Working From Home Requires a Whole Different Mindset From Working in the Office
The days of ‘having a jolly at home’ are gone, and now it is a place where work is done and done to the standard it was in the office. The two are now equal and yet need managing differently.
These working from home tips will help you to be the very best version of yourself working from home.
Tips 1-10
- 1. Your influence is now through a 16-inch screen, so don’t have the light behind you because they will not be able to see you.
- 2. Agree with yourself about your working hours, whether that is 9-5, 6-6, or anything else, and only break it by exception.
- 3. Don’t use the same space, if possible, for work and home – like not sitting on the sofa watching the TV whilst working on your laptop.
- 4. If you have two monitors don’t have the person speaking to you from one and then you talk into the other because it looks odd.
- 5. Don’t ram your calendar like Tetris with no gaps between meetings because you need a small break between each meeting.
- 6. Frame yourself in Teams calls, like a photograph, with a little headspace above you, and equal space at the sides.
- 7. Turn off your email notifications to avoid the 4-minute badger!
- 8. Get out of the house during the day at least once a week and work at a coffee shop or meet a friend for lunch.
- 9. Have 3 wardrobes; work, relax, & going out, and don’t mix them.
- 10. Write a daily to-do list of all that you need to do that day and don’t make it a list of everything to do, just that day’s tasks.
Tips 11-20
- 11. Whether you are working from home or at work, ‘Eat That Frog‘ is the perfect metaphor to help you start with the biggest and worst task first.
- 12. Share how you are really feeling with your line manager, beyond a ‘How are you?’, ‘I am ok’, as they are not mind readers.
- 13. Use A.C.E to make your meetings more productive with Agenda, Capture and Evaluation.
- 14. Agree with your line manager on your deliverables – your SMART targets so that you both understand what is expected of you.
- 15. Understand the term ‘Cabin Fever’ because you need to know when you have it and what you can do about it.
- 16. Reward yourself with a break when you have worked x hours or finished a project.
- 17. Get into the habit of not answering home/personal/family messages until the day has ended, unless they are urgent, as this will ‘train’ them to know that you are working during this time.
- 18. Is your working from home chair comfortable?
- 19. Avoid ‘work creep’ where you find that you are always working with glimpses of home life in between because you’ll come to resent it.
- 20. What healthy snacks do you have?
Tips 21-26
- 21. Choose sometimes to be on camera during meetings and other times not, as video calls can be exhausting.
- 22. Use good tech to make your life easier – rubbish headphones? Change them.
- 23. Put lunch into your diary, even if it is only 30-minutes.
- 24. Have a notice on the door for when you are in really important meetings – ‘Do Not Disturb’.
- 25. ‘Train’ your interrupters at home that when you are at work you cannot deal with xyz, and they’ll need to wait until lunch or the end of the day.
- 26. Have some banter with your colleagues over instant messaging (Skype, Teams, Whatsapp) by sending gifs, emojis, or a thought for the day.
