8 Tips for Staying Sane and Productive While Working Remotely
Remote Work is a hard skill – and not everyone on your team may immediately excel!
If you are going remote or hybrid, you need to invest in training for your team on how to work effectively as a remote employee.
By now, I hope most people have realized that remote work isn’t just lounging at home pretending to get things done. Repeated studies have shown that most people increased their productivity while working remotely during the pandemic. Yet, it was also revealed that they also increased their levels of anxiety and burnout.
Working Remotely is a skill, one that took me years to figure out how to do effectively.
So, if you are a remote worker and want to stay sane and effective at your job, here are eight things I’ve learned while working remotely for the past decade.
Be Present – Out of sight is out of mind. And in a remote office, everyone is out of sight. So, if you want to be seen, it’s essential to be present and active in your virtual workspaces. Be active on your team Slack. Give feedback and praise to colleagues. Have your video on for meetings, be engaged, speak up and participate.
Get Clear on What is Expected – Working remotely means your performance at work won’t be evaluated by your inputs any longer (i.e., how long your butt is in a seat), only your outputs. So, you had better make sure that you and your manager are aligned on those outputs and how and when you will evaluate success.
Find Your Flow – One of the most significant advantages of remote work is that you can maintain focus on a project for more extended periods of time without interruption. It usually takes a good 10-20 minutes of focus on something to get to what is called your ‘flow state,’ where you typically do your best work. But constant interruptions prevent you from reaching it. It’s a lot easier to turn off notifications in remote work than at an office. Take advantage of it!
Have a Real Workspace – Get your work to pay for a real desk, chair, monitor, keyboard, and good internet. Or, if you don’t have a dedicated space at home (with a door!), they should pay for a shared workspace. If you are expected to work regularly at home, your employer should do so. Now, if you are a freelancer or contractor, it’s still wise to invest in a good chair at the very least (and save your receipts as home office expenses can be written off.).
Set Boundaries: It can be easy to always be at work if you are working from home. And while sometimes it can be nice to do other activities or errands during the day and work at night, be careful about protecting yourself when you are available. Work with your team to set team-wide norms for when people should be comfortable turning off notifications and unplugging.
Make a Social Life Outside of Work! -–- Offices can be full of fun, exciting people that you want to be friends with (or not). But when working remotely, that built-in social life that comes with work is no longer there. So, it can be extremely easy for many people to feel lonely working remotely at first. The good news is that remote work should give you more time to pursue other social activities. Join a running club, go on a date night, take cooking classes, or call and check up on old friends.
Create New Routines: Office work is full of routines, often with the widely hated work commute. And while taking back that time is fantastic, those commutes and the general schedule of office-based work give a structure to the days that can make remote work seem like chaos in comparison. Give some order to your days by working in other routines from exercise/yoga/meditation, traveling to a nearby café or park to work for a few hours, and scheduling most of your calls to certain parts of your day.
Put on pants: You are at least 100% more productive with pants on. Just trust me on that one.
Over the past year, the explosion of remote work means that we are still just learning how to work in this new paradigm.
Working remotely requires a substantially different set of skills than it takes to succeed in an office environment. Organizations committed to at least some remote work need to invest in training their employees how to be successful in this new emerging paradigm, in both their individual contributions and how we work together.
Helping organizations make remote work is a big part of what we’re about at Flip the Script. So if you’re looking for a partner on your remote journey to help move “trial and error” into “iteration,” Sign up today for a free consultation: Link here.
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