It’s Sunday night. You set out a nice shirt, you even iron it for a change. Maybe you add something else: earrings or a tie. Pulling open one more drawer, you contemplate the final item, and settle on… your best sweatpants.

After all, tomorrow marks the start of a new job, but you’re not leaving your house, and your colleagues will see you from the shoulders up, a new head on their video calls.

What is it like to start a new job in a virtual world? How do you get to know your new colleagues and learn about the all-important ‘company culture’? Wait, what even is company culture right now? What should you be doing in your first weeks to begin to settle in?

While it can be easy to focus on the transactional and dive right into the job to be done, you’ll get much farther in the long run by exploring the above questions. Based on my work supporting teams in building strong communities, here are five things you can do to immerse in your new work world.

Thanks to just-launched machinery (the pandemic has really accelerated technological innovation!), I recorded one of my meditation sessions so that you could see just how it’s done. That’s right, I’ve got a transcript of what actually happened inside my brain! I don’t mean to brag, but I think you’ll be quite impressed by how zen my brain gets:

(mind): Ok, brain, we’re going to meditate now. Body, get yourself comfortable so that we can sit still for a half an hour.

(body): On it! How about we sit cross-legged?

(mind): Erm, are you sure that’s a good idea? We usually get sore when we’re cross-legged….

The pieces of my day that used to power me — and drive my creativity — had disappeared, and I didn’t clock how much I gained from them, or far worse, that they were even gone.

If you, too, went from spending days amongst other people to sitting in your favorite athleisure, glued to one seat, you have also lost these things. And this loss doesn’t just make you tired, it makes you less happy and less likely to reach your productivity goals at work.

This year I launched a business designed to bring humanity back to the workplace, and, seeing this energy gap, I spent my pandemic diving into the reasons we were all drained and working with clients to weave energy back into their days.

As a New Year’s gift, I offer five critical lessons that have helped my clients (and me!) to draw more energy over the past year, and which will make your 2021 better, plus a linked activity to explore them for yourself. Just in case things don’t magically change at midnight on January 1st as the memes would have us believe.

In San Francisco, March 8, 2020 was the kind of early spring day that made people want to flock to the parks, linger with friends, consume piles of food foraged from local shops, and wait in line at Bi-Rite for ice cream cones they could consume at just the right pace because the temperature was that breezy, balmy shade of in-between that marks early-summer days.

It was a full nine days before the city — and 12 days before the state — would begin a shelter-in-place mandate. There was an inkling in the air that coronavirus was going to impact us, but the idea of not leaving our homes for weeks on end wasn’t a thing, nor were we collectively aware of the massive health and economic disruptions to come…

Everyone wants to prototype -- to create a fast and just-real-enough version of their new product -- to ensure they're building the right thing, but no one has the time. So, they do things like build the product and sneak in cheeky prototypes on the side to inform product iteration (and, if the initial launch premise is wrong, product revolution). Almost surreptitiously. Kind of like they're having an affair with the prototype….So go on, stop having affairs and date your ideas before you commit. Because once you're married to a product or service, it's not easy to call it quits.