Mastering the Art of Telework: Tips for Productivity and Balance
In the beginning of 2022, I took a remote/telework position, the first position I’ve ever had that was fully remote. I’d been commuting a little over an hour each way for three years, and the previous six years required about 40 to 50 minutes each way, so I was looking forward to canning the commute. (Honestly, I’d have loved the commute part if I could have been a passenger instead of the driver.) Getting two hours of my day back for whatever I wanted them for was extremely appealing, as was the fuel savings we’d enjoy. However, it hasn’t been without some challenges. I’ve found several things that have made me extremely productive on my job that I’ll share with you today.
Essential Technical Aspects
Working from home is always going to require a reliable Internet connection, and your company will probably provide you with VPN software that will enable you to connect to the company network. If you’re going solo, rather than working for a compay, the VPN may be important, but it’ll be one that you set up yourself rather than the company. You’ll need to know how the communication channels operate as well – Microsoft Teams, Zoom meetings, softphones that operate through your computer, or your own phone.
One good thing about working from home is that you get to set up your own workspace. That can also provide a challenge. You will need a good ergonomic setup: desk, chair, and a place for your computer and monitor(s). You’ll also need to find out if Uninterruptible Power Supplies are part of the company-provided setup, and, if not, what the company requires in the event of a power outage at your home. It’s not something you can always circumvent if you don’t have a generator that kicks on automatically.
Upload speeds or my Internet connection were the only problem I have had at my house, because there was a time that I had to transfer very large files across the Internet, and the company decided to provide a cellular hotspot for me to do that with. I’ve used it when my Internet went down while the crews were doing construction down the road as well, and when a power outage brought down the Internet, I was at least able to complete the task at hand before the battery drained on the computer.
Your workspace furniture needs to be good quality, because you’ll be spending a full workday at it. I have a great office chair that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, but after three years, it’s starting to give me problems staying at my desired height. My desk wasn’t designed for the kind of work I do at it, though, and I’ve just been dealing with it as it is. It’s not a huge problem, everything does fit, but I have a sort of a “hutch” over the desk, with doors, and the monitors make it hard to open those doors. Not impossible, but difficult. (Check out this piece on ergonomics.)
I also have a treadmill in my workspace, and I have used it on occasion during meetings that didn’t require my vocal input. As long as I don’t have to look something up on the computer, I can just connect via my work phone, but I could just as easily take the computer over to the treadmill and attend the meeting on the treadmill. In fact, if I get everything cleared off the treadmill, I may begin doing that. That’s on my list for the next holiday.
Creating a Dedicated Workspace
It’s ideal if you have a space that you can dedicate specifically for working, with a door you can close. However, you can still work from home even if you don’t have a separate room you can work in. It will take some other skills, though, and we’ll talk about that as well.
If you don’t have a whole room you can use just for your workday, you can set up a space in a portion of a room, and it’ll work best if it’s a room you don’t use much. If you eat in your kitchen, maybe the dining room would provide a space you can use. You can also set up in a corner of the bedroom or living room, and, if you absolutely have to, you can work from the couch or the kitchen table. I’ll talk about how to do that in a bit, but your work space should be some place that you can say, “This is a place where I go to do my job, and when I’m in this space, that’s what I’m doing.”
When I started working from home, nobody else was home during the day. My husband and son left for the day before I started my work day, so it was just me. I kind of wandered into the study when it was time for me to get started, and I only ever closed the door on the days when the Roomba ran. When my son moved out and my mother-in-law moved in, I began closing the door every day, so that she didn’t have to worry about being able to turn on the television when she came downstairs. She doesn’t turn it up very loud, so I rarely even hear it with the door closed, but that’s the advantage of being able to close the door.
That’s something you’ll just have to work out if someone else is at home during your work day. If that “someone else” is a child, you’ll have to seriously consider whether working from home is a viable option or a good idea. Even if the other occupant is an adult, the two of you will have to manage the expectations of dealing with distractions and noise. Everyone who lives in the house lives in the house, and they may feel that it’s not fair if they always have to be quiet during the day.
Distractions can be a problem of their own. Not everyone is cut out for working from home. I can sit in my study perfectly fine for my eight hours, knowing that the television is there, without wanting to sit and watch it. Work time is work time. It’s true that sometimes I have to answer the door for the UPS guy, but it’s also true that I don’t have people stopping by my desk to chat over the popular television show. There are distractions to manage in an office space as well, so you just do what you have to do to manage them.
Establishing Boundaries
You may have to explain to your family and friends that “I work from home” isn’t the equivalent of “I’m available to run your errands.” You have the same responsibility to your employer when you work from home that you have if you work in an office. Your family must understand that your work hours are for work, and they have to treat your work day just the same as they’d treat your work day if you were in an office.
Even so, there will be times when interruptions are inevitable. You don’t need to alienate those in your life when they need to ask you something. My husband gets a lot more vacation time than I do, because he’s been at his job forever, so sometimes he’s home when I’m working. He often performs a wonderful service of cooking me breakfast, and he’ll knock gently on my door to let me know it’s ready before bringing it in to me. My mother-in-law almost never knocks on the door, so when she does, it’s going to be something very important. She is intensely respectful of my work time and work space.
You can find your balance between “No Interruptions” and “Open Door Policy.” While you have the responsibility to provide your employer the hours you’ve agreed on, it’s still home for you and your family. It’s primarily about respect.
