Workspace
It is very important to organize a comfortable workspace, as you will be spending a lot of time there. If you have the opportunity, set aside a separate room or at least a balcony for work. If not, work wherever you can: at a desk in your room, on the sofa in the living room, in the kitchen. The main thing is not to work where you sleep, because then you risk reducing your productivity and worsening the quality of your sleep.
If you plan to continue working remotely, you can invest in a comfortable desk and chair for work. If working from home is a temporary measure for you, then you can make do with what you already have. After all, not everyone is as lucky as Shopify employees, who can receive a thousand dollars in compensation for setting up a home office.
We also recommend buying noise-cancelling headphones if you have noisy housemates or neighbors.
Preparing for work
If you don’t live alone, explain to your housemates that you are working and that you should not be disturbed during working hours. This can be particularly difficult to convey to the older generation, for whom the concepts of ‘sitting at a computer’ and ‘doing nothing’ are often synonymous. It is important to discuss everything in advance so that there are no hard feelings because you cannot drop everything and take out the rubbish or do something else because ‘you are at home anyway’.
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To get into the right frame of mind for work, you can imagine that you are going to the office in the morning and do everything you usually do, except that you can replace the trip to the office with exercise or a short walk in the fresh air, if there are no restrictions on this in your region.
Many remote workers advise not to give in to the temptation to work in your pyjamas and to change into work clothes. This is especially important if you have a video conference coming up.
We also recommend reading our post on how to motivate yourself in the morning.
Communicating with colleagues
The work itself will not differ much from working in the office, except that all communication with colleagues will take place online. But there are a few nuances:
Do not expect an instant response. In the office, you can simply walk up to a colleague, see if they are busy or not, and ask them whatever you need. But when you ask a question in a messenger, keep in mind that your colleague may be working on an urgent task or simply away at the toilet.
Follow the rules of business communication. Don’t just write ‘Hi’ or ‘Hello!’; get straight to the point. This will save both your time and your conversation partner’s time. Try to send everything in one message, because
Separate your home and work life. Some employees use two monitors — one for work programmes and the other for personal email and social networks. You can use different browsers: for example, I save all my work links in Opera, and I use Chrome for personal purposes.
Try not to get distracted. Procrastination is a terrible thing. You get a notification about a new message on social media, and an hour later you’re watching another video on YouTube, and the task still isn’t done. Some offices block social media and entertainment websites or make employees hand in their phones to combat procrastination, but when working from home, there are no such restrictions. If you are easily distracted and know it, try switching your phone to airplane mode and installing an app on your computer that will limit the time you can spend on entertainment websites.
Control the noise level. According to research, noise reduces employee productivity. Your home is probably not as noisy as an open-plan office, but try to minimise the noise level anyway: use sound-absorbing headphones, talk to your family and neighbours and ask them to keep the noise down if possible. If you find yourself in the opposite situation, where your home is too quiet and you miss the familiar background noise, you can always solve this problem with special noise generators.
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