What NOT TO DO when working remotely
The truth is that you can accomplish more when working remotely than when working in the office environment. You don’t have much obstacles and you would not need to listen to others while you are trying to focus on your work.
These are the most common mistakes which you may encounter:
1. Returning to your old habits
Usually you start your day with morning hygiene, breakfast and then you put your work clothes on and you are ready to go. You probably developed some daily routine like chats with your colleagues from the office, reading or listening while travelling to work, etc. Now, you need to realise that environment has changed so you need to adopt a new daily routine and earlier you do it, better long term results you will have. Most of things you will learn through trial and error which is natural process but always try to make a clean plan on what you wish to achieve every day. While setting these up, don’t forget about daily exit strategy on when you finish work for a day. This is a ritual and if you practise it on daily basis, you will adopt to this new life within couple of weeks.
New home workers have a hard time to separate their work life from personal one so it is important to sit down and make a plan. Many will work from every room in their house and will be working all the hours which will result in very poor rest rate and this would have an awful impact on work life in the long term.
Successful people make plan for every day of their work, they are adept at time-boxing and are able to restrict their “office” life to certain places in house as well as dedicate a time windows for work, they always stick to the schedule. Usual working day take 8 hours but the actual productive time is 3-4 hours and it is important to make most of it. Once you will be able to find a good use of your time, your work will became a pleasure and you won’t burn out from doing so.
2. Unable to distinguish personal time from working time
Time is money, you heard that adage but have you ever gave it some deeper thought? If you respect your time same way you respect money, you will be a wealthy human being!
Like mentioned in point one, the planning is a key here, you need to know that you are working and you cannot absolutely use your work time to do any personal things, bad use of time will result in bad results at work as well as bad quality of your life. Many people when starting working from home develop a fear that their boss may not be able to justify on how well they work, they try to reply to everything immediately and they always worry that by the end of the day, week, month there will be comments, not exactly good about their work ethics.
Like with everything in life, you are developing certain relationship with your boss and people you are working with and all relationships are based on trust. By having your work life organised you would not be a victim of misjudgement. You need to earn your trust but don’t necessary change your daily routine to impress others, at the end of the day, the results you make will speak for themselves. In order to achieve that you need to have a clear agenda, manage your time well and do everything step by step. If you have difficulties with certain tasks, don’t fear to ask questions, I’m sure your boss will appreciate transparency and he would also benefit from this.
3. Not doing team meetings
This is something which is often overlooked, a company is running thanks to people who works for that company so it is crucial to have good communication. Make sure you have time for this, perhaps outside of your 3-4 power hours you dedicate to do most intensive work. A 20-40minutes dedicated for conversation with colleagues about work projects or even exchanging experiences could be vital.
You can use old school phone calls or messaging systems as well as video conferences but always dedicate time for them and prior to have a session like this make sure you allocate time for this and ideally make a quick agenda of topics which you’d like to cover. Don’t make the talk unnecessarily long, if you won’t have enough time to discuss everything, prioritise what’s more important and the rest you can perhaps send by email to be either consulted over the chat or during your next video session with your colleagues.
4. Overusing wonders of internet
You name it: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Instant messaging services, it is easy to waste time, and as mentioned before time has value, value is also money ! It is OK to check things time to time if they take couple of minutes or perhaps dedicate some time from your break to follow your friends on social media, that is fine, but make sure you don’t overuse these, and never ever use your productivity time for these, it is like wasting two or even three times of your time.
What if you have spare and you have done everything from your to-do list? That time can be used to plan another tasks or you can use it for education, as long as it is work related matter you can use your time to learn new skills or perhaps learn more about new products, systems, services, whatever is that you do.
Hope you found these tips helpful
All the best,
Lucas
