7 Tips for Working From Home

So your company allowed you to work from home! Great news! You tell yourself you are going to be so much productive.

You wake up when you feel like it, you make a healthy breakfast with the greatest cup of coffee, you open your email, reply to messages on slack, then suddenly it is midday. You close all the open tabs in your browser and concentrate on getting things done, after a half an hour you get bored, you go to the slack channel and check on all of your friends because working from home is exciting. Then you head to the balcony to relax your eyes from looking to the screen then you realize that the sun is setting.

The day ended without you finishing anything on your to-do list for the day. Oh right, you did not have a to-do list in the first place. Now, you are having dinner feeling guilty and anxious that the day ended and you did not do any work at all, you promise your self that tomorrow is going to be different.

Below are tips that will help you get organized, and help you reap the most out of your work from home experience.

1 - Have a routine

I could not stress this one enough, have a routine similar to the regular workday is essential for being productive, try to wake up at the same time, have lunch at the same time and dress like going to the office. This will help you to prepare mentally for the day.

2 - Keep a todo list

You always thought that a to-do list was a good idea, but no one actually keeps one. Well, when you are working from home you have to be your own boss, keeping a todo list will keep you focused. But you have make it as clear as possible, and you have to put tasks that you can finish in one day.

3 - Have a working space

You do not need anything fancy, laptop on a clean desk with a notebook and pen. If there is a door where you can close that will be a lot better if you don't you better have good earphones to block out the noise.

4 - Overcommunicate

I think that this will be the hardest part because we as humans most of our communication is through our body language and our tone of voice. This will be split into two categories communicating with management and communicating to your colleagues

• Communicating with management

Working from home is a scary idea for management because they will have no visibility on the work progress, and you will have stressed PM calling and asking for a status update every 10 minutes, for that software like JIRA, TFS, Trello are critical and they need to be updated at an hourly basis

• Communicating with your colleagues

Softwares like Slack and Microsoft team are the most popular, but you have to treat it the way to treat face to face interaction, if every 10 min someone visits your office, you will be irritated, same goes for messaging software, schedule times to discuss stuff. If you are not available for a certain period, state it on the public slack channel, and please don't message your colleagues after office hours unless it is an emergency.

6 - End your day

At 5 you should have most of your tasks finished, write a to-do list for tomorrow, sign out from slack, and this the most important step, assess your day, did you finish all of your tasks? at which task you spend time the most and why? what adjustment you can take tomorrow to have a better day than today?

7 - Destress

The year 2020 is going to be one of the most memorable years, let us say that. So many things are happing, economies are collapsing, COVID-19 is spreading across continents, we are being bombarded with news that we do not need right now, and we spike our adrenal glands with every new news. Isolating your self from the outside world is not the answer, so I suggest scheduling a half-hour to listen to the news, preferably not before going to sleep.

Every person has a different method of relieving stress. If you have kids, spend more time with them. If you do not have kids, spend time with your pet. If you do not have pets schedule time for praying. If you are not religious meditate. But we need to practice self-care in those dire times.

Conclusion

Working from home can be really exciting and productive but we have to prepare for it. Since the widespread COVID-19, we have witnessed a massive drop in pollution related to fewer people using their cars or public transportation. Maybe when it is all said and done, companies will look to working from home as a serious option, not something that is good to have.