Guide to Living Your Best WFH Life
Rachel Everett
CEO at Viderity, Inc. | Driving Innovation in IT, Creative Services, and Operations Consulting
Hello colleagues and friends! Here’s everything we need to remain functioning members of society while working from our living rooms, kitchens, and home offices. ??
Staying informed
While you’re living out your best socially distanced life, you can always stay informed with the latest ’rona news by visiting the CDC, the WHO, and JHU websites. Here’s a dashboard that tracks the outbreak, a thread of other
Stay Productive While Working from Home
Remember, Shakespeare wrote King Lear while the plague shut down theaters. Here’s how you can accomplish something of similar value to humankind.
Setting up a proper workstation
Experts recommend setting aside a workspace to get you into “work” mode. If you have a beechwood standing desk with three monitors and a view of the ocean, well that’s amazing. If you don’t, switch up where you’re working when you start to feel like you’re no longer being productive in your chosen spot.
The Mayo Clinic has a guide to setting up an ergonomic workstation, and you might want to also try out a vertical mouse and the right keyboard.
- Scent: You can use a candle, incense, or another scent diffuser that you associate with work. We recommend eucalyptus or mahogany.
- Sound: Play certain music only while working and not while doing anything else, like Spotify’s Lo-fi Cafe and House Focus playlists, asoftmurmur.com, or Big Desk Energy.
- Design: Here’s some inspo for your work from home setup
Video Calls: How to look professional
Appearance: Make sure you have good lighting, keep the angle at eye-level or slightly higher, and have a professional background. It might be time to take down the “Saturdays are for the boys” poster, anyways.
- Pro tip: You can activate a beauty filter on Zoom
Etiquette: Be mindful of where you’re looking when you’re lost in thought or talking. Mute yourself when you’re in large meetings, but don’t when you’re in small brainstorms. Call in from a quiet place and keep everything you need close by so you don’t need to leave the screen.
- Write talking points and reminders on Post-It notes attached to your screen.
- Quit out of any apps you won’t be using prior to the meeting.
Backgrounds: Try these fun ones for Zoom.
Scheduling
Create a time that you’re “in office” every day and be prepared to start working at that time. Then, decide on a time that you “leave” for the day and mark both on your calendar. Embracing time constraints could help you keep all four of your burners going (friends, family, work, health).
- One way to set up your work schedule? Use the pomodoro technique to divide up work into manageable chunks, and use this site as your timer
Try a time management tool like Calendly and Todoist
Things to Do When You’re Not Working
Learn new skills
- Be productive while others are “Netflix and Chilling” and take up a new skill. We recommend diving into the world of data science or “No Code.”
- Follow artists like @chris_riddell on Instagram, who’s teaching her trade in live videos
- Tips to learning new skills fast: Take Short Breaks, Early And Often
- 450 free Ivy League online classes
- Free educational courses offered due to school closings.
- Chess.com
Read long-form articles
Big Ideas
Business Strategy
More
- Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World
- Neither, and New: Lessons from Uber and Vision Fund
- Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting
Read books
- 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years
- Great website with tons of recs → Five books
- Full list of Bill Gates’s reading list from 2012 on
- Recommendations
- An adventure: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (Copywriter Henry Stockwell)
- A story that veers in and out of reality: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
- A hilarious, self-referential tale: Less by Andrew Sean Greer (Editorial Coordinator Jamie Wilde).
- A fictional pandemic story: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Writer Eliza Carter)
- A reality-bending mystery whose film version stars Leonardo DiCaprio: Shutter Island by Dennis LeHane (Managing Editor Neal Freyman).
- A bestselling story of a startup gone haywire: Bad Blood by John Carreyrou (Head of Content Samir Sheth).
Exercise
Buy a few key pieces of equipment that you think you’ll use the most, like a yoga mat, kettlebells, and free weights. Then find some workouts you can follow from home.
Amazon Prime Video is a great place to start: If you’re a member, a ton of workouts are already available to you for free.
This database is also full of easy-to-follow one-page routines.
Our favorite fitness YouTube channels: Yoga with Adriene, POPSUGAR Fitness, and Blogilates, but there are plenty more if you run a quick search.
Studios are giving out free workouts online right now as well. Here are some, broken out by type of workout.
