do in the morning” because it really just makes me feel worse about my newfound routine.
I don’t move, basically at all
I’ve always been active-ish. I practice yoga pretty regularly and have been working out a lot more, but it’s been difficult to motivate myself to move. If I don’t exercise first thing in the morning (see above), I’ll try to force myself to go to yoga around lunchtime or at least go for a walk. Even that has been too difficult for me to muster because unless I need something specific from Shoppers or have run out of coffee (never), I can’t be bothered. I stopped going to yoga midday because seeing the pileup of emails after class was too stressful for me. At the very, very least I’ll force myself to walk down the four flights of stairs to get the mail instead of taking the elevator.
I’ve forgotten how to dress myself
I remember when I first entered the working world after university and college and I had no idea how to dress for the fashion and beauty industry. I quickly acquired my own style that is mostly comfort with the laid-back aesthetic of Jennifer Aniston, but I find that my style is relative to my work situation. When I was working in a more professional space, I dressed more professionally (duh), but now that I work from home and mostly just wear my yoga clothes (even if I’m not doing yoga, see above), anytime I have to go somewhere my immediate thought is “Can I wear Lulus to this? No? Can I wear jeans to this? Can I wear sneakers?” Add the fact that I barely wear makeup or wash my hair on the regular anymore and I’ve basically stopped being human.
I work a lot more than I should
This is not me bragging about how much harder I work than other people. This is me telling you I have a serious problem pulling myself away from my desk. I can be a very high-stress person when it comes to work and I’ll often just keep working when I have a lot to do. Even though I can tell myself it would be more beneficial to sleep and start fresh the next day, I have a difficult time convincing myself that the list can wait when I’m in one of those moods and since everything is so easily accessible, this has been a tough habit to break.
I barely talk to people IRL
Save for my fiancé©, any events that I occasionally go to during the week and the friends I occasionally see on weekends, I only talk to people through email, text or Snapchat.
I get lazy about housework
I live in a decent-sized condo and even though I have a designated workspace (one of the things people tell you to create when working from home), I often feel like the rest of my home morphs into my office and I get suuuuuper lazy about doing anything. My office and my desk are constantly a disaster and I’ll leave laundry hanging to dry for almost a week until I have to do laundry again. It doesn’t make for the calmest space and definitely makes it more difficult to separate work life and home life.
