Work From Home Definitive Guide — Tips, Tools, Rules

My final work from your home guide offers 42 tips, tools, and hacks to boost your productivity, from staying moved to cooperating with distant teams and managing kids at home.

Working at your home has been hailed as a solution that gives workers flexibility and a better work-life balance. Nevertheless, since the planet’s biggest work-from-home experimentation continues, workers grapple with significant physical and mental health challenges that come together with the social isolation of staying at home. Here is Hive Life’s final guide on staying disciplined, organized, and collaborative when working from home.

Develop Best Habits

When working remotely, it is crucial to incorporate superior habits in your on-site workout lifetime. This five lifestyle help can assist you in the ideal mindset to handle work effortlessly.

Make Morning Time Table

It might be tempting to dismiss it, given the excess freedom. An easy means to stay in check is to keep up your usual morning pattern even when working remotely. In reality, you must create and adhere to — a structured morning pattern to optimize your productivity.

The initial hour of the day is vital in establishing the tone for a day, and preparing to get work as you normally would (e.g., getting dressed, going for a shower) could send a signal to the brain it’s time to shift from resting to working manner.

Fuel the Body and Your Brain with the Right Foods

When we start thinking about productivity, we usually consider external factors like how we organize our period and how best to steer clear distractions. However, what we consume badly affects our cognitive functioning; therefore, we must eat the ideal brain food to sustain our energy. Suppose you think of all of the times you’d get fat. In that case, high carb lunch on the job, the memory of that cheeseburger you indulge in, or that burrito you scarfed down is probably closely tied to the memory of a food slump that dissipates the others of one’s daily life, leaving you feeling demotivated and flat.

That is why it’s crucial to have meals packaged with healthy fats, plenty of greens, and a fantastic amount of carbohydrates. So be certain that you’re fuelling your system with the sort of energy that will help keep you going rather than slowing you down.

Avoid Burnout During Regular Exercise

Whenever you have got work that requires you to be plopped in front of the computer all day, it’s simple to experience burn out pretty fast. If you’re not waking up to move around every once in a while, that isn’t only likely to adversely impact your physical health and mental functionality. In a study known as Exercising in the office and Self-Reported Work, Performance correlation has been shown between low-intensity movement and efficiently improved productivity.

So if you should be starting to feel lethargic and sluggish, know that that’s your own body telling you how to get up and move around. Whether that is squeezing in a walk at dinner, standing up at your desk for a while, or just doing a little yoga routine for 15 minutes, bear in mind that every little helps in preventing this oh-so-troublesome brain fog.

Set Boundaries to Keep Your House and Work-Life Separate

Probably one of the essential work-from-home recommendations involves putting strict bounds to block work life out of slipping into your house life. Allocate certain hours to get focused work and inform your team to understand when you’re able to be reached. Establish rules with relatives; have a closed-door policy to stop them from barging in and enhance your productivity.

Those who have kids or pets who require your attention, request a caretaker to care for them throughout work hours. Make certain you put boundaries for yourself, too; devote time to get fractures and keep from working throughout this moment.

Avoid Cabin Fever

As the possibility of working at home could look exciting initially, it is possible to readily become demotivated once you are stuck employed in isolation involving your same four walls in and day out. This is exactly why you must generate a work-life balance that enables you to get the job that should have been completed while keeping a wholesome way of life.

To be apart from noisy colleagues may feel like a relief at the start, it will become lonely working on your own. With loads of electronic tools easily available at our hands, touch base with coworkers and friends will be luckily easier than before. Finding the opportunity to check and join may be a welcome break and also certainly will help energize you for another afternoon.

Make a to Do List

One of those first measures to becoming organized is composing a todo list. Studies have demonstrated you are 42 percent more likely to realize your targets if you write them down. A fantastic way to put up yourself for success is by simply composing your activity plan the evening ahead. Possessing a concrete framework for that next day helps ensure you start daily with an intention, rendering it much more probable you’ll fill every daily life with work.

Set Deadlines

Creating a timeboxed schedule and self-imposed deadlines can help condition the human brain to break up daunting tasks to smaller, attainable balls, making the task process more manageable. It’s been discovered that setting a deadline for each goal helps keep you on course and can motivate one to complete the activities at hand better, bringing structure into your day and working out for one to accomplish more.

