Staying Connected and Healthy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

I have had a few discussions about the struggles with remote work from home the other day in my graduate class that is moving online for the rest of the term and wanted to share some ideas for them that have worked for me. Then, I decided that more people could probably benefit from this (this post was inspired by an email that my wonderful wife wrote for her team when they had to start working from home):

• Keep a daily routine?, dress every morning like you are going to the actual office and not just your room ???????????????.
• Even if it is just around your block, a walk ??will always clear your mind. It gives you the fresh air you deserve and loosens up your joints. We walk for even just 15 minutes every day, often in the morning and later in the day.
• Keep a healthy diet ?? (like I make my cookies with almond flour and coconut oil instead of butter but I've also tried to eat more salads, which are quite easy to make for lunches) and drink enough water/tea/even coffee - just drink enough. I also like meal prepping for lunches, here is a good guide for healthy meal preps:

• Meditate ?? even just under 10 minutes in the mornings if you are feeling stressed and want to set your mind right. This is a nice gratitude one that works for me:

• My wife likes Yoga ?? during lunch, sometimes I join her, the Yoga with Adrienne YouTube channel is full of awesome free videos. One short and sweet stretch that gets your blood circulating is this:

• I like working out ????♂? in the mornings but I don't really want to spend hours doing it and have actually quit the gym because there are so many good HIIT and bodyweight videos on YouTube (some of my favourites are FitnessBlender and Athlean X. Remember: Sweat is just fat crying.

• Use a remote tool for keeping track of tasks ?? or even to manage tasks with your team (I really like Trello with our team). Obviously, since Microsoft bought Wunderlist, it offers a good To-Do App as well. And if you and your company are tied to Google, you can just use Google Keep. Or if you've got a bit of money to spend, don't need collaboration, and work with Apple devices, just buy Things.
• Use a tool that allows for remote collaboration and information exchange with your team??????????, many of them are currently free or available with fewer restrictions. At work, we use Slack for my research group but the University uses Microsoft Teams, we also like some functionality of Discord (which is super popular with gamers), I've also looked into Tandem (which feels like it's bridging the gap between Slack's and Discord's functionality with more immediate voice chat options) or RemoteHQ, which I have not tried.
• Run your meetings (and for us entire classes) using video chat ???♀??????♂?software. While the remote collaboration tools mentioned before can do this for you, too, most of them cap out at a higher number of participants, so the University gave us Cisco's WebEx for running large meetings with 50 and more participants and it works like a charm. Of course, lots of alternatives like Jitsi (updated on April 2 and highly recommended!), Google Hangouts Meet, Zoom (I would not recommend this anymore given the many privacy and security concerns!), and GoToMeeting exist.
• For the video recording ?? of our lectures, I have tried Loom (which is now free for education), TechSmith SnagIt (probably the gold standard of screen recording software), Open Broadcaster Software (which we have used for lecture and game streaming before) or Streamlabs OBS if you are on Windows. Of course, you could try these for streaming your webinars and remote presentations in your company as well.
• If you work lots with whiteboards as we do in our user experience (UX) classes (think mindmaps, user flows, customer journey maps, affinity diagrams, etc.) then you might be interested to look into Miro (better deals for educational institutions although they seem to be completely swamped with requests right now) or Mural (really great because of their many UX templates).