Home office - getting organized

In the light of recent events nearly the whole world switched to home office operations to keep people safe and to ensure business continuity. Pandemic began to influence long before the local situation become serious enough but that left us with series of challanges we had never encountered.

Mindset change

First of all most of us don’t have a designated work space in our homes and in many cases there is not enough space to split living and work space. Our imagination has to work harder to switch to work mode. I have never really thought about it but in reality we do that every day: we leave our lives behind the doors, commute to work and then go back to living. Now it’s more of an imaginary border.

Having that said we still need to focus “at work”. What I do is dress differently so that my brain thinks that I’m at work. That trick helps but still at home there are many things you can distract e.g. that light that should have been fixed months ago or your relative that needs attention. Every distraction causes more time to get back into working ultimately prolonging your time “at work”.

Workflow

What you can also do, and what I personally like to do is just organize. I make a list of things I want, need, or have to do and using those 3 categories I start with those needing most attention. While at work I also tend to note everything that seems to be a significant thought or some arrangements just to always remember those things. This way I’m almost never lost in context and I can always go back to a particular thing without loosing previous findings.

Organizing your workflow from the beginning is only a step forward. Making lists without completing any points from those lists is plain procrastination. To keep making progress I like to have a clock on the desk. That way I can always control how much time any task is consuming and periodically check the progress. While working at home it had become more obvious that clean desk is just as important as zero-inbox rule.

Connect

People are social beings therefore we simply cannot live without others. Especially when working from home you should attend to daily meetings, even if it’s only video conference. Turn on your camera and discuss, summarize progress and plan ahead. It’s also important to consult your dilemas over certain tasks with others. Communicate your ideas and needs and help when your skills can match.

Remarks:

I will leave you with just short list:

Change the way you approach work in any place,
Home office can be comfortable and productive,
Integrate organizing skills more frequently,
Never stop communicating with others,
And don’t forget to stretch while working long hours in one position.