Tips To Be Productive When Work From Home During Pandemic
Working at home can be hugely rewarding for most of us, but only if you keep your productivity up, maintain a healthy work-life balance, and nurture your business relationships.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, mostly the office has been allowing their employees to work from their home. This is one of preventing steps that must be taken because we need to cut off the spread of the virus that is growing massively day by day. As a designer, it is not a big problem because we are not using a lot of property or media that need to be used directly in the office. However, the problem often appears from ourselves. Therefore this is not a difficult guide to make your “work from home” to be more effective.
Self Discipline
Working from home doesn’t mean we ignore time discipline, I think the changes are only about the place and the media that we use to work. Previously we worked at the office. Then, for this time we have to work and stay at home so we can use zoom, google meet, or something similar as a medium of communication. We must stand by along the work hour, but it doesn’t mean you need to face your monitor all day long, just be ready when the urgent task is coming up.
We can keep doing our daily activity and use time management like we used to, wake up early in the morning, do some work or task, take some break or a couple minutes to meditation until we get back to the bed again. This way will help us to train ourselves and understand how to divide your time for work, break, or another activity.
Is it easy? Sure it is not because there is a tendency to be lazy, which is getting higher at this moment. There are also many factors that will affect our mood and we have to make sure that we can work with proper condition & situation. It doesn’t matter if you want to work on your bed if you have married. It would be the most challenging part and make sure that your household affairs are already prepared well.
Decide Goal of The Day
Get to know what we want to finish today or what the jobs that should be done. We can call it “highlight of the day”. It is something that you must be focused on and then decide what is to be the priority and activity target that you want to finish. Make sure the deadline or estimated time to do it, for example, there is a task to make some design concept. Break down the task into a few parts so we can do it sequentially like, “Today I want to finish the user flow”. However, if you still have time, you can jump to the next part as a bonus.
Try to commit to one highlight. It will help us to stay focused when working remotely. At the end of the day, we can evaluate the work progress and it will be easier to convey the stakeholders. If you want to learn more about making a great highlight just stop by here.
“Success isn’t something that just happens — success is learned, success is practiced then it’s shared.” — Sparky Anderson
When you are idle, it is a good time for you to improve your skill and decide what a new thing you want to learn. Read some articles on Medium or if you are a designer you can read some design blog such as Product Design Blog, Muzli, or Designmodo, etc. If you like video tutorials rather than the article you can get some new insight here.
Communication
Please convey to your family if you are staying with your family at home, about the rules which are allowed by the office when you are working from home. Hopefully, there is no misunderstanding and ask permission to you boss if there is something that is urgent about your household affairs it is because we couldn’t make a prediction about what will happen such as you get some trouble with your internet connection or electricity immediately.
What has been mentioned above is only about tips and it is possible for you to be more flexible if you want to apply those steps based on your condition for this time. Of course, it is not an easy way to be self-disciplined when we are not working at office under your supervisor. The most important thing is always be responsible for your work. Don’t lie or trump up some irrational reason, even it seems easy but it would be a lot of challenges to train ourselves.
Contributor: Biean Bara Pradana