Finish One Task Before Moving Onto The Next

Even though working on several projects simultaneously may look like an efficient way to get work done, research has shown that multitasking hinders productivity. Alternatively, by channeling all of your energy into one endeavor, you’re able to complete it at a significantly shorter time. Putting more focus into one task also usually means that you’ll pay more attention to the details and produce a higher quality workout.

Minimize Distractions

Using instant use of distractions like social networking and no one around to respond to, it’s easy to fall a rabbit hole when working in your home. According to a report conducted by the University of California Irvine, it takes 2–3 minutes to regain focus after being diverted, which explains why it is critical to get the self-discipline to avoid losing focus on the tasks simultaneously.

To reduce the risk of diversion, think about turning off alarms onto your phone, block website access, or app using Cold Turkey Blocker, or even better, disconnect entirely.

Take Breaks

Even though taking fractures may seem counterproductive, a study conducted by the University of Illinois found that taking short mental breaks while working may enhance your ability to focus and make it possible for you to be productive for a prolonged period. Stepping out to get a quick refresher will help unwind your mind, readying it to tackle the others of one’s workday. Make certain to keep your breaks sweet and short, or you might risk destroying the momentum of one’s efficiency!

Be Productive with One of All These Time-management Recommendations

Procrastination can be a continuing issue for all, especially if our work life faces disturbance. Below are some time management fundamentals to assist you to satisfy those all-important deadlines.

Track Your Time Spent to Analyse Your Productivity

It truly is tough to learn where you are losing time if there isn’t the proper info to reevaluate your productivity. This is exactly why finding enough opportunity to keep track of your workflow could be valuable — maybe not just to judge the length of time you may spend in your customary job endeavors, but also to see how effortlessly you prioritize them well.

Once you are mindful of exactly how long you spend on selected activities, you will immediately have the ability to set any pockets of squandered moments. From that point, you should begin earning better timing direction decisions by way of a blend of prioritization and batching (much more about this later on ).

Stop Procrastinating With the Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management system that encourages individuals to work together with enough full time to have — as opposed to against it. Utilizing this approach, you break your workday into 25-minute balls separated by five-minute breaks.

These intervals are also referred to as Pomodoro. When about four Pomodoro, you require a longer break of about 15 to 20 minutes.

Experts claim that the renowned time management method struggles with distractions by preparing your mind to improve its care period, while the constant timing of your activities enables you to be more accountable, devoting time spent on procrastinating.

Therefore, the next time you get a massive task that seems quite daunting, consider dividing it into brief periods of intense attention by setting a timer for 25 minutes and working without distractions. Then, take a 3–5-minute break (called a Pomodoro’) and replicate it. After 4 “Pomodoro” has passed, i.e., 100 minutes of workout together with fifteen minutes, you may have a 15–20 min break.

Try the Pareto Principle to Help You Prioritise Better

The Pareto Principle, otherwise called the law of this vital few’, implies emphasizing 20% of your tasks, prioritizing the main things in your todo list for the most crucial impact. It stresses that strict prioritization does not only mean doing the essential things.

The very first step is always to reevaluate which tasks won’t need to be performed at all — recognizable as they don’t contribute to your end goal. These 80/20 rule theories that probably the most crucial results stem from the completion of just a couple tasks — the activities which are of the maximum importance. Reengineering that your todo list this way can make certain you are not wasting time on things that, in the end, you will not make a difference.

Try ‘Batching’ by Grouping Similar Tasks Together

One easy tip to hack on your productivity would be batching’. Consider it as a way to declutter your to-do list. If you’re analyzing your program daily and are in a position to pinpoint certain tasks that may be grouped to ensure your focus is compact, instead of jumping from one item to another, arrange them in batches.

For example, looking after all your communications platforms, while it’s email, Slack, calls, or instant messages, or maybe completed in one period of time. This will make certain you aren’t sidetracked by other things, optimizing your time effectively.