Rituals for Transitioning Into and Out of Work
There are things about working at an office that are sort of like rituals for getting into work mode. You get up, shower, dress, and commute to the office, you get in, take off your coat, fire up the computer, settle into the chair. Lots of that still applies to working from home, but your clothing may not take the work, and you don’t have the commute and entry to the office building. Honestly, I wear the most comfortable clothes I can, I don’t fix my hair, and I don’t wear makeup during the week. I have my shower and facial care rituals, though. Having that dedicated room for work helps me separate “not work” time from “work” time. When I go into the study and sit down at the desk, I’m at work, and that’s what I’m doing. When I rise from my desk and go out of the room, I’m on “not work” time. I joked with my mother-in-law that I come out of my daytime office and move to my evening office, my spot on my loveseat, to do my writing and my training activities.
If you don’t have a dedicated workspace, you can still do certain things that make the time “work time” and “not work time.” When you go to your desk or work area, you can set your water bottle in a certain spot, lay out your supplies in a certain way, get your headset on. Maybe you have a song you play just before you go to the desk. Maybe it’s a walk or a jog just before work. At the end of the work day, you can make your list for the next day, put all your supplies in a box or basket, close the lid on the computer or shut it down, and make a deliberate action of walking away from the space.
Your go-to-work and leave-work rituals will help you establish that separation. You really need to avoid the temptation to work when it’s not work time, and you need to make sure that you’re working when it is work time. Those two parts of your life must remain separate and distinct for you to have a healthy experience working from home. The rituals can also help others recognize when you’re at work and when you’re not at work. When they see you laying out your supplies, they know you’re getting into your work zone, and when they see you putting everything away, they know you’re about to “leave the office.”
Time Management and Scheduling
Working from home is not for everyone, especially for people who have difficulty organizing their own work and managing their time and tasks. It helps to know when your mental energy is high and low, and if you can schedule your tasks around those highs and lows, it can be helpful. (Check out my article here on that.) Keeping a visual calendar is also beneficial. I keep my consolidated calendar open on my desktop so I can easily see when my meetings are scheduled, and I know if I have time to start on a two-hour task in the morning, if I should save it for the afternoon, or if it’s going to happen some other day altogether. (If you want to see how I use my calendar, check out this article.)
You must build breaks into your day, even when you’re working from home, or maybe, especially when you’re working from home. Don’t fall into a trap of thinking that because it’s a more relaxed environment you can sit in the same spot all day fixated on the job. You still need to take breaks every so often. It actually makes you much more productive. I had one day where I had meetings literally all day long, but I made sure I let people in the meetings know that I needed five minutes between meetings. You have to get up and walk around, clear your head, and sometimes, transition from one meeting to the next. Also, resist the temptation to work through lunch every day. Make yourself go to a different spot and have lunch. Don’t take calls during lunch unless it’s an emergency, and don’t let people get the idea that everything is an emergency. There are very few genuine emergencies, and most of that is about managing the expectations of others.
Your company usually has some sort of productivity suite, for email and calendar, so learn to make use of that calendar to keep track of deadlines. However, it’s not enough to know when something is due if you don’t schedule time to work on it. If you let that happen, you’ll end up seeing that deadline come up on the day it’s due and you won’t have done anything on it. I keep a prioritized list of each day’s activities that I make at the end of the day for the next day. Tasks that will require more than one day stay on the list until they’re done, so that they don’t fall off my radar. Here’s how I prioritize a long list of tasks.
When you work from home, you also need to be aware of the need to be able to report on your progress and activities to people who may need to also report up the chain. Find a way to keep a work journal, which can also serve as a progress reporting method. You can keep a word document open on your computer all day and just type stuff into it for each day. Include meetings you attended, action items from the meeting, issues that are keeping you from accomplishing something, and who to talk to about it, then at the end of the day you use it to flesh out tomorrow’s list. Remote work requires really good communication, because you can’t just walk down the hall to talk to someone, and they can’t just stop by your desk to ask you about something.
Overcoming Common Challenges
Losing motivation isn’t something unique to remote work, but I’m sure you already knew that. It can be more of a problem for remote work, though, because of the tendency of some managers to assume that because they can’t see you, you’re not working. Procrastination is also not something that only happens offsite, but it can be easier to procrastinate at home because you are offsite. However, both motivation loss and procrastination are symptoms, not problems themselves. It’s beyond the scope of this post to address those, but when they’re yours to deal with, getting down to the reasons behind them is going to be your best tactic.
Some people have troubles with feelings of isolation when they work from home, and if that’s you, working in the office may be your better choice. If it’s not an option, you may want to find someone else at work that has the same struggle, and spend your breaks chatting with each other. Your own social life after work can help as well, at service clubs, church activities, or the neighborhood “book club” (wine-tasting) meeting. Whatever it takes. I’m an introverted extrovert, I love my social activities, but I do my best work when I’m on my own. Not everyone works like that, know what works for you and don’t fight against it.
Do not let your work life spill over into your home life, even when your work life is in your home. I’ve never had that problem, because my work computer is hooked up to two monitors in my study and I absolutely hate doing my work from just the laptop screen. I’ve done it, when we were staying at a lake house but I was out of vacation time, but I hate using that little screen for all the things I have going at one time. Make sure that colleagues know what your work schedule is so that a person on the opposite coast isn’t expecting you to be available before you’re at work or after you’re done. Use the “available time” feature of your corporate calendar to set your work hours, and when someone asks for a meeting, your work hours are your work hours.
Your Turn
Yes, emergencies do happen. Part of my work involves maintaining servers that provide data to barge pilots on the rivers, and if those websites go down, that barge traffic doesn’t move. That’s an emergency. It doesn’t happen often, so I don’t mind working after hours to resolve that. My family also knows it happens sometimes, and so rarely that it’s quite an event when it does. It usually gets me out of cooking dinner, so there’s that, too.
These are generalized tips for working well on your own, but you have to find what works best for you. I’d love to hear something I may have missed, so drop it in the comments below. I’m always looking to do things better. Got a question on something I didn’t touch on? Ask it below!
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