22 Tips For Working Remotely and Smashing Your Goals

Working from home has affected productivity and mental health. Here are tested and proven easy tips to maximise your output working remotely

Alright the future of work is here to stay and we all need to prepare for the best remote work practices. Regardless of what happens, work has changed forever, people will go back to the office surely, but the dynamic will now be a hybrid mode.

So learning how to work remotely will be a skill in your arsenal that might just propel you to your next career promotion. If you've asked yourself the question "how to work from home" - you've reached the right place.

1) Create a routine

If you want to succeed working from home or working remotely this is a must, which is why it's the top position. You need to build a system that builds a body clock. I used to get into the zone when I got onto the train and grabbed by morning coffee at my office, when I couldn't do this anymore I spiraled. This was until I started building an atomic habit again, micro habits that signal the mind for whats about to happen next. Nowadays my trigger is early morning juice, similarly so, build a routine. Get out of bed, go to the gym, have a process.

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2) Have your creative work space

Separate your living, from your office space. Even if it means working from a coffee shop. You need to keep your area of comfort for leisure and work for work. This is an important work tip as separation of concerns as well as "environments" make a significant difference to motivation. Pretty much the same reason people go to libraries when they can read at home

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3) Set time boundaries

Its very easy to be sucked into 24 hour work when working from home. One of the keys to working remotely is creating time boundaries. Employers may feel like you're available to message after work hours. In addition you might get FOMO from all the slack notifications. Fight the urge, set your boundaries. 80% of 130 people I spoke to said they were constantly fatigued from working from home. This is a very important tip amongst other work from home tips and tricks. Stay disciplined to time

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4) Leave home

How to be productive working from home ? Leave your home. Ironic - I know but cabin fever can creep into you. As humans we need social interaction and movement. Step away from your home, go for a walk, meet a friend or better yet exercise. This will stimulate both your body muscles as well as your brain. Feeling fresh air graze your face makes a big difference, especially when you're glued to your screen

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5) Plan meetings with work colleagues

We've been remote for nearly 1.5 years now and I always advice social meetings for working remotely. Catch up with any team-mate in the same city as you and make it a monthly if not weekly thing. Building bonds with people in real life not only helps you create long lasting relationships, but also helps you connect deeper with another person. 70% of communication is non - verbal, which you miss out over zoom calls.

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6) Reduce distractions

"Minimise the number of distractions you have in your office" - simple yet sage advice for working remotely. We've got a concentration span of 12 seconds, with slack messages going off every moment combined with our innate nature of not wanting to miss out on important conversations leads us to doing absolutely no work at all. I encourage you to embrace an async first work culture, tools like remoteworkly.co help with async video meetings or even loom for screen recording.

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7) Have no meeting Wednesdays

Meets really hurt productivity. 72% of managers say meetings are a complete waste and 60% of employees think they will work better without meetings. This is the same reason Zoom fatigue is becoming a big issue, because you need to have your camera on and focus the entire time. Try encourage a culture where you have certain days with no meetings. Any conversation that needs to happen can occur in an asynchronous way, weather thats via tools like remoteworkly.co or vidyard. If you're reporting bugs, use feedback tools like bugheard or remoteworkly.co/show

8)Avoid unwanted meetings with conversation bloat

Focus on getting work done, try set a decorum where you can leave meetings you're not needed in anymore. Teams that embrace the concept of async communication will win. This will reduce anxiety within teams, improve culture and make sure the meetings that do happen are purely focused on value and outcome. This can be done using tools like remoteworkly.co for async meetings and startups or even voice notes like recordify

9)Start with the toughest task

There's a science behind this but it works. We often think starting with easy tasks gives us the feeling of accomplishment and builds up momentum. There is some truth to this, however by the time you reach the tough/long task to complete you're left drained of energy and delay it to tomorrow, which never comes. Start with the toughest tasks, its the best way to be productive working from home

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10)Over communicate

There will be obvious disconnect between you and your team mates when you're remote. That is the nature of VoIP communication. So make sure you overcommunicate. This does not mean to spam people with 100 messages, but rather use video and tools that capture as much data as possible for you to make it easier for the other person to understand what you're doing without having to reach back to you."

11)Leverage asynchronous communication

My favorite tip in my list of remote work best practices. I strongly believe async communication is the way of the future. Leverage using async communication whenever and wherever possible without organizing impromptu/time blocking calls. There's several tools out there that let you take full advantage of async communication, remoteworkly.co, loom.com, vidyard.com, marker.io (for website feedback), remoteworkly.co/show (for QA feedback), trello.com, asana.com

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12)Use productivity hacks like pomodoro

The pomodoro technique is one of the best productivity tips I came across. Its an old technique that lets you cut down your work into an investment reward balance. This builds another atomic habit loop where you learn to enjoy difficult tasks in anticipation of the reward. Your day is broken down into 25 minute work chunks of pure focus with 5 minute breaks, do this 4 times and then take a 20 minute break, rinse and repeat. Checkout timechi.com

13)Share your project progress

The easiest way to start working when you're feeling down or demotivated is by sharing your progress. Social accountability plays a big role in human motivation, something about putting our reputation at risk that kicks us in the behind. In addition, sharing your progress becomes a incredible feedback cycle, where you encourage others with your progress or cause them to reach out to you and motivate you to push faster. Lastly, having progress updates is a great way to look back and see how far you come, consequentially motivating you to work better

14)Avoid jumping on impromptu phonecalls

This rolls back to my earlier point about async conversations, Paul Graham mentioned that one of the downfalls of remote work is impromptu meetings where a large number of incredible ideas are usually generated is being robbed from todays workforce. Yes this is true, but on the flip side, most of the inefficiencies in working from an office came from these "tap on the shoulder" interruptions. I no longer pick up calls unless the message following up says "this is urgent", your concentration is sacred in 2020. Protect it at all costs.

15)Set clear expectations for each day

Employing a daily manifest of long term goals, short term goals, micro tasks as well as schedule has been a game changer in working remote. You almost get to "grade" each day in terms of the success you wanted to achieve and what you did achieve. This lets you work out what is the most effective work from home schedule for you. Each week, analyze the good days and bad days, pick up patterns that lead to bad days and those that lead to good days and optimize to focus on the good patterns.

16Share with video whenever you can

To prevent the feeling of isolation, use video software whenever you can. Loom.com is a great place to begin, or even zoom for work meetings. I know it can be daunting at times, but it provides a great path to building deeper and more meaningful relationships with teams. PS - when you're chatting, look into the camera and not your screen. Makes double the impact

17) Ask for one on one checkins

Do NOT cancel your one on ones with your team mates, they're more important than every given there is no face to face relationship with your direct supervisor or subordinate. Use a template with a clear structure to find out how your team is doing, how things can be done better. This builds trust and encourages them to keep motivated even when people feel disconnected.

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