Beware of ‘Decision Fatigue’

An idea produced by social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister,’’’decision fatigue’, maybe the consequence of an excess of options to produce that usually leads to unnecessary stress. The four telltale indications of this are procrastination, impulsivity, avoidance, and indecision. To make sure that it can’t get the very best of you, try limiting your options.

It’s easy to begin doubting yourself whenever you’ve laid out too many choices. So, first, make sure your choices are the best ones. If they aren’t, expel them. Next, set deadlines. When you delay a decision since it won’t need to be finalized right away, you are leaving room to second guess yourself. Lastly, stepping to a regular can significantly cut back on day-to-day decisions. It may require the opportunity to use what is best suited for you, and also, little decisions like what to consume or wear will be the final straw as soon as your plate is full. Automate those decisions by establishing a routine, cutting edge stress in little ways to avoid burnout.

Use the 2-Minute Rule to shorten your todo list quickly.

Obtained from David Allen’s “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity,” the 2-minute Rule was made to place it to evaluation by handling virtually any little task that can be completed in two minutes. While this might appear to conflict with the 80/20 Rule used in the Pareto Principle, it simply means that you need to tick off the crucial activities like getting back to your boss or even upgrading a colleague, that’ll require only a few of minutes. It stipulates that if something on your own todo set could be done over two minutes, only do it. You do not need to defer or assign. Tick it off instantly to optimize your list and clinic positive reinforcement, inspiring you to get the bigger items further down your todo list.

Tools to Help You Stay Productive

These Improvement tools vary from purpose, method, and layout. Determine which ones work great for you and your team’s lead.

Online Platforms

TimeTracko

TimeTracko is a mix between time tracking, monitoring of employees, and project management. It’s a powerful employee monitoring tool, as it gives you very detailed information about your employees.

The Time Doctor time tracking system records what web pages and apps each employee uses. It also allows managers to take desktop screenshots to see what their employees are working on at the exact moment and minimize the chances of slacking off.

Trello

Trello is a platform that allows for simple cooperation. Think about its layout as team-built boards’ where endeavors have been recorded on cards and categories or done,” keeping your schedule effortless to digest, and much less difficult to relay to individuals you’re working alongside.

It’s possible to add due dates, attachments, and different details to each card — and, more to the point, Trello lets its users incorporate programs you are already using, which makes it easy to organize on tasks no matter where you are. If you are working solo, it’s also a fantastic, no-nonsense productivity tracker that permits customization, note-taking, and scheduling. The best part? It’s free of charge.

Monday

Monday is a productivity platform with great visuals to help professionals or entire teams stay on top of their workflow. Since every individual and company has different needs, Monday allows for flexible organization of different tasks, so you can do everything from budgeting to scheduling to project planning all on one, easy-to-use website that uses charts and other infographic-style layouts to ensure that productivity is streamlined and easy to keep track of. You can have as little as five users on your team when you’re a member of Monday.com, with packages ranging from USD 39 to 79 a month.

Mobile Apps

ToDoist

Launched in 2007, ToDoist has become a market pioneer. They have helped their users perform over 1.3 billion tasks up to now. As its name suggests, the app is a to-do-list that aggregates all of your endeavors. With the possibility of adding tasks, setting priority deadlines and levels, separating them based on categories such as work or home chores, and synchronizing them across all your devices, it’s no surprise this tool has been downloaded from 10 million people and counting.

Buffer

Buffer is a social networking manager that unites all of your social networking platforms into one program, making sure that they have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even Pinterest. Allowing you to program your articles to get them all at a particular period, answer to messages using a joint inbox, and behaving as a stage to assess and analyze how your blog articles do with enlightening images and details, is a one-stop go shopping for the direction of the societal websites. As of 2010, Buffer has drawn over 80,000 organizations, including the likes of Microsoft and GitHub. Elect for its top-notch services to unlock an entire slew of additional features such as intending further beforehand and linking more societal networking reports.

Create a Dedicated Workspace

Making and redesigning your workspace may mentally prepare one to snap into working mode, ensuring you’re as productive and efficient at home as when you’re in the workplace. Below are some tips that will assist you.

