What are we doing wrong when Working from Home?

When I first started working from home in 2019 when the lockdown was declared, did my productivity really improve? Naah, it completely went downhill.

Photo by Jason Strull on Unsplash

In every management meeting, I was attending, I was hearing top managers declaring proudly that their team delivery speed has improved many folds when teams are working from home. And I used to agree with them, though feeling guilty inside because for me it was completely opposite.

WFH is the new normal. There are some great companies like Google, Facebook, etc which are coming up with remote job opportunities. Clearing interview for such companies is one major task, no deny is that, but we have to realize that working with such organizations in a remote way is a completely different task for which we are not trained at all. And we have to, we have to, we have to, make changes in our working style from home so that we work efficiently, have fun while working from home and produce great results while working from home.

Why did my productivity drop during 1st year of working from home? Well, there were many reasons. But the two main reasons which I identified were:

1. I was working from my living room, which was open for everyone to walk in and walk out. Although I had my headphones on, all the time but after a few hours it used to become difficult for me to wear my headphones and I used to take off. Any of my family members walking in or walking out, used to take away a bit of my focus from my work. And if not them, then at times, I used to talk to them about family matters.
2. I allowed myself to open social media from time to time on my laptop or mobile. As no one is watching me, I can open social media websites and spend some time there. And social media is a drug, you start with a small quantity but then you feel like increasing the quantity. Over time, I started opening social media sites, youtube videos more and more, without me realizing that I am doing it.

So by the end of every day, I used to feel, I had a busy day without accomplishing anything for real. Over time, I started hating my work as I was feeling that I was not accomplishing anything, without even realizing that I am responsible for the state I was in. Probably the reason behind such thinking was human nature: find mistakes in others, rather than yourself.

I even changed jobs but it didn’t help. The new company I joined, for the first few weeks I liked the work and culture but over time I started feeling the same. It was at this moment I realized, that maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the company’s fault and it is me who has to change.

With such realization, I started changing a few things around how I spend my working hours. With these changes, I am actually enjoying my daily job a lot and I really feel like I am getting ready for remote work with my dream organizations.

Here are a few things I follow to WFH efficiently:

• Sit in a separate room: Even if you have to create a room out of Cardboards, create it.
• Book 2 to 3 hours of slot in your calendar for every day for focus work. Mark this time as busy so that no other team can set up a call with you during this time.
• Set very specific time slots in your Calendar to use social media or watch youtube or news or whatever your poisons are. We don’t realize it, but we loose so much time because of phone notifications and social media. And more than time, we loose focus.
• Set specific time slots for talking to family members: You can’t and you shouldn’t escape from talking to family members while WFH. Having specific time slots during your day will give your family a way to communicate with you without disturbing your work. Feel free to share your calendar with your family members.
• Don’t avoid lunch breaks, assuming this will save you time and you can work more. Having 30-45 mins of lunch break will ensure that you have something to look up to while you are focussing on work before lunch. You will work with focus and speed to ensure you have happy lunch. Play with your kids, talk to your family, go out for a walk during this time.
• Make sure you close your work at a specific time during the day be it 5 PM or 6 PM based on at what time you start your day. Again, knowing you have to close all your work at a specific time will force your brain to use the time at hand efficiently and with full focus. Remember if you know, you have a flight to catch at end of the day and you have so much work at hand, you do all your work with at most efficiency and generate remarkable results.
• Schedule all my meetings either at the start of the day or the end of the day, so that you have a big focus time slot in between meetings. Don’t shy away from postponing the meetings to later or the first half of days. Or like I suggested earlier, mark your calendar busy for 3 hours for focus work anyways.
• Maintain a to-do list, where you have a list of work items you have to work on by their priority. Every time you will mark an item done, you will get a dopamine shot, which will help you focus further to close more items from your list.
• Maintain a distraction list. This is more important than having a to-do list. We get so many thoughts around small tasks during the day, like checking the price of the mobile we want to buy, paying for a Netflix subscription, or search for some new book to read, or checking Covid count in the world. Our brain always comes up with some good justification to complete these interesting tasks first. Not only we loose focus but this distracting task which should have taken only 2 mins to complete, take us to new places on the internet browser and we end up spending 30 mins to 1 hour on different websites. Now with the distraction list, every time you have a distracting thought apart from work, write it down in your list. This is the list you have to go back to once you finish your day.