Working from Home | Advanced-Level Vocabulary for Confident Conversations in English

Hey, it's Annemarie with Speak Confident English.

This is exactly where you want to be every week to get the confidence you want

for your life and work in English.

Since the beginning of 2020,

one of the biggest hot topics and conversations are the benefits

and the consequences of working from home.

As you know,

many people around the world began working from home due to the COVID-19

pandemic in this Confident English lesson. Today,

I want to share with you a variety, in fact, 31,

different collocations, idioms expressions, vocabulary,

and more for advanced level conversations about working from home in

English.

In this lesson today, I'm going to focus on four primary topics:

different things that we say when we talk about where we're working specifically

working at home.

Number two language that we use to talk about how you work at home

and whether or not you've developed productive routines. Number three,

language that we use to talk about some of the challenges of working at home.

And number four different expressions or language we use.

When we talk about communicating with colleagues online,

let's get started right away with different things that you can say when you're

having a conversation about working from home. And in this case,

focusing on where you're working.

When we work from home,

we often say that we are working remotely or that we're doing a

job remotely.

The word remotely means you're working outside or away from your business

office or your company building.

Now I work at home all the time.

My office at home is my business.

So I can't really say I'm working remotely if I'm working

in my office at home, because this is where my business is.

But if I go to a coffee shop to do some work,

then I'm working remotely.

If you normally go to your company's building and have an office there,

but right now you're working from home then you are working or

doing your job remotely.

Similarly, we can use the verb to telecommute,

to telecommute means that you're using telephone and internet access to do

all of your work from a home office or some other place

outside your work office.

Some professions allow you to work from anywhere. For example,

freelancers often talk about their jobs,

allow them to work from anywhere. They can be at a coffee shop,

in a home office or on vacation and still do of their work.

Similar to saying that you can work from anywhere.

You'll hear some freelancers say that they are a digital nomad.

Someone who is a digital nomad is location independent.

That means they don't need to be in a specific place to do their job. Instead,

they can do everything they need online and telecommute.

If your profession allows you to do all of your work online,

you can say that you are working virtually.

In fact, maybe you're even on a virtual team.

Now that we've got that list. I'm curious,

which of those best describes you?

Are you someone who for a temporary period of time is working remotely

or working virtually,

or do you have the opportunity to work virtually anytime you

want?

Now let's transition to a variety of things that you might hear people say or

things that you might read when people talk about how they are working from home

and whether or not they're able to be productive.

There are definitely challenges to working from home.

People who have developed a productive work at home routine will often talk

about the importance of breaking up their day.

To break up your day.

What that means is to divide different times of your day for

specific activities. For example, in the morning,

you have time that is specific for working out.

Then you have time for answering emails, time for online meetings. And so on.

Similarly, you'll hear people talk about the importance of blocking out time.

If you block out time on your calendar,

it means you don't schedule anything else during that time,

except maybe working out. Maybe that is time,

that is dedicated to getting exercise and staying fit.

Or maybe you block out time to be creative to do something

that inspires you or motivates you a result of

successfully blocking out time.

Also allows you to do deep work or to

have deep focus time. Deep work, or deep focus

time means you have the ability to block out all other

distractions so that you can do some difficult

brainwork or mental work.

Maybe you're trying to find a solution to a problem doing strategic planning

or writing a proposal.

Those activities take a lot of mental effort.

And it's important to remove distractions like telephone calls, emails,

television, shows,

all of that so that you can really focus on getting your work completed.

Another component of working productively from home or from anywhere is to

minimize context switching. It's

kind of a complex way to say you're going to eliminate distractions and block

time for specific activities. For example,

maybe you do all your meetings in the morning and you spend one hour,

one specific hour, a day answering email,

and then you spend two hours doing some important writing or other tasks.

The opposite is that everything is happening at the same time.

For example, sometimes I have many, many,

many different tabs open up on my internet browser.

And what that means is I have multiple different things trying to get my

attention and I'm less focused.

I'm less likely to get something done in an effective way.

So what about you?

Have you worked to minimize context switching and has it helped you to become

more productive?

A lot of people talk about the benefit of work from home flexibility.

And when you see it in writing,

you'll often see W F H for work from home.

And certainly that is true. You do have a lot of flexibility with your time,

but many people including myself,

have to be careful about how they structure that time.

It's also important to make sure that you create time to unwind,

to unwind means to relax, to let go.

If you work from home, there's this pressure,

this feeling that you're always at work, there's no separation.

It is important to create that opportunity to unwind,

to relax,

to be separated from work so that you can thrive.

If you thrive in a work from home environment, it means that you prosper.

You flourish, you do well, you enjoy it.

And you appreciate all the flexibility that it affords.

And you've created a very productive routine.

Now that we've talked about how to be productive working at home.

Let's talk about some of the challenges because those definitely exist as well.

One of the challenges of working from home,

when you have multiple distractions and responsibilities,

the laundry needs to be done. You have to wash dishes.

