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Productivity Tips #2 – Working From Home (WFH)

Since the lock down began due to coronavirus, I’ve had to change the way I work and the way I interact with my team. I’ve found that some people have enjoyed the freedom and flexibility, whilst others have found it challenging and boring. Many are still struggling to adapt.

There are 5 key elements to brace through this period:

  • self-discipline
  • positive mindset
  • taking care of your health
  • developing a new life style and habits
  • Be proactive and stay connected with your colleagues and loved ones.

This post provides some tips to help those that are struggling with the change.

1. Re-create your daily timetable, merging your work and personal schedule

Taking charge of your schedule and deciding when you work seems pretty obvious. However many people are still trying to do it all, with the lack of child care making it incredibly challenging for many parents to maintain their strict 9-5.

You need to figure out when you can fit everything in for the day. Include your work commitments, personal tasks, family chores. By keeping a schedule you don’t need to maintain the mental load of figuring out what you should be doing and when. Make use of the eisenhower matrix I discussed in a previous post to help you prioritise.

Identify the most productive hours during the day and plan the most important tasks to get done during those hours. Personally I’m not much of a morning person and prefer to do any significant tasks in the afternoon. However I’ve found that my daughter tends to sleep through the morning, and if I get more things done at that time, I’ll be able to spend more time with her in the afternoon and evening when she is awake.

Changing our existing habits is one of the hardest things to do. Home was where you went to relax away from work, and now its followed you home! Mindapples has a great pdf on how to go about changing your habits.

2. Spend some effort to setup a proper home office

A good home office can really help you maintain focus on the task at hand. Try to separate your professional and personal areas by carving out the physical space, it may be as simple as a table in a quiet corner of a room, or for those fortunate enough to have the space an entire study area.

Invest in your equipment. Get a proper headset, so you don’t crane your neck on the phones. Especially if you have a lot of meetings in your diary. Buy a monitor, stop looking at your 13-inch laptop screen, it was great for travelling and occasional wfh, but for working for an extended period, maybe it makes sense to get something bigger.

You’ll be spending a lot more time at your desk, make sure you have a good desk chair and foot rest if needed, alternatively invest in a standing desk. All important choices in keeping a good posture.

3. Open and transparent communication with your team

In general most people are understanding and try to be more empathetic towards each other during this work from home period. Be open and honest with your manager and team members around any limitations and constraints you have when working from home. So that they can help support you to be as productive and efficient as possible.

As a manager my one to ones feel like they have taken on even more significance. Without being able to take body language into account, assessing colleagues mental health as well as physical health is even more challenging. Don’t be afraid to explicitly ask them how they are feeling about the situation and if there is anything you can do to help. Quite often just speaking about problems can be enough.

One of our teams has adopted virtual coffee point times in the day and setup zoom calls for colleagues to meet up and talk. Topics have ranged from what is your work setup, to what is in your fridge. This could be a great opportunity to learn more about your colleagues, and to bond as a team.

4. Adopting a positive mindset, with positive distractions

Think about some of the things you have been longing to do when you have the time at home, now you have the chance, take action!

For me personally, I’ve been wanting to start a blog for many years, without a daily commute and with family to help with my daughter. I have sufficient time to write a few posts. I am also incredibly grateful to be able to spend much more time than I expected with my daughter at this age.

Try to see some of the positives this change in lifestyle has brought to you, it may even shift your values/beliefs, such that you may want to start thinking how you can maintain or enhance those positive impacts long after covid 19.

5. Take regular breaks and get some fresh air

Make sure you block your calendar and set some time to relax, refresh and recharge. Especially as you don’t have your normal lunch breaks. It is so easy to pop into the kitchen and grab a bite as you continue to work. Get up, stretch your legs, maybe try this 5-minute home office workout from Nuffield Health.

It can be easy for your workday and personal life to blur when your commute moves from 50 miles to 5 metres. Our commute gives us an opportunity to prepare for work or home life, and that context switch time has now all but disappeared. Some of my friends have found it helpful to have a different routine for those commute times. Such as taking kids for a walk or doing some exercise before you start your work day or home life.

