If you’ve ever worked from home, or are considering working from home, you can or will relate to the things I’m going to talk about today. My work-from-home experience was fairly short, and it was that way because I simply feel that it’s important to be in the same place when working in a team. For those people who are independent workers or working remotely, this isn’t always feasible and can be much more cost effective to work from home
The inspiration for this rant is that our company, Clever Endeavour Games, was working from home for a while. First we were working from our individual homes and our productivity was extremely low. Not only that, but as a person who was trying to manage the project, I found it impossible to know what anyone was working on. Then, we moved to start working at my place, at the kitchen table, which was also pretty lame. This was because we were constantly distracted by “home” things, eating, other people in the place, and it just didn’t work. So we moved to a shared workspace and it’s awesome and we’ll talk about that in another post.
This is what most home offices look like right? Ha.
Assuming it’s more effective for you to work from home, how do you not explode?
Get Dressed in the Morning
Before you start your work day, change out of your pyjamas / boxers / nudity or whatever you slept in, and actually get dressed. You don’t have to put on a suit, but at least put on some pants and something that you could reasonably wear to leave the house.
Move Your Phone Away
Don’t keep your phone right on your desk, as it will distract you. Put the ringer on if need be, but leave the phone in another room or away from you so that you’re not tempted to scroll through Instagram or Facebook while “on the job”.
Separate Work from Life
This is a general tip, but when you’re working from home, make sure you’re not working and, say, doing your laundry. Or getting up every 5 minutes to clean dishes, or eat something. Pretend you’re actually at work, and you’ll do life chores when you “get home”.
Give Yourself Downtime
Try not to answer emails after a certain time, unless they’re extremely urgent. Especially when working from home, there’s a tendency to check an email while on the couch or during time spent living (i.e. not working), and to run back into the office and “just do this one thing”. This is bad! It breaks the lines between work and home and it’s a slippery slope.
There’s a ton of stuff written about this, but I just felt like I should share my opinion on it. Feel free to let me know if there are things I should add 🙂
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