Surround Yourself With Nature

As biological creatures, it’s important for our psychological and bodily functioning to connect with the natural world. Studies have shown that live plants, whether they’re a portion of your office decoration or visible through a nearby window, may decrease stress, boost mood, and boost productivity by 15 percent. So remember to keep your sunglasses open, let the fresh atmosphere, and make certain you have an unobstructed view of this natural world to guarantee a good work environment. If you fail to find such a natural out of your window, think about making a few additions to your workspace, like incorporating potted plants or perhaps a tabletop water fountain into your office layout or simply carrying your breaks out.

Choose Your Colours Wisely

It’s a renowned actuality that colors do make all of the difference in terms of affecting moods and behaviors. Studies have revealed that all key colors affect another part of people: the human body (reddish ), your brain (gloomy ), emotions (yellowish ), and last, the vital balance between your mind, body, and emotions (green).

Proven to arouse your brain and aid endurance, blue is amongst the very frequently used colors at work. When inserted with several squares of green, it can exude a general awareness of balance and serene — an ideal combination to show your workspace to a productivity system.

Invest in Ergonomic Furniture

You are probably going to be unsurprised to know that most people usually work better and record increased productivity degrees if employed in a cozy atmosphere. Since several aspects may impact this, including lighting, temperature, and furniture, a wise and fundamental investment for a home business office is ergonomic furniture, a technical and practical method of design that optimizes both efficacy and relaxation.

This increases your productivity degrees and prevents common computer-related harms such as spine pain and tendinitis, or even inflammation or irritation of a tendon.

Correct Your Workspace Lighting

As sensitive beings, subtle changes in our environment, such as with lighting or fever, can deeply affect and slow our attention degrees. Studies have shown that blue lights help us stay focused and attentive, resulting in lots of offices incorporating them in their design to boost daytime performance.

It’s important to prevent issues often related to bad lightings such as migraines, eye discomfort, and fatigue, opening the windows and doors to let the maximum amount of all-natural lighting into your workspace as potential. It’s also worth investing at a desk lamp with trendy white bulbs since this will keep you awake and focused while improving productivity.

Invest in an Extra Screen Monitor

While plenty can perform their tasks using just one screen, The New York Times reports that investing in a dual-screen will permit you to accomplish the same tasks substantially quicker, increasing productivity rates by way of a whopping 20–30 percent. Not only does the second-screen allow for smoother transitions between both tabs and documents, improved user experience and provide easier types of referencing and comparison, but it also speeds up processes such as cutting and pasting video and image editing, and programming. Beware, though, a few have whined a dual monitor can lead to the undesired knock-on consequence of making you distracted.

Improve Your Focus With Aromatherapy

In the same way that your workplace’s color and lighting affects your mood and endurance, so do the scents. Researchers have discovered that one scent may elevate our moods, enhance memory, and reduce stress and improve cognitive functioning, proving that nourishment is an easy and efficient means to better concentration, focus, and productivity levels at the workplace and home.

Manage Your Remote Team With These Tips

It could be tricky to motivate your team. Here are three top ways to induce performance to get an ever more normalized remote workforce.

Build A Strong Culture of Positive Feedback

Positive feedback can be a good motivator, particularly in regards to distant groups. By observing your employees’ accomplishments and emphasizing the potential, your team will feel motivated to step beyond their rut — and keep learning by neglecting.

Schedule routine one-on-one sessions to maintain discourse flow, adopt failure using a constructive mindset, and keep an eye on your tone when giving responses — it’s simple to seem inadvertently unpleasant, especially with no conversational cues of body language and tone. Most importantly, a frequent culture of giving positive feedback may assist you in creating a relationship of confidence and mentorship together with your employees.

Track Performance, Not Hours Worked

While sitting at any office guarantees presence and will drum up a feeling of the contest, micro-managing an employee’s seat time hurts morale, which, consequently, affects performance. Instead, managers should foster a culture of responsibility, particularly when distant working comes into play. Leverage technology platforms like Trello build a visual scoreboard of the team’s progress, track KPIs across the board, and help each employee understand how their unique goals align with the company’s. And don’t neglect to recognize outstanding individuals and team accomplishments, as this may spur many to continue the good work.

