My top 4 hacks for productively working from home

This pandemic has companies scrambling to accelerate digital transformation by shifting to remote work. A great number of them are leveraging technology in order to make remote work “work”. Over the past 4 months in lockdown, I have observed a few remote work hacks that have helped me survive until today. Here are 4 of my personal hacks that I want to share with you:

Working remotely from home can easily turn into an unproductive day once we fall into the “I can work while doing this…” trap. This means we intend to do work while watching our favorite series on Netflix, playing video games in between meetings or tasks, or just simply scrolling through our social media application feeds. We can easily be distracted with all of these things while working remotely from home. We can avoid this trap by setting a schedule of tasks we need to accomplish.

I find it extremely helpful to set my work schedule on a weekly basis. It gives me a great view of what I have to accomplish and how much time I have within a week to get things done. I strongly encourage to write down your schedule in an app or in your work calendar. I have this habit of creating calendar items and sending it to myself so that I am reminded of what I have to do at specific times in a day. This allows me to focus and prioritize on things throughout the day.

Once we have set our own weekly or daily schedules, I believe it is essential to always start the day right. A simple yet effective routine is this: Take a bath, eat breakfast, drink coffee 15 to 20 minutes before you officially start work. This allows you to physically and mentally prepare for the day. We have various definitions of starting our day right so it is important to find out what works for you and start doing it every morning before starting work.

For most people, working from home can be more exhausting than working in the office. During the first few weeks of working from home, I had days with back to back meetings from 9AM to 6PM. This will drain every bit of your mental energy even if you say that you’re just in the meeting listening or conversing from the comfort of your home.

I find it highly effective to schedule brain breaks in between meetings and tasks. It’s pretty simple. Whenever someone asks if I’m available at a certain time, I always make sure to set a 5 to 10 minute buffer to take a break — whether it’s a quick comfort room run, water break, or scroll through my social media feed for funny or cute videos. The important thing is you get brain some few minutes of rest from work.

A lot of companies are new to working remotely that they are still figuring out how to measure productivity. Unfortunately for most, they think that since you are working from the comfort of your home it is okay to work extended hours.

Oh boy, did they get that wrong. The past 4 months have been extremely tiring because of having to work extended hours. I know it seems like work is never ending and we have to finish a lot of things, but it is important to draw the boundary when to stop working and continue the next day.

One useful hack that has done wonders for my productivity is enabling quiet hours for my work applications. I mainly use Outlook and Teams mobile for work. Luckily, both of these apps have the “quiet hour” button that instantly turns off my work notifications from 7pm until 7am of the next day. You can easily find it in settings.

There are a lot of other hacks you can use to be more productive and these are just my personal favorites. Try to explore and see what works for you.

Related posts:

When an unknown threat is observed in the wild, researchers quickly get to work observing its behavior in real or virtual environments. They deploy event listeners, read event logs, analyze source…

Do you have any burning questions for Solv Protocol? The best time to ask your questions is during our AMA on 10/12/2021 12PM UTC on our own Telegram! Ryan Chow, Co-founder of Solv Protocol will…

This article has been moved to: https://indejuice.com/blog/what-is-indejuice. “What is IndeJuice?” is published by IndeJuice in IndeJuice.