Productivity Tips for Remote Workers

Advice and Tips for Remote Workers

Over the past few years, the appearance of remote workers in the USA had a significant influence on the modern lifestyle of professionals. Trading corporate offices for individual distributed workspace made the lives of American employees more convenient by letting them skip their daily commute or operate from the comfort of their own environment. Thanks to its distinctive qualities, remote work became the number one choice among many today’s specialists.

However, managing your activity independently without any corporate infrastructure can cause some behavioral issues that result in a rapid drop in your productivity and focus. At home, you can be easily distracted by all sorts of factors such as domestic chores or your blurred spatial limits. Not having a direct control from your boss and lacking corporate stimuli, it’s your responsibility to make sure that the productivity levels stay on a maximum through strict discipline. Working remotely means ignoring an excitement phase and using a well-designed strategy to retain your energy and sustain performance.

Your Ergonomic and Dedicated Independent Workspace

One of the prerequisites that can contribute to efficient performance at home is your completely separated physical workspace. Stop checking your deliverable metrics from the living room sofa, processing information in the kitchen and sending emails from your bed. Being surrounded by objects and things that remind you of relaxation or leisure will lead to a considerable psychological ambiguity that hinders your progress.

Spatial Separation: Pick a room in your house and designate it specifically as the place where you will work, preferably one that has a door and keeps the noise from domestic activities.

Proper Posture: Invest in an ergonomic office chair and adjustable stand-sitting desk that will save you from tiredness.

Visual Optimization: Make sure your main monitor is placed in such a way that its top third is at eye-level.

As soon as you enter the office, you’ll subconsciously give yourself a signal that you need to focus. By keeping your space completely separated from any domestic items and making sure it’s clean, you’ll remove any micro-distractions from the equation. By taking your private office seriously, you’ll create an obstacle that will protect you from potential disruptions.

Time Blocking and Effective Prioritization of Tasks

In remote conditions, conventional boundaries, which used to separate your workday into different periods, like the start of your day and collaborative lunch, disappear. Thus, it’s quite possible that you’ll waste entire days on checking notifications, unnecessary emails and discussing trivial stuff online, leaving behind your deliverables. This needs to be prevented through time blocking and proper prioritization of tasks.

Time blocking implies breaking up your workday into separate periods each designated to different work activities. You could, for example, spend mornings analyzing materials and blocking off all communication channels (Slack, MS Teams etc.). Later, you could allocate some time to manage your other responsibilities such as sending emails and communicating with your colleagues. Prioritization of tasks through tools such as the Eisenhower matrix allows you to make sure you allocate your productive hours to critical assignments.

Managing Potential Digital Distractions and Setting Communication Boundaries

Although the usage of digital technology in a remote environment is inevitable, features like instant notifications and direct messaging can prove themselves to be a barrier towards productivity. Being in a constant partial attention state induced by distractions, which makes you stop whatever you’re doing whenever a notification appears, has negative consequences through the process called context switching. According to scientists, it takes up to 20 minutes to recover from just a single one.

Notification Management: Configure your corporate collaboration software so that irrelevant notifications won’t reach you, leaving only the important ones.

Isolation Strategy: Put away any potential distractions, like a smartphone, in another room during the core hours of your workday.

Asynchronous Work Expectations: Inform everybody that your working hours are strict and that you aren’t available to reply instantly.

Creating boundaries for yourself is vital for retaining complete cognitive control over your daily performance. Although it’s important to stay available for your communication partners, it’s harmful to spend your productive hours doing what’s called “presence theater”. Building trust doesn’t consist in reacting to every single message instantly, but rather in consistently delivering high quality deliverables.

Establishing Work Boundaries with Your Domestic Partners

Working from home efficiently will become a little bit harder if you surround yourself with people who live there too. At home, it’s easy to confuse your physical presence with your availability as an employee. Domestic distractions like random interventions, errands and conversation tend to interrupt your focus and divide it into pieces, prolonging completion time of tasks.

By talking openly with all the people that you live with about your work schedule, you’ll create a boundary that will indicate that when you’re in your office, then you’re actually at work. By using visual cues, like a certain item that would let people see that you’re concentrated on work or having an online meeting, you’ll have nothing to worry about anymore.

Implementing Rest Periods and Preventing Cognitive Exhaustion

There’s a common misconception about remote work that says you have to work constantly for eight hours per day. The reality, however, is quite opposite as prolonged uninterrupted work results in mental tiredness, inability to make decisions properly and slows down processing speed. As a consequence of no commuting, it’s important to establish rest pauses in order to replenish your cognitive resources.

Pomodoro Technique: Intensively work for 25 minutes and then force yourself to take a physical pause for five minutes.

Optimizing Movement: Use your break periods to stand up, walk around, hydrate yourself or even step outside for a while.

Disconnecting From The Screen: When taking a rest break, make sure you completely disconnect from any digital media devices.

By structuring rest into your workday, you’ll be able to retain your cognitive capacity for work and avoid burnout. Planned pauses will enable you to rest your brain before proceeding to work again. The quality of your performance will depend not on the amount of hours you spend in front of your computer, but rather on their efficiency.

Creating Starting and Ending Routines

Since you’re physically working from home, creating an explicit border between these two concepts can prove challenging. Unlike regular jobs, you have no means for indicating the transition of work by commuting to work. Hence, you’re constantly on standby and it has a devastating impact on your performance.

By introducing some starting and ending behavioral rituals, you’ll create cues that will let your subconscious distinguish between home and office. A typical starting routine would include waking up at the same time every morning and going to work, changing your clothes and even taking a walk before work. Some closing routines would include shutting your laptop and cleaning your workspace.

FAQ

1. What’s a good strategy to avoid domestic distractions during your workday?

The best approach in this case would be to consider your duties at home as something completely detached from your work. Either prepare time for fulfilling them beforehand or after your workday ends. Whenever the desire to do something strikes during your workday, limit yourself to a special ten minute break period or lunchtime.

2. How to deal with bosses that require immediate answers to messages?

It’s important to discuss expectations regarding work processes in advance with your manager. Emphasize that being interrupted frequently hinders the quality of your performance. Try proposing a compromise of communicating once an hour.

3. What to do when working from home demotivates you?

First of all, try breaking down large assignments into smaller deliverables and tracking them as you go. In addition to that, you could use various digital tools and engage in virtual co-working sessions.