I have worked from home a lot. I was home-schooled from 1st grade to 12th grade, spent nearly half my time during my PhD working from home, and now I’m a remote software engineer for a start-up. Over this time, I have collected some tips that will hopefully help you make the most out of working from home.
Create Rewards for Yourself
Staying focused while at home is probably the biggest challenge. I have work to do, I know what to do, but I just need to motivate myself to do it. I create rewards for myself after I complete work-related milestones. For me, rewards are simple things: going outside to grab coffee, playing a video game, playing a song on the piano. Anything you like doing can be a reward to work towards. When I was young, my parents would not allow me to play video games until I had finished my schoolwork, which was enough to motivate me to remain focused and finish my work early. Since high school I have adopted a similar strategy for ensuring I can get my work done.
Limit Distracting Notifications
Notifications are inherently context switches. My attention is on my work, but as soon as a notification comes in I need to check it. Regardless of what the notification says, part of my subconscious absorbs that information and it affects how I feel and think about the world. Spend time disabling notifications on applications that are distracting or do not bring you value. The apps I allow to send me notifications nowadays are Gmail (for work emails) and Reddit (for cute dog photos, /r/aww is great).
Keep some music/TV/video/stream on in the background
One of the worst things about working from home is the isolation. In a work-place environment, our days are broken up into social and productive periods. Without people near you to speak with, it is easy to begin to feel lonely. To avoid that lonely feeling, I keep a podcast, TV show, Twitch, Youtube, or Spotify running and open constantly in the background to ensure I always have something talking or singing nearby. See the end of this post for a list of things I have been enjoying recently. This makes me feel like I’m not alone.
Chat with coworkers or friends online
You are not actually alone, just the means to connect with others is a degree removed. Chatting with coworkers or friends online is an even more direct tactic to avoid feeling alone. Spending extra time on a conference call to chat about life, sharing funny things you find on the internet with someone, or texting a friend you haven’t seen in a while are all ways to build relationships outside the context of your daily work. In the end, your relationships with people will matter more and last longer than the tasks you have in any given work day, so make sure you invest time in them.
Communicate your work and objectives clearly
Being physically separate from your workplace makes it harder to clearly and effectively communicate the work you have accomplished, or the near term objectives you are planning to work on. Non-verbal communication or other nuanced communication methods are hard to capture over video chat or a phone call. Try to use clear unambiguous language as best you can.
When possible, visual explanations help a lot. For example, explaining code in detail over the phone is particularly challenging. I’ve found that screen-sharing my code is a much more efficient way to communicate my work visually rather than audibly.
Media I have been enjoying lately
I’ll leave these on in the background while I work:
- Taskmaster ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT5C7yaO3RVuOgwP8JVAujQ )
- My Brother My Brother and Me ( https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/my-brother-my-brother-and-me/ )
- Speed-running on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/speedrun)
- Beer and Board Games ( https://www.youtube.com/user/blamesocietyfilms )