I’ve been working from home, full time, for the past 3 and a half years now. It’s definitely been a learning experience.
Working from home does have its cool things and bad things.
Yes, you get to wear your pyjamas all day if you want to. But I wouldn’t recommend doing this.
Here are 5 things that I’ve learnt these past 5 years from working at home.
1 – Treat your home like an actual office
Working from home does make your home an actual office. Hence, you should treat your working area at home like such. What I mean with this is that you should ensure that you have everything that you need to make the most out of your time working.
This also means that your working area should be exactly that, a working area. Get rid of any possible distractions that you may have around you.
On another note – working from home has one major benefit… you can write off your working area from your taxes. This actually adds up at the end of the year!
2 – Go to bed early
This was and still is a key factor for me to make the most out of my working time.
Here’s the thing… By nature, after 7pm or 8pm, my body feels like it wants to tune off. It gets late and dark in the evening and I go into resting mode by nature. And that is exactly what I do.
Wake up early. I’m talking 5:30am or 6:00am. Make the most out of your day. And, by the time the night gets here, treat yourself to wrapping it up.
Coffee is my best friend ensuring that I can get this done!
3 – Have an actual schedule
This one goes hand by hand with the last one.
You need to have a schedule, otherwise you’re not going to be as productive as you could be.
Have working hours, snack hours, lunch hours and make sure you set-up an hour to wrap everything up and conclude your day.
It’s extremely easy to enslave yourself inside your own work when you work at home. Don’t do this.
Also, make sure the people around you are aware of your schedule. A lot of the people who might live with you might feel like you’re off because you’re not actually at the office.
4 – Project Management is a thing
Asana, Zenkit, Trello… Any of these will work to keep track of your tasks. If you work with others, this step is even more important.
I work with a team of 6 people total, each of us in a different place of the world. There’s no way in hell we would get anything done today without three different systems in place.
- A project management tool. In our case, we’re currently using Zenkit. It works well, and it lets you organize tasks in different views: calendar mode, list mode…
- An efficient way of staying in touch (and no, whatsapp won’t do it). Slack is probably one of the most famous ways for teams to talk to each other remotely. I have another suggestion that might surprise people in the “working” space. Discord. Discord was originally created for gamers buy we’ve found it to be a cool and free alternative to slack that will let you organize your team in different departments.
- A system to organize working docs. Google Drive works, but it’s a little limited in terms of how much you can do on a google doc and it can also get a little messy if you start working with different presentations, sheets… We use quip. Quip is outstandingly amazing, and I couldn’t recommend it enough. You can leave comments on people’s work, insert spreadsheets, calendars and a long etc. within a single document. It works beautifully. The mobile app is glitchy to say the least, though.
5 – Make a list of objectives each day
This one is crucial for me. I have a list of things that I need to get done on a weekly and daily basis. Every morning after breakfast I do two things, go over my emails and make sure my list of objectives is crystal clear.
There are a few other tips that I could come up with, such as maybe considering leaving your home and working at a coffee shop now and then. But, of course, this wouldn’t apply in today’s scenario where we are being asked to work from home to keep corona from spreading.
