Last Updated on August 3, 2021 by Aram
In these hard times, the whole world has been disrupted and the usual work routine has been changed. every work-related subject that we used to do has been drastically effected, like commuting, running to the office, punch-cards and turnstiles, using elevators, socializing with colleagues, meetings and interviews, pair programming sessions, business trips, and many more.
All or some of these subjects nowadays are either no longer happening or has changed in the way employees are handling them. Taking into consideration all the precautionary safety instructions as advised by the WHO.
Even for the work itself, who was imagined that one day we will be working from home for a particularly long time (weeks or months long) ?! And that our homes will be our offices as well. This is what many employees have now been already accustomed to and doing their jobs while working from home.
I know many of you have been already doing great both working from office or home, yet there might be some of you who are having difficulties to manage and adapt working from home, so let me share with you some tips that would help you to increase your productivity and efficiency while working remotely.
1. Prepare your Work Station
When you are working from home, you will have the tendency to use your work laptop in unusual places, like beside the TV or in the bed or in the kitchen.
This will only degrade your work productivity because your body and mind will be either distracted by the TV, or and mainly focused on resting or eating instead of working and being productive.
This is why you should always dedicate a room or even a corner to setup your work station. Just make sure, it is somewhere less noisy.
The station should also somehow simulate your office by having a comfortable office chair and the screen position on a desk taking into consideration many ergonomics guidelines to make sure that you have comfortable and healthy seating, one of these guidelines would be to appropriately position your computer screen so that when are you seated, your eyes would be looking straightly at the screen’s top frame. Office ergonomics is big topic, you can find more about it in this MayoClinic article.
Check this great article about Everything You Need To Know To Set Up An Ergonomic Home Office
2. Make Use of Digital Tools
Nowadays with the rapid development of technologies and platforms there are tons of products and tools available to serve a long list of different needs,
For online file sharing, you can use Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox, before using any always double check your organization’s information security instructions when sharing files from your work computer.
For Task management and tracking, you can use Trello or go for a more advanced tool (mainly for software development projects) you can go with Jira
For code sharing, you can use GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab all of these are wonderful tools to collaboratively share code. Again, don’t forget your information security instructions for code sharing.
StackOverflow is your go-to-place whenever you need any assistance with a technical (coding) problem.
Retrium is the best way to conduct Online retrospectives for your Scrum Teams
Teams, Skype For Business, Slack, Zoom are great video/audio conferencing and team chatting collaboration tools.
Feel free to use a classic writing pad and pen to list down your tasks or put notes, but go for the digital options like OneNote, Trello or just your computer’s basic Notepad.
3. Wake up Early
Since you will be working from home, then there is no need to wake up really early as now there is zero commute, you can use this time to get some more sleep or otherwise you can do early morning exercises
Just before hopping into work, make sure to fuel up with breakfast and don’t forget to keep it as healthy as possible, as this will charge your body to kick off your work day and thus it will boost your productivity.
4. Do the difficult Tasks in the morning
In the morning, when we have just woke up it is always better to do the tasks that require focus and analytical thinking (preparing a flow diagram, writing some complex functions, doing numerical analysis…etc) your brain will help you better acheiving these as early as possible.
Keep the rest of the day for less brain-demanding and more routine tasks, like sending emails, listing remaining tasks, attending meetings
5. Take Breaks Only When Needed
So you are at home and you have all the entertainment stuff around you from TV, internet, games (PC or consoles), so you will mostly be tempted to start playing and forget about your work.
Just make sure to have short breaks (5 – 10 minutes) every hour or two, take a walk tour inside the house, hydrate with a glass of water.
Stay away from the things that might drag you away from your work, keep your mind focused on your work and completing your tasks. Remember you are on a short break and you are going back to your desk very soon.
6. Monitor your Eating and Drinking Habits
Working from home doesn’t mean that you can eat or drink whatever you want and whenever you want.
To stay on the safe side and maintain healthy body, you should keep a healthy route of eating your daily large meals on time and snack in a healthy and controlled way as well to stay hydrated all the time with a cup of water every 2 or 3 hours throughout the day.
Your large meals should be of high fibers, lots of colorful veggies, adequate amounts of proteins and relatively low carbs. Your snacks should also be of no difference in terms of focusing on healthy foods and avoiding foods with no nutritional value, you can snack up with a fruit or few raw nuts and seeds of your choice.
Always remember this rule of thumb, the more processing happens on food the less nutritional value it will provide, and the more the food is of natural source and exposed to less processing or refining the healthier it will be.
Bad eating habits will cause a negative effect on your health hence a degraded work productivity and efficiency. Without a healthy mind and body you will not be able to focus on work, your body will get exhausted quickly and thus your employers will not be happy about your results.
7. Work after Hours, only if needed
If there is a very important or critical matter that requires you to stay a little longer than the normal working hours, then you don’t have an option other than staying, but be aware;
Don’t make it a habit
Because even if you are at home and are not allowed to go out, due to a curfew or a lock-down, it doesn’t mean that you should keep working.
You should always seek balance between your work and life.
Summary
At last, always be safe, stay at home, follow the instructions of your local authorities whether there is a shutdown, lockdown, curfew or anything partial, take all the necessary preventive measures and keep up-to-date with the latest news about COVID-19 from who and only take the health advises from the official and authority sites, stay away from fake news and websites that only publish wrong and false information and this can cause panic.
Here is an interesting article about the 12 best work from home gadgets and accessories.
Take a look also here for 10 Smart Tips For Successful Remote Employee Productivity Management
If you have already returned back to your office, I have some tips as well to stay healthy and boost your productivity at work, check it out: 7 Healthy Habits to Boost Your Productivity at Work
Bonus
Here is your bonus classical masterpiece that you can enjoy either while working from home or unwind after a long day of meetings and tasks.
Mozart Violin Concerto No. 5 By Hilary Hahn