Making the Most of Working from Home

We’ve put together 5 steps to help you live your best work-from-home life…

Devise a Fake Commute

Physically and psychologically preparing for your working day is essential to achieving a healthy work/life balance. Make exercise your new commute to get out of the work from the home rut. Go out for a long walk on either side of your work-from-home day.

In Maastricht’s Piazza Ceramique work home development each office-apartment has two front doors. Residents make the transition between home and work by coming out of one door and going to work through the other.

A garden office or garden studio gives you this same sense of spatial separation.

Find a Substitute for Water Cooler Chat

There are many benefits to working from home but there are also challenges. Some adjustments may be needed to tackle any feelings of isolation or loneliness.

Websites like Remote Workmates make up for the lack of casual conversations you’d have in the office. Or lead the charge and be the one to suggest to your team you have a virtual social gathering.

Avoid Unnecessary Meetings

Endless meetings eat into productivity and de-motivate. Could you get the same results through Microsoft Teams or Slack? Only invite necessary people to essential virtual meetings. Send a recap out afterwards to keep wider in the loop.

To avoid attendees just showing up and thinking out loud, have an agenda so everyone comes prepared and knows what needs to be accomplished. Suggest they come to the meeting with an idea, view, or stance on the next steps to solve a problem.

Build Your Remote Work Toolkit

We’re all now pretty familiar with telephone conferencing and tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Skype but how can we up our remote work game? What other time-saving tools can we add to our arsenal? Krisp is a fantastic tool to eliminate background noise e.g. barking dogs, washing machines etc from video calls.

If you need to find out the opinion of your team but don’t want to interrupt their workflow, why not send a poll through Doodle or Polly?

Getting creative remotely can present more of a challenge. We’d suggest using an online whiteboard to help you bounce ideas around like Miro, Stormboard or Limnu. Organisational tools like Asana, Trello and Monday can help you map out a project, create and assign tasks and document deadlines. For an ultimate guide to team collaboration software see here.

Leave Loudly

There’s no shame in having a life outside of work!

Own leaving and do it loudly, then put your out of office on in order to set boundaries. Taking the time to decompress at the end of the day is vital to avoiding burnout. Even simply switching off your computer at the end of your day can help you feel like you’ve ‘left’ work.