54 Tips for Working from Home
I was just sent this great resource on working from home from the team at Groove. I guess lots of you folk are working from home at the moment, more so than usual. They sent me 47 tips, I've added 7 more, please add your tips in the comments below!
Our UNA team are fully remote, and we all work from home (or elsewhere) for ages - we love it, and are super productive as well.
I've added a few of my tips based on my experience of working from home here:
Mark Purser - COO - UNA.io
1. Know your best times.
I am super productive in the morning, between 8am - 12pm my mind is focussed and sharp and I can power out lots of detailed admin and creative work. I try and keep my meetings out of this time and I refuse to socialise in this time because it is too valuable. The great thing about working from home is that you can work out a schedule that suits your life, so take advantage of that, find your flow and adapt a working life to suit that.
2. Know your teams times
We have times at UNA when we are all online, it's usually in my evening but I reserve that time for work as I know how effective it is when we are all online working through issues together.
3. Get into your community, get some exercise.
Maybe not an option for some of you at the moment, but working from home comes with the risk of us becoming isolated - take time each day, get outdoors, I often like to go out for lunch and eat dinner at home. I ride my bike around, go surfing, I also teach yoga which is very social. I also love talking to clients via Zoom and you guys on UNA.IO!
4.Change your Location, but have a Location
I often pick up my laptop and work from a cafe for an hour or two - usually just to focus on a specific task - but I also have a workstation at home, with a decent chair and elevated screen, which is my sanctuary.
If we are working from home, why not make that home in a beautiful place? I love to travel and have worked on the road. Working whilst travelling can be really challenging, I will always buy a local SIM so I have internet on demand, and usually like to go somewhere and set up for a few weeks, relax into the vibe of the place and establish an effective workflow as well. Too much movement from place to place can be stressful, I've found travelling every day whilst trying to work is a total shit-show.
Our CTO Alex T⚜️ is the King or AirBnB - (also travelling with a baby!) so he might have some good tips here as well...
5. Eat well!
I love cooking and eating great food, I will often slow cook food whilst working at home, taking a break to prepare ingredients and give things a stir. I also have a veggie garden at home, another great practice to balance my mind - cheaper than therapy, and I get tomatoes! Long hours in front of a computer screen can be heavy on the system, we need to counter this with some super healthy practices as well.
6. Meditation and Yoga
These practices are invaluable to my routine, I will stretch everyday, often practice pranayama as a short break to settle my mind, and swear by the practice of yoga nidra as a technique to reset and refresh during a busy day.
7. Keep Lists
One thing that working from home will enforce is getting disciplined and organised. There are lots of great tools for mapping and managing productivity - we use and love Teamwork for our Project Management - but I am a big fan of a handwritten task list. I write up a task list every Monday morning and joyfully tick things off when they are completed. It is retro and rudimentary, but it works for me!
The good folk from Groove share some of their tips via the blog below. Do any of you have more tips that might help? Please share in the comments, I would love to hear them.
-
Thanks for the list!
Working from home is something I have been struggling with for the past few years and never really got a good balance of, to this day. Having a 6 and 7.5 year old kids causing mayham in a smaller size house don't help when needing to focus. I often end up at a 24hr restaurant (Waffle House) in the middle of the night trying to get stuff done.
Btw, you have two # 4's and two # 5's!
-
-
Great tips, Mark.
-
immersion and sense of belonging
-
-
hello Mark exellent article, I also work at home and I bring the old kitchen to an office. I am very demanding when I work, little by little, all the family and friends that we start to consider as a real office and they respect that.
To be productive, I start early in the morning with a routine, a coffee, a spiritual meditation, a motivation course, a visit to social networks and email. and when I start to work, I am very focused on a task. I relax with music, motivational lessons, stories, news. in the evening I go out to see friends.
But in all of this, what really works when I focus on one task after another.
But can you tell me how to find people to recruit to form a team that will work from home? it's the hardest thing at the moment
-
Great tips hans - certainly remote working is not fa fit for everyone. I’m not sure if you business, but perhaps you could advertise on here?
-
-
Realize that you are not control. You were not in control in the past. And you won't be in control in the future.
That is freedom, because it means you are not responsible for what happens even though it is prudent to share in the global fallout and to try to be of assistance to others, even though you are not the One who can put the disorder into order.
And who is that Someone? Who cares? The main thing is that he/she/it is not here to put this together. Therefore make do with what you have. Do your very best and be satisfied with that.
-
https://www.instagram.com/p/B-DdtZ6jOsr/
Jocko Willink has some great books on Leadership, but he talks on his IG about remaining disciplined during these times.
-
What do you all use as your primary collaborative platform - CRM - ERP - Video Conference, IM, VOIP ETC?
-
ive added these to a LaTeX document, and really liked the original post as well. Thanks Mark P .
-my biggest tip is meditation.. ive been doing it for 20 years and most of the time i dont have thoughts..
-another one is training both hemispheres to work concurrently. for this i will practice writing with both hands at the same time,
.....using the same kind of pen or pencil in both hands, and practice three modes.
1: mirroring text (two streams of the same thing in simultaneous)
2: sequential (each hand writes one word by itself, simultaneously .. ie left hand writes the while right hand writes quick, left hand writes brown while right hand writes fox, left hand writes jumps right hand writes over..
3: one letter each hand same word in serial processing (2 cores.. ha ha ha)
you can actually feel your brain itch while you're doing this..
there's more but thats enough to start one off... i'm convinced at this point i dont really have conscious thoughts very often, ive been meditating so long.. when i do have one it feels very jarring, like almost as if there's physical resistance to it.. i just --live-- in the moment and work through my goals and deadlines and so on but in a non linear intuitive sense. it's hard to describe...
