Your dog is sitting there staring at you with the betrayal of a creature who had the entire house to themselves an hour ago. A few weeks ago they had the run of the place all day: the couch, the yard, your undivided attention on a loop. Now you’re back on back-to-back calls, and they’ve responded by developing a whole new bit where they walk directly across your keyboard mid-sentence.

Most “keep your dog busy” content reads like it was written by someone who has never once had six meetings on a Tuesday and a dog who considers your lap a workstation. “Provide enrichment.” Cool, thanks, very actionable. Here’s a rotation that gets me through a full call day without either of us losing our minds, no training required, no PhD in canine psychology, just five things that buy real chunks of quiet and one dog who, by 5pm, still respects me.

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1. The frozen lick mat for the calls you know will run long

If a meeting on the calendar looks like it’s going to run past 30 minutes, I load up a lick mat with plain yogurt and a spoonful of peanut butter the night before and freeze it flat. Frozen solid, it buys 20 to 25 minutes of total, blessed quiet, which happens to be almost exactly the length of every call that was supposed to be 30 minutes and mysteriously became an hour. 

I keep two or three in the freezer at all times, stacked on a cookie sheet so they don’t weld together into one giant lick mat glacier, so I’m never standing in the kitchen five minutes before a call negotiating with a dog who can absolutely tell I’m stalling. Plain yogurt over flavored is worth the extra label check.

2. The snuffle mat for the mornings they’ve clearly had too much breakfast energy

Some mornings your dog wakes up with boundless amounts of energy, and a lick mat isn’t going to mediate it whatsoever. You’ll know within the first five minutes, usually because they’ve already relocated three shoes. On those days, I scatter breakfast kibble into a snuffle mat instead of a bowl. 

Working kibble out of the mats with their nose takes close to 15 minutes, and burns off more energy than you’d expect from something that technically involves zero cardio. It’s held up to over a year of daily interrogation and machine washes fine, which matters more than you’d think once you’ve seen what a dog does to a mat that smells like breakfast.

3. A change of scenery during your break

Between calls, I’ll move the dog bed to the window that faces the street instead of leaving it next to the couch where we’ve both been marinating since 8am. New view, new smells drifting in through the screen, a whole rotating cast of squirrels to file grievances against. 

If you’ve got a yard, a tie-out during a 10-minute break does the same job. Your dog doesn’t need constant entertainment to survive a work day. They need the equivalent of a scene change every couple hours, or the whole day starts to feel like a single, extremely long episode of nothing happening.

4. A real walk mid-morning, not a bathroom break

A 10-minute walk around 10 or 11am resets the rest of the day in a way a quick trip to the yard just doesn’t. This isn’t about hitting some exercise quota. It’s about giving your dog one real chunk of undivided attention mid-morning so they’re not spending the whole afternoon trying to get that same attention in smaller, more annoying installments, one paw-on-the-keyboard at a time.

5. Tire them out before your first call

The single biggest difference maker on this whole list is what happens before 9am. A hard 10-minute play session, a flirt pole in the backyard, a sprint down the hallway chasing a favorite toy (This one is our current favorite), something that actually gets the heart rate up, before you sit down for the first meeting of the day. A dog who’s already a little tired handles a full day of you being unavailable a lot better than one who’s starting the morning at full battery with nowhere to put that energy.

None of this is about entertaining your dog every second you’re on a call. It’s about giving the day a rhythm that isn’t just “the human is on the laptop again, indefinitely, for reasons that make no sense.” Once you find that rhythm, the paw-on-the-camera moment mostly takes care of itself. And on the days it doesn’t, at least there’s a lick mat in the freezer.

Meet the Author

Hey! My name is Garrett, I’m 22-years-old from Dallas Texas, though I currently reside in Brooklyn. New York has been quite the shift from what I’m used to in the suburbs, but I am enjoying the city life thus far! In my day-to-day routine I am constantly thinking about dogs, mostly because of my work at a local doggy daycare, but also because of my general love for animals!