Happy and productive WFH!
As an introvert I’ve always enjoyed and felt more productive when I WFH.
Due to the unfortunate pandemic outbreak everyone of us had to go remote overnight which might continue for few more months at least 🤷♀️
While I hear from lot of my friends that WFH is draining, boring, disturbing work life balance and stressful, the only worry me and my other introvert friends have is that WFH is making us more and more comfortable that thinking about going back to the office someday is very stressful 🙂!
Thought I’d write some things that I learnt from my mistake, things that worked for me and helped me enjoy my WFH experience which might help you too! You might not see anything new. It’s all the usual things that you might’ve heard/read somewhere. But I’m sure this definitely helped me and many of my friends.
Invest in your workspace
If you’re still working from your couch or dining table, think about getting a proper setup. It doesn’t have to be fancy/expensive but something that makes you comfortable and gives you feeling of sitting at a workplace. May be a desk and a chair. If you can afford a standing desk and an ergonomic chair would be great! At-least 10 of my friends got a standing desk after the WFH started back in March, they love it and trust me none of them regret getting it! With you spending 8–10 hours working on a weekday this setup is definitely an investment.
Make a routine
If you’re still waking up at 10 minutes before your daily standup meeting and jumping right into it, you might want to change it a little bit. Make a routine to get up a bit early, take a shower, get dressed (pants are optional :)) and then get to work.
Making a list of things that you plan to accomplish that day when your start working and making a note of what you did will help you track where you are and also help you feel productive!
Schedule time for scrolling
Scrolling never ends! While most social media sites like twitter, facebook, instagram out there are designed to keep us there as much as possible, it is up-to us to stay disciplined. During WFH, no colleague around you, it is easy to get into the habit of scrolling forever. I am not saying social media is all bad. Social media is the only way are in touch with lot of our friends and family. Social media is great if we schedule a time for it and we’re in control of it.
Focus Hours / Activate DnD
While phone and collaboration tools help us stay connected with our colleagues it can also be distracting when you want to focus on something like design thinking, coding etc. We definitely need such focus time as it is easy to distracted by notifications, getting lost in internet.
Slack has a great feature where you can snooze notifications, that’ll let your connections know that you‘re in do not disturb mode and it still gives them an option to still notify you which might help in case of a 911 situation.
At slack, we have a wonderful culture of respecting focus time and people don’t disturb when you’re on do not disturb mode.
If you feel you’re getting distracted often, then “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal” might an interesting read for you.
Disconnect
As you set a time to start working, you should also set a time to disconnect. Disconnecting is as important as connecting. You definitely need to balance your life, take time to relax, have fun! Without the fun part all the work we do would be meaningless! For me fun is playing with my wife and kids, watching a movie with them, talking to my friends over phone, cooking something new etc.
Go out
There are plenty of activities that you can do even with lockdown in place like talking a walk, going for a run, bike ride (all these of course with your mask on). This’ll help your body as well as mind to relax. Also I listen to audibles whenever I do these activities which is an added bonus 😎!
Thanks for reading so far, I hope this helps! You got this and Good luck for your WFH to be more happy and productive!
Also, please comment on what worked for you !