- Yoga: Free classes from CorePower and Skyting has a one-week trial
- Pilates: Two weeks free with P Volve or 7 days with Wundabar
- HIIT: 30 days free with Fhitting Room
- Barre: Bar Method goes live on IGTV once a week, Physique57 offers a 7-day free trial on their site, The Sculpt Society offers two weeks free, or 15 days free from Barre3
Some instructors are also offering live workouts on Instagram:
- Pilates: Lia Bartha
- Boxing: Gina DiNapoli
- Strength training: Ash Wilking, Kory Flores, and Kira Stokes
If you don’t know what kind of workout you want to do, here are some free apps with plenty of options: Try Aaptiv, Neoufitness, or Peloton’s not-just-cycling app for 30 days.
Stay connected to others
The WHO released some tips on how to deal with anxiety. Here’s what you can do if you’re stuck at home, especially if you’re alone...
- Call, text, and FaceTime your friends and family
- 7 ways to volunteer remotely
- Join a WFH Happy Hour Slack group
- Read this message from Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky
- Bring back Houseparty!
If you need someone to talk to, 7 Cups can connect you to caring listeners, and if you need trained mental health support ASAP, text the Crisis Text Line
Cooking
Now’s the time to craft unnecessarily complicated three-course meals, or just learn the basics.
- If you’re a complete beginner, here’s a Twitter thread on basic food safety and some free online classes.
Try to minimize your grocery store trips. But if you do go, here’s what to get, according to nutritionists. Then, you can take those staples and create…
- Pantry and freezer-friendly dishes
- Use stock-up staples like beans, oats, and canned tomatoes to make meals from Rachael Ray, Boston Magazine, The Washington Post, and Bon Appétit
- Too much space in your stomach and time on your hands? Check out Food in my Beard, Massimo Bottura’s #KitchenQuarantine videos, and Binging with Babish
- More recipe inspiration: Ambitious Kitchen, Serious Eats, and Food52
Getting bored of water? Learn how to make great coffee with this guide, or mix up a spring cocktail.
- You can also make these popular drink recipes: Dalgona coffee with instant coffee or with not-instant coffee
When you don’t feel like cooking: Uber Eats has waived delivery fees for independent restaurants.
Parenting
- Homeschooling:
- A thread with good resources
- Scholastic learn from home website
- Scheduling: This one was shared around the internet
- General tips: WaPo
- Online education: Khan Academy
After-school activities: Try creating simple science experiments at home using this list of 64 ideas
Clean up your life
Digital:
- Delete old and duplicate pictures so that pesky iCloud storage reminder finally goes away
- Clean your desktop (and build a separate folder so you can stop saving to desktop)
- Delete unused apps, update your software
Physical:
- Clean out your closet and donate clothes you don’t wear anymore
- Cancel unused subscriptions
Just Have Fun
Watch...
Business movies
- A few of the most talked about: Too Big to Fail, The Founder
- Learn about the best business people of all time: Becoming Warren Buffett, Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates
- And some of the worst: The Inventor, Betting on Zero
Viderity Staff favorites
- Amazon’s Fleabag, HBO’s Succession, Showtime's Billions, Netflix's Better Call Saul, Amazon's ZeroZeroZero, Hulu's Devs.
A more general list
- Lists of comforting TV shows you can stream: list 1 and list 2
- Anything from The Ringer’s “exhaustive” streaming guide
- How to watch Netflix with your friends
Cultural things
- The National Gallery of Art, and so many others, are giving virtual tours. Here’s an exhaustive guide.
- Aquarium live cam
- Live streamed art exhibitions from The Social Distancing Festival
- The Google Arts and Culture site is full of resources to explore
Listen...
Podcasts
- Social Distance by The Atlantic
- The Dropout
- Great episode → Reply All: The Case of the Missing Hit
Music
- The Seattle Symphony is livestreaming their programs for free
- Here’s a virtual orchestra performance and a balcony serenade from an Italian tenor
- Now’s your chance to get into opera: The Met is streaming performances for free
- Diplo is hosting live DJ sets on his Instagram
Play...
IRL Games
- Social/party: Monikers, Codenames, Taboo, Salad Bowl (DIY), Monopoly Deal, Bananagrams, Fibbage/Quiplash
- Strategy: Settlers of Catan, Bohnanza, Power Grid, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic (seriously)
- Here’s a list of many more quarantine games
Video Games
- Not all games are first-person shooters. Here are some relaxing picks:
- Explore Possum Springs and steal some pretzels in Night in the Woods (PS4, Xbox One, Switch)
- Glide through the ocean in Abz? (PS4, Xbox One, Switch)
- Create a cute animal getaway in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
- Not free, but cheap: Buy The Sims 4 for $5. Care for your Sims, or creatively kill them for fun (to each her own)
- Actually free: Games from Steam or a Minecraft Education Edition free trial