Top 10 tips for efficient and effective working from home

Working from home has become quite common across the world as organisations offer agility to its people. And with the COVID-19 pandemic, several people have been forced to work from home which they have never done before. Working from home (WFH) does offer a huge amount of flexibility in when and how you work - but it also puts a lot of responsibility on you to manage that flexibility well. Everything can become fluid - when you work, when you reply to emails and when you choose to do your other daily routine things; which is great agility but can completely disrupt your personal and family life if you let things get too fluid. Weekends and weekdays can merge, working hours can eat into non-working hours and soon you wouldn’t know if you are working or resting and chances are you would be doing neither!

 I have been working from home about twice a week for last one and half years and having to do it now for all five days already is putting strain on my professional and personal life. I can imagine it to be far more strenuous for people who are not used to it. So I started thinking about tips to manage the fluidity well so that it can be an advantage rather than disruption of your life. The role that you do of-course impacts how fluid you can be - but now that you are confined to WFH irrespective of the role, some guidelines would be helpful to organise the chaos a bit more. So here are top 10 tips based entirely on my personal experience.

1.  Setup an infrastructure that works: Laptop, wifi, headphones if you are on lot of calls/meetings, whatever is needed to make you work comfortable through the day. A desk or a table that’s at a comfortable height, chair that gives enough support to back are crucial part of this setup. While sitting on the bed all day to work might be tempting, it doesn’t do very well for you back if you are working on the laptop for a long time sitting on the bed!
2. Stick to a routine of when you wake up and do your work and your emails: It itings very easy to go with the flow and get up before your first meeting, which maybe at a different time everyday. But this is the exact fluidity that can eventually lead to the feeling of work never stopping or at the other extreme difficulty of getting into the work mode (forever Monday morning feeling!).
3. Create two or three spots for working, as far as possible: One is where you sit and do your desk work (like your working station/ desk in your office), one where you can have coffee while you talk to your friend/colleague (equivalent to meeting someone for coffee in office cafeteria) and one where you can take formal video calls (equivalent of a meeting room) and this maybe same as your first spot of working desk. This creates a bit of movement through the day and breaks the routine and you don't feel you are just confined to one place all day!
4. Dress up a bit: You may not dress up formally like you are in office but sitting in your pyjamas doesn’t create the right mood either. Wear something comfortable but something that you are ok to be seen in if you have to do unplanned video calls.
5. Be far more vigilant now about your calendar: In office, everyone around you might be used to putting meetings in your calendar based on the time that you are usually in office but it can go completely haywire while working from home. If you are not careful you would find your calendar blocked from 8 am to 10 pm since you are at home anyway!
6. Identify peak hours when you certainly don’t want to be doing anything else - because it is equally tempting to do some household chores or run some errands while you are working from home. Avoid doing those during your peak hours as that would take away your focus. For instance, I have my most meetings between 1.30pm to 8.30 pm (my meetings are with people based in different parts of the world) so I don’t keep any personal things to do in that time. It is ok to work later everyday as long as you have got flexibility to start a bit later the next day morning as well, but don’t let that flex creep into every hour of the day!
7. Be respectful of others’ time and space: you can’t call them any of the day and week just because both of you are working from home. You might be encroaching in someone's personal space; so be far more conscious of calling people unannounced than you would be while barging into someone's desk in office!
8. Take breaks and do things similar to what you would do in office: meet someone for coffee, have lunch. But don’t snooze or watch TV during those breaks- it can take you out of working frame of mind completely.
9. Do some workout, particularly in these COVID times when you are confined to home. In office, we walk around, commute to work and back while at home we are far more restricted. Find a routine that works for you: yoga, body weight exercises, jumping, even playing virtual sports on Xbox with your kids, whatever makes you physically active and energetic!
10. Finally enjoy: WFH indeed can be the best of both worlds! COVID 19 is restricting you now from stepping out so WFH feels more constrained now but otherwise it is a great option and our future generations would certainly be doing lot more of it than going to offices. So enjoy and make the most of it!