Variety is the spice of life

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

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Never has a saying been truer than that. With many of us having less variety in our lives than ever for the past year, with the year anniversary of lockdown tomorrow, let’s briefly explore this week how to invigorate our lives a little for these last few months (hopefully) of lockdown.

I don’t know about you, but I have found the last month or so the hardest, partly due to everything starting to come round again and partly due to being tied to my desk for too long since Christmas.

Hope is very much here though. I have just come back from a walk and the birds are singing loudly and spring is in the air. With the clocks going forward in a week’s time, the longer evenings will be with us and there is no excuse to get out after work. However, I would also recommend getting out during work too, if you can. Just a 30-minute walk during the day will invigorate you for the rest of the day. I sometimes do that, but most days I also go into the spare bedroom and do a short 20-minute workout which breaks the day and does me good.

We have all had enough of Zoom meetings, and I can’t believe the number of invitations I am still getting to virtual meetings in the evenings. I’m sure I am not the only one who has had enough of Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet. It is legal to have business meetings anyway and our sales team have been back out seeing customers for a while. But it might be more enjoyable to meet and walk with one other person if they live close enough rather than another hour talking to a screen. I am doing just that later today.

A change of scenery whilst we work also helps. Now those working in shops move around anyway and have an advantage of constantly changing scenery, but those of us with largely desk jobs can sometimes just get bored of being in the same home office day after day. I am fortunate in having an office with a few people still working within it, so once a week I go and work there rather than home, ideally in the middle of the week to break the week up. I was talking to someone last week who works from a laptop at home and chooses a different room to work in each day. Now schools are back that might work for more of us and is a great idea for bringing in variety.

What works for one person is different than for another, but I would certainly encourage you to bring variety into your work life as much as possible. It is good for your mental health.