Working from home is a very tricky task that a lot of people think they can get accustomed to. In reality, some workers can cope with this very well, whereas others get the illusion that they are productive when they are actually not.
Our wonderful brain plays a lot of tricks on us, and being mindful of your personality type, as well as those tricks, can make the difference between an efficient and a deficient remote working experience.
This post will underscore a few tips to remain productive while working from home.
Just because you are working from home, it does not mean that you should become lazy or change your routine. Keep the same routine you follow on regular work days.
- Wake up early at the same time, just like on a regular work day.
- Shower, have breakfast, dress-up exactly as if you are going to work.
- Go out of your flat and go for a morning walk for 10-20 mins and then come back. This will give you the illusion that you changed places and "went to work". If you are feeling sporty, go for a morning workout or a short jog.
- When you come back, clean your work space, order your desk and make sure the room that you are going to work in looks appealing and gets you into that "work mood".
- Put on the same background music that you usually listen to at work to get work-ready. Start the day with a TED talk or a motivational video. Some people might miss the office or library background noise. You could simulate that via a web app like https://www.noisli.com/ .
- Have a sheet of paper and a pen next to you. Start the day by writing down the tasks that you would like to accomplish with some checkboxes next to them. Next, prioritize the tasks that are important by adding one, two, or three asterisks next to them " * ". According to your daily productivity cycles, pick the higher priority tasks when you are most productive during the day, and alternate between hard and easy tasks every now and then to reward yourself and give yourself a tiny break. This list of tasks is also useful for you to share your daily goals with your co-workers when you sync.
Your brain associates your home with "laziness" and you will very likely end up in your comfort zone in front of the couch, or in front of the fridge wondering how your feet took you there even if you were not hungry :-). To combat this:
- Allocate a special room in your flat to work from and re-arrange the furniture so that it looks like a suitable workspace. Try to get away from your bedroom. If you feel lazy in the living room, work from the kitchen, ... etc)
- Trick: work from your flatmate's bedroom, if working from another room is not an option for you.
- Trick: switch flats every other week with a friend and work from their flat instead of yours.
- You can also put a desk in the Balcony or backyard and work from there. Or, you can work from the common park near your housing block.
- Trick: transform your own flat into a co-working space. Basically, switch flatmates with your neighbors and/or let someone from your social circles come to your flat and work with you during the day. You will both motivate each other and you will have no option to slack.
- For some people, working alone is a dull and unproductive environment. To overcome this, you could start a silent co-working live-stream and invite your friends and colleagues over so that you get the illusion that you are not "alone". Instead of live streaming, you could also have a silent co-working video conference room with some light music in the background.
- Another trick that might work, is to use your work laptop instead of your personal computer to minimize "feeling at home" or being distracted.
It is important to fill-in the physical distance between you and your colleagues from work with some virtual closeness. Therefore, you must stay in touch and synchronize with each other on a timely basis. I would recommend a stand-up virtual meeting once or twice a day. A good time is in the early morning before you start or at the end of the day. Here are some useful tools you can use:
- Video conferencing: https://meet.jit.si/
- Team-messaging: https://matrix.org/ , http://slack.com/
- Remote task collaboration: https://taiga.io/ , https://wekan.github.io/ , https://trello.com/
- Remote source-code collaboration: http://www.gitlab.com/, https://github.com/
- Common-calendar, Syncronizing files: https://nextcloud.com/
- Other more secure alternatives to Google & Co.: https://www.privacytools.io/ , https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/wiki/de-google , https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
- Teaching / e-Learning: https://piazza.com/ , https://open.edx.org/ , https://moodle.org/ , https://bigbluebutton.org/ , https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#learning-and-courses
Keep in mind the barriers between your colleages from work and your friends. In digital space, these barriers can easily become fuzzy.
Moreover, if you use some of the tools above to catch up with your family and close ones, you could change the look or themes of these tools. Set up one theme for work and another one for personal life. This may help your brain not get the "work vibe" when you use the same tool that you use at work to communicte with your loved ones.
After your work-day is over, it is important to diffuse and make your brain feel at home again. So, try these tricks:
- Take a short walk or go for a jog outside 10-20 mins. This is the illusion of you going back home from work. It is also a great refresher after a long work day ;-)
- Re-arrange the furniture back to how it was. Move back to your "feel at home" area or room.
- Switch-off your work laptop and close all the work-related windows. It is important to strictly not allow your work to "haunt" you at home. Otherwise, your brain will be stressed trying to find "peace at home" and you will burn out faster than a paper plane on fire.
- Cook yourself a nice meal, watch a short video to diffuse and then get back to whatever you usually do in your leisure time after work is over.
- Always remember to go out at least once or twice a day, get some fresh air, and alternate between sitting down and some physical activity. This is specially important for your mental health. Convince yourself that you are not forced to stay at home. It is your choice!
- Yale University - The science of well-being
- Berkeley University - The science of happiness
- https://mentalhealthathome.org/resource-pages/covid-19-coping-toolkit/
- https://github.com/TjWallas/working-remotely/blob/master/ideas.md
- https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/gesundheitsmanagement/information-regarding-covid-19-coronavirus-sars-cov-2/tipps-fuer-das-arbeiten-von-zu-hause?set_language=en
- Tj.Wallas_
- Marlen