How to work from home without going crazy (and being productive)

Stop throwing money at a meal that is (most of the time) expensive and stupid, because you can cook on your own.

You can spend more time with the better half, with the baby or with the cats, as the case may be.

If you feel tired, you may wake up later or even - LUX! to take a nap at noon.

And, more than that, no one interrupts you when you got into the flow and you were on the wave of work, even though you put those headphones on your ears especially to be left alone.

It's just that if you end up working from home and you don't have discipline, if you don't impose a routine, you risk getting rid of some inconveniences typical of offices and encountering other problems.

Because it is clear that in the next few days there is a good chance that you will end up working from home, in self-imposed quarantine or not, here are some things that I recommend to work efficiently and, at the same time, not to go crazy:

1. DISCIPLINE

The coolest thing about working remotely is that you can do your own thing. If you want to believe in America's time zone, work all night and then sleep until noon, you can do it. If you don't want to take a lunch break with all your colleagues, because today you feel like fasting intermittently, no one will stop you.

You have a lot of freedom. You decide when and how to work.

Do you know what the problem with freedom is? It comes bundled with responsibilities. Everyone thinks he wants freedom, but when he does, he doesn't know what to do with it.

In order to work successfully from home and not go crazy, you also need:

a) structure ,

b) deadlines ,

c) breaks .

I take them one at a time:

a) Why structure : Because otherwise you will not work efficiently. When you're not in an office, it becomes more obvious who really does the job, who delivers results, and who doesn't. There is this switch from monitoring effort (how many hours you spend in the office) to focusing on results (what you actually delivered). No one can pretend or complain that he is extremely busy.

Clarify your responsibilities and expectations of yourself. Decide when and what to work on, when to take breaks, when to eat, and just as importantly, when to say stop at work. Build a schedule, a work routine, just like when you work from an office.

If you plan to work from 9 to 13 and then take an hour break, stick to the schedule. Do not start cleaning the house or washing clothes and working through the drops, as you will not be able to work in the long run. In addition, you will signal to the brain that those deadlines are not mandatory and you will slowly lose confidence in yourself.

b) Deadlines : Have you heard of Parkinson's Law ? It is the theory that the work expands (or contracts) to fill the time allotted for completing a task:

“Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. If I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials.”

The more time we spend on a task, the more it will take us to do it. If we have only 2 hours to do one thing, we will make incredibly much progress in those 2 hours. If we take a day off, we'll make sure that task expands into complexity until we're full of it all day.

That's why we need deadlines - and we work well with them, otherwise we end up thinking non-stop about the things we have to do.

c) Why breaks : From home you can work much more efficiently than when you worked from the office, because no one interrupts you when your world is dearer and you get rid of all the office noise, but do not expect to work at capacity maximum for 8 hours in a row because it is unrealistic.

We probably have a maximum of 4 hours a day in which we can really focus on something ( deep work ), after which we notice how the law of diminishing returns works and our power decreases.

It is important to know what those hours are when you have the maximum energy and creativity, so that you can exploit them (they differ from each other), and to occupy the rest of the hours with tasks that you can do more on autopilot and you do not need equally high concentration power.

At the same time, don't forget to take short breaks to recharge your batteries - 10 minutes an hour, like when we were in school, are enough, as long as there are real breaks, in which you let your mind wander. . So without scrolling on social media or news sites, right?

2. SOCIALIZATION

We are social animals, we don't like to be isolated for too long, no matter how introverted we may be.

Continue to socialize with co-workers, friends and family, and try not to take that dose of poor quality communication (no, Facebook likes are not a quality interaction, nor is link sharing with panicked news on WhatsApp groups). Get on the phone and call them!

Set up recurring Skype / Zoom meetings with coworkers, and when you have them, try to focus on things that may be harder to do in writing or risk being misinterpreted (eg, bonding, brainstorming, receiving / giving feedback).

GitHubGitLab, for example, has 30 minutes of blocked daily calls with everyone every day. In the first 5 minutes I go through the agenda of the day, at the end I talk about what they did in their free time - even if they just watched TV; I'm talking about this. They have all the working and communication procedures detailed in the handbook (it is public).

If you live with someone else in the house, play board games, card games or the Playstation - anything can disconnect you a bit, don't stick to laptops or news TV stations all day.

3. HEALTHY HABITS

Try to stick to a routine and healthy habits that you normally had. And by healthy habits I mean both the good ones for your mental state and the ones for your body. Mens healthy in healthy body.

I know, it's tempting to spend most of your time refreshing on news sites or mindlessly scrolling through social media feeds. It gives us the illusion that we could predict the future, that we would be in control. It's just that we're out of control. It's just an emotional carousel, in which we feed on poor quality information (most of it is stuffing or rumors) and it leaves us more hungry than before.

Rationally speaking, there's nothing going on in a 12-hour, even 24-hour news cycle that has a real impact on your life, and you need to know that in real time. you act. And if that's the case, I'm sure you'll find out otherwise - probably by phone.