Prioritize Communication

The real key to working efficiently is based on corresponding demonstrably with your boss and coworkers. It could be simple to fail to communicate with remote work, particularly if you aren’t utilized to working out the workplace. As the newfound liberties of working at your home could be freeing, it’s necessary to stay attached to your teammates and boss to continue to keep them updated in your work advancement. Be certain you familiarize yourself with the communicating tools used by your employer to make certain you can be reached throughout your designated work hours.

Work From Home Tools to Manage Your Remote Team

Maintaining clean communication, engagement, and focus across a dispersed team may be rough. Here would be the best collaboration tools for teams to stay connected.

Video Conferencing

Zoom

Combining HD video using crucial features such as screen sharing, whiteboarding, and neighborhood recording, Zoom is possibly the most Swiss Army knife of video marketing tools.

Additionally, it will come with a digital Wallpaper feature to cover up people’s cluttered bedrooms! Under its free plan, end users may sponsor millions of one-on-one meetings and 40-minute conferences with as much as 100 interactive participants. Certain subscription bundles grant usage of break-out rooms, which allow hosts to divide their audiences into smaller classes for sessions such as training.

Instant Messaging

Google Hangouts

Google’s video messaging product, Hangouts Meet, offers a simple-to-use interface for discussion, screen sharing, and virtual meetings of up to 250 participants (Enterprise edition). As a way to host a gathering, you will want to get a G Suite account; however, no plugins or special consideration types are essential to connect one. Somebody off sick? No problem! Hit album’ and so they can watch the meeting back once when they’re feeling better.

Discord

If you are an enthusiastic gamer, then you’ve heard about Discord — a free community platform originally made to aid players in talking with good friends and organizing cognitive tasks, boasting more than 250 million users since 2019. Open voice and video stations, habit permissions, and also an infinite message history create Discord well suited for managing large classes fast and linking web customers without hassle.

Project Management

Workzone

Workzone is a cloud-hosted project direction, and file collaboration app made by advertising execs that would like to help bureaus and creative teams get real-time insights into the status of projects around departments, campaigns, or clients. Founded in 2002, it’s widely rated among the most older and battle-tested programs available in the industry. Its top features include the capability to populate projects by tasks and subtasks, assign individual todo lists, and set permission levels for certain users such as outside customers and vendors.

Scoro

Scoro can be a comprehensive solution that enables customers to streamline their entire project onto one real-time KPI dash, with features that are particular to project financing and budgeting. These generally include time spent and charged, planned tasks and meetings, invoicing and quoting, automatic recurring expenditures, and contact management.

Work From Home Tips + Kids

If you have kids, working at home is more challenging once they are there with you — but it’s a reality that most are facing. Here are a few methods to stay sane through everything.

Find What Works For You

Since we are all unique people and our lives vary somewhat, there is no one-size-fits-all solution once it comes to juggling parenthood and work. This indicates you’ll need to find a system that works for both you and your family — and then stay with it.

You should check out some useful guides to working out of your home with kids to help acquire some good ideas on how best to approach the matter. Once you create a system that works, make sure you adhere to it just as far as possible. Working from your home may appear to be almost impossible for someone accustomed to working from any workplace. But trust us, it’s not.

Use Valuable Online Resources

Next, You need to depend on all of the help you can get. Aside from your partner, this includes any online tools you can find that may make your daily life easier. For instance, you will find plenty of programs developed to simplify and fortify a working mommy’s lifespan. Chorma, for example, is a superb app that transforms house chores into an enjoyable and friendly contest.

The further chores that a person finishes, the more points they’ll dent. This is a fun way to keep your kids busy while working as children want to compete. On the other hand of things, some of the most useful productivity apps that you may also find helpful for organizing your workflow include Trello, Monday, along with Brain.FM.

Create a Schedule

An abrupt absence of job arrangement and the change of one’s ordinary working environment can confuse you. That is why it’s of the utmost importance that you create a workout schedule that helps bring some structure straight back into your everyday life.

Set boundaries for yourself and your loved ones and remind them not to disturb you during your designated work periods. This new situation may require some critical teamwork, therefore try to get everybody on the same page.

Above all, figure out what is best suited for you. For more guides on productivity and work, check out my medium profile.