As the marketing director for Ignite Northwest, a company that supports entrepreneurs, Cyndi Donahue said most if not all of the people she works with regularly work from home, with one glaring exception: Donahue herself.

But with officials advising to “hunker down” to curtail the spread of COVID-19, Donahue is doing just that. Luckily for her, her husband is an old pro and helped her get situated in their home’s guest room. He’s helped her set up the technology, and they’re putting their children on a schedule for structure, but the thing Donahue is struggling with is missing people.

“I think socially, that’s something we’re all going to struggle with,” Donahue said. “We’re all going to have to find new ways. Going on a walk with your family or getting outside in a safe, healthy way, but also things like getting coffee by Zoom. I think we’re going to have to get creative.”

Zoom is a web-conferencing service that many companies use to host remote meetings. Late Tuesday afternoon, Ann Long, Liberty Lake Coworking owner, hosted a meeting with five Liberty Lake Coworking members to share the ins and outs of working from home. Fittingly, the meeting took place on Zoom.

“I live on Zoom,” joked Rena McGill, owner of Corlinc. She mentioned that Long had reached out the previous day about the possibility of a virtual happy hour. Finding ways to connect and stay social has been important for the remote workers in the Zoom meeting.

With so many people new to this type of work life, Laura Bacon said she’s worried about how people will cope when the honeymoon phase wears off.

“They don’t have a commute time, they’re home with their kids,” said Bacon, owner of Branding Boutique. “It’s pajama day every day, and it’s fun and it’s exciting and it’s new. But I think they will soon realize working remotely is not the end-all be-all that they thought or hoped it would be.

“When work needs to get done and things need to get accomplished, it’s hard to sometimes find the time, the space, the quiet opportunity to get that done.”

Bacon hopes things return to normal before that day comes, but the group did have advice and insights to share in the meantime.

Getting out of those pajamas works for McGill.

“I find that if I get up in the morning at a regular time, I get in the shower, I get ready as if I’m leaving the house and going to an office, I come in here, I shut my door, I have a cup of coffee, and then before I know it, it’s noon,” McGill said. “I just find that that routine allows me to be productive.”

But Treasure Brooks, owner of Clean Nation, said a true work-life balance isn’t realistic for her. She was working in her living room, and she tilted her computer screen so the group could see show just outside her house, where her son and godson were playing.

“There’s no balance, you just do it. You’ve got to,” Brooks said. “It takes me from 8 o’clock in the morning to 10 o’clock after the kids go to sleep to make sure my invoices are getting out, and then responding to our customers.

“I don’t know if you’d call it balance. I drink a lot,” she added, laughing.

Travis Scott is the marketing director for a Denver-based company and manages seven people remotely. For him, setting expectations with his team has been key in making the arrangement work.

“I’ve really tried to foster trust and self-sufficiency over the last few years,” Scott said. “I’ve been managing them remotely for almost five years now, and when I first first started, I mean they were checking with me on everything, asking me questions they could easily go look up, and I would just write back in Slack. And the answer to the question was Google. You have to be able to do things and trust yourself.”

In addition to Zoom – this had been his fifth Zoom meeting of the day – Scott also uses Slack to message his team and the web team-management tool Asana as a way of charting project progress split into two-week spans.

But there isn’t a tool for everything. Travis said people have a wider range of emotions when they’re working from home, something with which the group agreed.

“When you read an email, you read it in the mood that you’re in,” Scott said. “If you’re in a bad mood, that email takes a more negative tone. You have bigger highs and lows working from home, emotionally. I think it’s key to understand that and know how to manage it.”