Are you trying to figure out how to work from home efficiently after being told to do so with very short notice and virtually no instructions?
If so, you’re in the right place…
While there has been a slow shift towards fully or partially remote work over the last decade or even longer, the recent COVID-19 outbreak has accelerated that process to an unthinkable speed. It has forced many industries to adapt to remote work overnight, and it has forced a considerable part of knowledge workers to stay at home, for better or worse.
Having spent a large part of my professional life working on my own terms, I believe that distributed work with people collaborating on projects without being in the same physical space or even working at the exact same time is the path forward. That said, I also understand that it will initially pose some challenges, especially if done without adequate preparation.
With the right strategies, though, I also believe that you can not only adapt to the new normal but leverage it to work more efficiently, with less frustration, and with more time left to do the things you truly enjoy.
From my experience, optimizing your skills and processes in the three areas below will be the key in allowing you to do so:
- Physical & Mental Environment
- (Especially Written) Communication
- Personal Knowledge Management
Want to start optimizing the way you work from home and freeing up your time?
The first step to take once you know that you will be working from home for the foreseeable future is to make sure that your work environment is optimized and that you form the right set of habits.
Whether you live in a small one-room apartment or a three-story house, making sure you have a dedicated “workspace” separated from your “private space” is the number one thing to do to work remotely in an efficient manner.
Of course, you can work from your dining table for a day or two, or even a week, but long-term, you will need to create that separation in one way or another. That might range from simply turning your dining table into a work desk every morning by setting it up in a certain way all the way to having a dedicated home office.
In addition to the above, keep in mind that setting up a proper “mental environment” is at least as important as setting your “physical environment” right.
This includes, among many other things:
- Making sure that you form the right habits to get into “work mood” at the right time, something that is normally accomplished by arriving at the office when working “locally”
- Making sure you maintain a certain daily routine instead of starting to work on an erratic schedule just because you can
- Making sure your spouse and children understand that just because you are at home it doesn’t mean that you are not working or that you do not need to focus
Need help with figuring out how to set up your remote work environment and habits to best suit your needs?
As much as distributed work is the way forward, being in an office also undoubtedly has its benefits. Benefits that you will lose once you go remote.
Perhaps the most important of those is that working in the same physical space at the same time naturally makes it easy to communicate with your colleagues “real-time” and face-to-face.
You can partially emulate that when working remotely through video calls. Most of the time, however, you will have to rely on text-based communication.
Because of that, you want to make sure that:
- You and your company are using the right set of remote work communication tools like Slack and Zoom, and that you are familiar with them
- Your writing skills are top-notch, allowing you to communicate your thoughts–and more importantly, convey what otherwise would have been conveyed through “non-verbal communication”–via text.
Related to the latter, you also have to make sure to learn to interpret other people’s messages and intents correctly. In other words, to succeed with remote work, you will have to be good at feeling and conveying emotions through reading and writing.
To demonstrate what I mean, just think about the difference in the message and emotions that the two, on the surface same, messages below convey:
- This is not what I was expecting.
- this is not what I was expecting 🙂
Do you feel like you and your distributed team need to get better with communication?
Lastly, when working remotely, you will be away from your colleagues, spending more time alone.
What that means is that you will have fewer chances to shout “Hey Joe, where’s that file we were working on yesterday afternoon?” or “Hey Jane, what did you say that Client A said about our proposal during your last meeting?” across the office.
With communication with your colleagues becoming scarcer and asynchronous, working productively from home is also highly dependent on having the right personal knowledge management systems and processes in place.
In other words, to work from home efficiently, you will have to be good at taking notes and keeping them organized in an easily retrievable way. You will also need to be organized with your files, folders, emails, and all the other information that you handle on a day-to-day basis.
Learning to do so will not only save you frustration, but it will also save you hours of time. You can learn more about my digital productivity-related consulting services here.
Having been working fully or partially remotely for the last decade, having recently built a home office, and being a productivity nerd in general, I can help you with:
- Designing a productive mental and physical environment – Helping you come up with the best solution depending on your situation (incl. whether you live alone or with a spouse and kids, your apartment or house size and layout, budget, and personal preferences and habits)
- Improving your written communication – Proofreading and revising your emails, reviewing messages and other written documents, helping with composing messages and documentation
- Getting your digital workspace organized – Helping you design and implement processes and tools (file organization, email management, etc.) to make you more productive