Your children need to be homeschooled is that sometimes you might feel that

you have to steal a few minutes to do something.

Now of course, the word to steal means to take something that isn't yours.

For example, if you go to a store and you steal a sweater,

it means you take that sweater without paying for it.

So what do you think it means if someone says yesterday,

it was so hard for me to steal a few minutes of time

to work.

What do you think that means?

It was hard for me to steal a few minutes of time to do some work.

What that means is there were all these distractions you needed to pay attention

to your kids. You needed to do housework.

You needed to return phone calls and go to the grocery store.

And it was really hard to take a little bit of time during the day for you to

focus on your job.

When that happens, when it's hard to steal a little bit of time to do your work,

it can be hard to stay on track,

to stay on track means to stay focused on what you're doing and to meet

all of your deadlines properly.

If you do want to stay on track,

you might need to shut out the world.

What do you think that means to shut out the world?

Imagine shutting your door. When you shut your door in your office,

what does that do?

It closes out any distractions or extra noise that you don't want to

hear.

So if you shut out the world,

it's like closing the door on the world.

You're trying to remove all the extra distractions that you don't need,

or don't want.

If you're working online,

shutting out the world might mean closing all of those extra

tabs, those newspaper articles, you're reading Facebook,

social media sites and so on so that you don't have those extra

distractions.

Earlier. We talked about the importance of finding time to unwind,

to relax. And that can be really challenging when you're working from home.

Some of the language we use to talk about those difficulties of separating

personal and professional life are to have blurred lines

between your professional and your personal life.

What that means is it's not a clear straight line,

but now it's all blurry and confusing.

It's hard to step away or remove yourself from your

professional life.

When it's at home.

You'll also hear about the difficulty of creating or maintaining a

work life balance,

or the frustration of an always on work culture,

always on work culture.

That means exactly what it sounds like you are always on.

You're always available. All of this might lead to feeling burnout.

When you feel burned out, it means you are exhausted. You are finished.

You have no more energy to give.

One final challenge of working from home is the feeling of self

isolation or to feel cut off from the world

earlier. I use the expression to block out the world.

That is when you intentionally close the door on all of those distractions.

And then here I used to feel closed off from the

world.

If you feel closed off,

it means someone else shut the door and you don't have the opportunity

to interact, to engage and to be with others.

Again, that can be a very isolating or lonely feeling.

The last thing that we're going to talk about today are some common expressions

or things we say.

When we talk about communicating with our team members and colleagues online,

definitely over the last several months,

this has become a very common statement.

Let's zoom on Monday at 10 o'clock zoom is a software

that many people are using for online meetings and opportunities to

connect.

Zoom has become so common and popular that it is now used like a

verb. Let's zoom on Friday at 9:00 AM.

Since we're talking about having meetings on Zoom or other online platforms,

there's a lot of other language people use when talking about those meetings or

having online connections. If you have a bad connection,

it makes it difficult to have a productive conversation online.

As a result,

you might hear people say things like my internet is unstable today.

I have a bad connection, an unstable connection, a poor connection.

If you've been in an online meeting,

you've probably experienced someone saying you're frozen.

What that means is your video has stopped transmitting and your image is

still, you're also going to hear people say, Oh, you're on mute.

You're on mute.

It happens all the time.

If you're on camera that you'll see that someone is talking,

but of course you can't hear them because they've turned off their microphone.

And of course there are times when people just suddenly disappear.

And what you might say in that moment is we've lost.

For example, we've lost Anna. We've lost Tanya.

When we have online meetings,

it's really important to have strong bandwidth bandwidth are

the frequencies that transmit signals.

That word has become common in an idiomatic expression.

You might hear people say,

I don't have the bandwidth for this today.

Or I don't have the bandwidth for this conversation.

I don't have the bandwidth to take on a new project.

If someone doesn't have the bandwidth to do something,

it means they don't have the energy or the capacity to do something they're

overwhelmed or burnout.

And with that, you have 31 new collocations expressions phrases,

and more that you can use to successfully talk about what it's like to work from

home in English conversations.

Now that you have all this, I would love to hear about your experiences.

If you've been working from home. Tell me what it's been like for you.

Have you set up a productive routine,

have you successfully learned how to minimize context switching and block time

off,

or has it been difficult?

Have you had a hard time creating work life balance and separating

personal and professional time at home?

Try using some of the expressions that you learned here today in your own

example, sentences,

it is the best way to learn and remember new vocabulary.

You can share your examples with me in the comments below.

If you found this lesson useful to you, I would love to know.

And you can tell me in three simple ways, number one,

give this video a thumbs up on YouTube and subscribe to this channel.

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and coworkers on Facebook or LinkedIn. And number three,

if you know someone who's been working from home and would love to talk about it

more successfully in English, share this lesson with them directly by email,

have a fantastic week.

Thank you so much for joining me and I'll see you next time for your Confident

English lesson.