Working from home? 8 Top Tips (with resources)

In light of the increase in the impact of Covid-19, I thought it would be worth sharing some insights into working from home or remote working. 

Having worked in busy offices much of my career as well as remotely I know that there are both advantages and disadvantages when working from home. On the upside, you can work your own hours, there are fewer distractions, and no travel to work is needed, meaning lower costs and less hassle. 

On the downside, I miss the buzz of working in an office with others, the camaraderie, and the interactions that are part of everyday office life.

But with many more of us likely to be working from home over the coming months, I thought I'd share some top tips with you on how to work from home successfully as well as how to enjoy the experience of doing so. I've also included mention of some useful resources that might help.

Create and maintain a routine and take breaks

Be disciplined in what you do and I can't emphasise this one enough. Unless you're logging in to a system which measures and monitors your activity, you can probably work or indeed not work whatever hours you like, even sitting in your pyjamas and slippers to do so. 

So my best advice here is to work to some sort of routine that fits with your personal preferences. Without a routine, it's just too easy to drift into a state of procrastination and distraction.  

As to routine, I have to confess that I'm not nor have ever been a super early morning person and apparently whether you're an owl or a lark, this has as much to do with genes as anything else.

There's a wonderful book called 'The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey' (highly recommended) which talks about this and one big takeaway I learnt from the book is that we all have various times of the day when we're at peak performance and it's best to do the challenging work during these times. The book describes how these differ from person to person. 

Some of us, and props to those who do, like to get up at 5.30 am, go for a quick jog before work (you know who you are) and if that's your thing then you can do this and should do this when you're working from home as well. 

Personally, my most productive time is late afternoon and early evening. I also enjoy working late into the night which I once read Churchill liked to do as well although in his case it was with a bottle of whisky to accompany him. 

While creating a routine or schedule, also remember to build in regular breaks. Another excellent point made in the book, the Productivity Project is that if you don't take breaks, then you become less and less productive to the point where you barely achieve anything.

So the key things here are to set a schedule, stick to it and take regular breaks.

Break things down into smaller tasks

Set those large objectives but then break them down into smaller tasks. This is probably best explained through an example. 

Right now, I'm working on a new 30 hour course to be delivered to around sixty Masters students at EDHEC. I like to have the course ready well in advance of delivery and so this means working on the narrative, researching any recent changes, creating slides, sourcing case studies, adding activities and making sure that the whole course is going to be interesting, useful and engaging. I also need to create a reading list and some assignments. 

To do all this takes many weeks of work. So the large objective is to create the course and all the support material and for this, I need to set a timeline to complete the work. 

However, I also need to set smaller tasks along the way. This may be to research the changes in a particular niche topic, find some case studies or simply to create some slides.  

Breaking down the task in this way is known as The Pomodoro Technique, strangely named after those small Spanish tomatoes. There are various books on this and if you want to read more about it then I can recommend 'Pomodoro Technique Illustrated' by Staffan Noteberg.

Organise your workspace

If you're going to work from home, then you need your own space to do so. I'd recommend staying out of the main room of the house, apartment or whatever as if you don't, and you share the place with others, then you're going to be dealing with multiple distractions. 

So find a place where you can set up and leave things when you need to. This may be a spare room, a study or a special table somewhere. You going to need enough electrical sockets close, and a comfortable place to work as well as somewhere you don't get distracted by the kids, the TV or anything else. 

Speak to whoever you're sharing with to explain what's happening and make sure they're good with it. 

If you need to clear a room full of stuff, then I can highly recommend the book by clutter clearing guru and global celebrity, Maria Kondo 'The Life Changing Magic of Tidying'. 

At this point, I must confess that my clutter clearing is still an ongoing work in progress but the book is brilliant and great for getting better organised. I particularly love the tip in the book about literally saying goodbye to the stuff you ditch and have occasionally been found standing by bins talking to old files and books as I thank them for their service and bid them a fond farewell.

Tech up

I'm a gadget junkie so this one's easy but I highly recommend making sure you have the necessary hardware and software to work from home. In my opinion, for hardware, the minimum items are a laptop with printer/scanner, tablet, and a smartphone. 

On the software side, you're probably going to need much of the software you probably already use such as Word, Excel or Powerpoint or at least access to it plus some archiving apps such as Dropbox or Drive.

You should have copies of and familiarise yourself with the main conference software such as Hangouts, Skype, Zoom, Webex and others. I say familiarise yourself because when working from home the people you conference with may have different apps to you and it's worth knowing how to use them.

Keep in touch with people

Even though you're working from home it's important to stay in regular contact with the people you need to and the people you want to. This can be done with the aforementioned tools and apps and while video conferencing is not as good as face to face, these days it's probably safer. 

Before making an important conference call, give yourself 15 minutes to make sure you have everything you need with you, you've read any documents that you should have and that your tech is working. 

Stay healthy

This one is a no-brainer. When you work in an office, you probably move around from meeting to meeting, to the canteen and back and when commuting to and from the office at the very least. The thing with working from home is that it's likely that you're going to be doing much less moving around than when working in an office.

So every day, if you can try and get out and go for a run or a walk (while of course keeping your distance from others), or maybe find some exercises on YouTube you can do at home. I have the added advantage of having a dog and Dodger needs a walk, even when there's snow on the ground or it's pouring with rain. If you don't consciously take exercise then you can find yourself hardly having moved for days and this isn't good for you, your health and wellbeing or your morale. 

Use To-Do Lists

Much has been said about the need for To-Do lists and prioritising tasks, even before the current virus and there are loads of options for doing this.

My current favourite is the Microsoft To Do app which is great for this (I've tried literally dozens of apps and this one has some excellent features). The main caveat here though is to not spend too much time organising what you're going to do so much so that you don't do it. I've already mentioned the Productivity Project but another great book on all this is Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Reward yourself

I left my favourite tip to last but it is important to reward yourself when you've completed whatever it is that you've set yourself to do. 

As we probably move towards being more restricted in our movements over the next few months, we're going to have to deal more with the impact of this. 

I love films, books and music so I expect it'll be easier to reward myself with such things, rather than other things I also love such as travel and eating out. These latter items may well be more restricted for a while but there's no reason not to continue to enjoy life.

With the virus now accelerating I expect we'll all be spending more time working remotely over the next 12 to 18 months and until there is both a cure and a vaccine. For me working from home has worked as it fits in well with my role as a trainer, speaker and consultant and I already spend around half my time working from home.

Eventually, cures and a vaccine will be found, as the best minds in the world are working tirelessly on dealing with the problem. Until it's resolved though I hope some of the tips and resources above help you over the next year or so. If you have any tips or resources you'd like to add then please do so in the comments section.

In the meantime though, stay safe, follow all the good advice from the experts and let's work together to get through all this.