I recommend that you set some time limits when checking all these channels. X minutes a day, at set times - ideally NOT right after you wake up and NOT in the evening before you go to bed. If you check them in the morning it will slip you from whatever you intend to work that day and it will fill your mind with worries about things that are not under your control, and if you check them in the evening you will end up with insomnia.

If you're into chat groups where there's nothing to talk about other than the latest coronavirus news, mute them all, turn off notifications, and treat them the same as news apps: with limits time for when and how much you check them.

Stick to good habits for your body.

Just because you're stuck in the house doesn't mean you have the green light to take a break from all the healthy habits you had before and start eating all the crap. It is more important that you continue to exercise at all times, those calories will not burn spontaneously just because it is a case of force majeure.

Improvise yourself on a sports corner, put on a yoga mat or a blanket, and use a YouTube channel or phone app to inspire you to see what exercises you can do with just your body weight.

If you don't know where to start, here are some of the runners I'm following:

- Lucy Bartholomew has some exercises done on IG Stories and saved in Highlights (the so-called Core and Gym)

- Hillary Allen also has IG Stories, saved in Highlights.

- Robert Hajnal has a few videos on his YouTube channel, the training playlist (10 mins abs, 10 mins kettlebell) (he has even more available for those who support Patreon ).

Later update : try not to work in the same place where you sleep or eat. Do not mix the jars, because you risk giving her insomnia (you signal to the brain that the bed is for something other than the only 2 activities for which it should be).

4. SILVER LINING

If you are forced to stay home, try to take advantage of your time and occupy it in a way that you will not regret later.

I know, it's hard to look for the good side of things when you're only paying attention to the bad things, when there's a good chance you'll end up stuck between 4 walls for a few weeks and there's so much suffering around you. But if you don't force yourself to do that, you risk going crazy. It doesn't help to sit and worry about things that aren't under your control.

Some ideas for things to do:

- Maybe try some new recipes or take an online course to improve your cooking skills (I recommend the one made by Viorel Copolovici on Udemy ).

"Maybe do some general cleaning for Marie Kondo." Maybe put it in your closet or closet and gather all the things you don't need anymore.

- Maybe you read those books you still couldn't get and you promised not to buy more until you finished what you bought last year (#guilty). If, however, you need extra inspiration and you have a Kindle, see my lists of books here: 1 , 2 , those in the newsletter archive or those mentioned in the podcast .

- Maybe start practicing a new language on Duolingo or improve your chess skills.

- Maybe you start that blog or newsletter you've been thinking about for a while. Or (for the more ambitious) you start writing a book.

Surely you had a few things on that New Years Resolutions list that you wanted to do and you kept postponing them.

Another habit that helped me a lot: last year I started keeping a diary of gratitude. Sounds cheesy - and I was skeptical at first (I think it's been about 10 years since I've seen this recommendation on various outside blogs), until I tested it and realized it worked. Especially in difficult times or full of uncertainty, it forces me to look for the full half of the glass and not take things as if they belonged to me.

I do this: in the morning, before I start my work day, I take a piece of paper and write down some things for which I am grateful. Why write? Because it forces me to slow down my thoughts and it seems to print better than when I write digitally. I try to get to a list of 10 things because there are enough numbers to force me to start noticing the good things, but not to end up putting everything that happens on the sheet. I try to make them as specific as possible, although in the next period I anticipate that we will get to enjoy the most general ones.

***

I still want to mention something. I always had jobs that allowed me to work remotely, at least partially, to oscillate between working from an office and working from home (Or from a cafe). I'm pretty 'lone wolf', I like the freedom to optimize my own time and it seems silly to be forced to sit next to a desk from 9 to 18, with an hour break, just because they were done things always. I'm able to organize myself without any problems - or maybe it's a skill I've been forced to develop in these 13+ years. In addition, I need to spend a lot of time alone, without being interrupted, and my interactions with people make me very tired. When I work in an office, I feel like I'm consuming twice as much energy and neurons to accomplish the same task as when I work from home, and I feel like I'm doing it slower and slower.

On the other hand, I don't think you can build an effective team just remotely, because there are some things you can't replace, no matter how well you organize yourself. You need that connection in real life, to build a relationship, to learn things about each other, about how you work. I came to the conclusion that you need to take from time to time the energy that only the banality of working together physically, from the same space, day by day, can give you.

***

EXTRA RESOURCES ABOUT REMOTE WORK:

The best book on this topic is Remote , by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of Basecamp software (by the way, I recommend all their books on work culture).

Also from Basecamp: Handbook and Guide to Internal Communication , where there are even more details about how it works

From the handbook of another large company that has a fully remote team: GitLab's Guide to All-Remote

From Buffer (another large remote company): The 2020 State of Remote Work

Și Automattic (WordPress) e o companie fully remote: The creator of WordPress shares his secret to running the ultimate remote workplace

Un ghid pentru a lucra remote: The Guide to Remote Work That Isn’t Trying to Sell You Anything

Know Your Team (part of Basecamp) is now offering their remote management guide for free download: " Guide to Managing Remote Teams "