Remote working - TEN Tips

The remote work is going to disrupt our life in more ways than we can imagine. The way people collaborate, engage and build products and companies is already seeing this transition.

The working environment is rapidly evolving from traditional setup to coworking to self desks at remote locations (or at home mostly).

I have been mostly working from home/remote for the last 8+ years since I started building my own startup in the early previous decade. Here are my ten tips which have helped me a lot and I would recommend to people who are working from remote locations as well.

• Organize yourself

Organize your time, schedule and activities

Get into a schedule in the day. Staying at home ends up being very chaotic from a working point of view.

It is going to be a struggle if you do not a well-organized schedule and plan your day well.

You need to set time aside for things that are time-critical every day. Understand which time zones you are most productive at. either late night, early morning etc., Divide your day into small buckets that you can get uninterrupted for yourself. Keep aside time for team engagement, scheduling calls and discussions.

Organizing yourself also helps in getting the team more productive with the right times set for collaboration.

Pro TIP - use Calendar events for key activities or task closure.

• Avoid distractions

Put your phone to silent (or airplane) mode when you need to focus on something critical. Kill all unnecessary tabs that you don't need to be looking at for "this task". Remove WA web from open windows if not needed. Just have things that are relevant to this task open at the given time.

• Build a place of work at home -

Get yourself a specific desk/place to work. Don't randomly sit around which results in poor posture and health hazards. Choose a corner where the interruptions are minimal from visitors to home, kids and family interactions etc.

The Amazon delivery box functions as my standing desk in this picture at the moment though!

Invest in a good standing desk, a good chair, headset with mic, large screen monitor and other tools needed for you to be more productive.

• Kill the boredom - Engage via Video calls, meetups with your team, friends.

Being a remote worker ends up being a lonely world. Keep some time for video interaction with colleagues, friends.

Engage in some real meetups on topics that interest you (beyond startups or professional engagements often). Call for an in-person meeting once a while where you just get together, discuss more than work, have some fun, switch off from work! Those with kids or family, go out to park, engage in recreation activities.

Switching off works wonders when you get back to work!

• Travel around to work at social places / co-working places

Go to cafes (third wave, Blue Tokai, Hatti Cappi are my favorite), or places where you can spend some time working, sipping coffee, observing strangers walking around. It just feels good than to be at home most of the time.

• Take breaks often

The challenge of not working from the office where you end up walking around for the meeting, talking to colleagues is that you just end up being at a place most of the time. Take some breaks in between. My favorite is to get up and walk when I have to call or I receive a call to converse. This leads to me walking a good number of steps per day without even realizing it! Some breaks are very refreshing! Switching off at times from work, and then getting back to work just boosts productivity.

• Stay Healthy

Now that you save those many hours (in Bangalore especially) of traffic every day, invest some time in picking up a sport or running, or actually hitting the gym.

You can go for a swim, or just walk around as well. Try to pick something that can help you become more healthy.

• Read

Reading something that interests you works wonders. In fact, you can pick up some favorite blogs to read, favorite tweets, posts to read. It also helps you to be away from the screen

I often bookmark some of these to read for about half an hour a day. You can also listen to podcasts, audio books etc but for me picking up a good book always works

Pro-Tip - Create a WA group with yourself (add your partner to create group, later remove them, so it is only you as part of that group), send links, stuff to do etc.

• Learn new skills

Learning something unconventional is often underrated!

Take this opportunity to learn new skills that would help you become better professionally or personally

I picked up various things that over a period of time, I became much better at. For example, I started learning rifle shooting (took about a month for me to get a good cluster of accurate hits).

I learned various aspects of shooting a rifle, calibration, technique, balancing it. I also learned to shoot with the left hand as well. Also, I got the chance to practice with the national team :)

I started listening to podcasts - Listening various key podcasts on entrepreneurship, building companies, life skills and more.

• Get those productivity Apps/Tips

Get the apps or tools that will help you become more productive.

Google Hangout, Gotomeeting or Zoom, Airmeet - for video conference

Loom - for snippet videos (great for sharing design/bugs)

Slack - for team/company communication

Notion, GoogleDrive, Airtable - collaborate on documents

Trello, Asana - for activity management

Canva, Invision, Figma for design collaboration

Miro - workshops and collab with non-designers

Google Calendar - see colleagues core hours

Whatsapp - quick conversations only

Remember that remote working or work from home can be really amazing and productive provided that you utilize it well. In fact, it could easily lead to productivity jump as you avoid travel time, unnecessary coffee/lunch/conversation breaks. Just imagine saving 2-3 hours per day of productivity wastage!

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