Productivity Tip #1 – Eisenhower Matrix

Have you ever felt like there is never enough time in the day to do all the things you want to do.

One technique that I’ve found particularly helpful, from a time management and prioritisation perspective, has been to bucket anything someone is asking me to do into one of the four categories in the Eisenhower Matrix.

This video does a great job explaining the technique in just two minutes.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president of the USA, made this method famous with the quote “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” The president attributed the technique to a former college president.

The Eisenhower matrix has the four quadrants below, it uses two axis. Urgent and Important.

Hopefully the quadrants are relatively self-explanatory, so I’m going to focus on how I make use of this matrix, and I would love to hear how other people have used this or other techniques to make themselves more productive in the comments below.

I maintain two of these matrices. I keep one for work and one for my private life. I find this really helpful to switch between work priorities and life priorities.

In practical terms my work list is nothing more than a notepad file with the headings of the different quadrants, and a small list under each heading. Nothing more complicated than that. However the hardest bit, that requires a bit of self-discipline when you start using this technique; is to write a task someone gives you into your list rather than just cracking on with whatever you’ve been asked to do.

I find just writing down the different things people have asked me to do, really helps to alleviate stress, as I’m no longer having to keep a mental track record of everything.

But writing things down first can be really tricky, as starting the task straight away can be really, really tempting. However, if you take a minute, take a step back; breathe and think about the bigger picture, it will really help to prioritise and manage your time effectively.

Do

In practice I’ve found trying to keep the “DO” list small is more realistic. In reality you won’t have 10 things going in parallel, that you are “doing”. I try to keep this list to around 5 items. They can be small in size like schedule meeting with a client, or larger items, like review a design of a system feature. They will be things that have a clear end goal/state. It can be really satisfying to see how many of these items you complete in a day.

At home a typical item that will go straight into this bucket could be change the baby’s smelly nappy, but only if I can’t delegate it away to my lovely wife!

Schedule

My schedule list tends to be twice as long as my “DO” list, and you’ll often find items that never get scheduled will move to your “ELIMINATE” list. To avoid these tasks becoming stale, I find it helpful to note down a target end date for the item, so I know how much time I have to figure out when to slot the item in. Scheduling time to write any blog posts, or design documents is a great example of things that are important to me, but are often not very urgent.

Delegate

One of the first things I had to learn as I moved into a leadership role, was learning how to delegate. It’s very tempting to do everything yourself, because no one can do it as well as you! Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. You don’t have the time to do everything yourself.

You’ll find you do some of this naturally at home with your family or partner. Who is responsible for the washing up, cleaning, grocery shopping? All the house hold chores are either things you are scheduling or delegating.

Eliminate

As I mentioned above there will be times when tasks move from one quadrant to another. Tasks that fall into this bucket are my favourite, as it means I don’t have to spend any more mental effort thinking or doing that task.

However another way to think about this quadrant is to improve your own productivity. How much time do you spend that isn’t focused on one of your goals? I loved playing video games, and I still find them fun to play with friends, but the time I spend playing them has significantly reduced over the years. Especially when playing alone, as I realised it wasn’t that important for me to complete the latest grand theft auto game.

Summary

I won’t claim that I’ve never incorrectly categorised a task. It does happen, so forgive yourself and just try to learn from it. There is always the temptation to do the simple or fun stuff first, and sometimes when you need a break that might be just what you need before you get back to the urgent and important list.

Time to relax and re-charge your batteries can be just as important as your “Do” list at work or home. Finding the balance is the key; and something that I continue to search for every day.

Intro

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

I’m writing this blog because I have an awful memory. My short term memory isn’t too bad, but anything beyond what I had for breakfast and I’m struggling.

I’m hoping to cover a few different topics on this blog, predominantly I will be covering programming and finance. Given these are what I’ve been thinking about for the last decade I thought it would be nice to share those thoughts with the world and also from a selfish perspective to help me remember.

I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.