Working from Home

A few thoughts on working from home

1. Take and shower and get dressed before beginning your work day. Part of the allure of working from home might be the freedom of pajama-based productivity, but there's an important psychology under the surface here. It's easier to act like a professional when you look like a professional. Or, in the words of Jon Acuff, flannel feels like failure by day three.

2. Define where work happens in your home. Part of the benefit of an office is that it's not your home. Work happens at the office, it doesn't happen at home. The literal geography made knowing how to act in a space easier. If that's suddenly gone for you, don't try to work anywhere and everywhere in your house. Do your best to portion off a room (or a corner of a room) to be-the-place-where-work-gets-done. You'll be able to mentally transition easier between work and non-work times, and others in house have a visual queue when you're available and when you're not.

3. Stay productive using the pomodoro technique. Without the social pressure of an office environment to keep you focused, you'll find it easier to drift and procrastinate. Setting a timer for 25 minutes, choosing a task, and working relentlessly till the timer rings is a simple way to stay productive.

4. Familiarize yourself with the tools you'll be using. Zoom calls for meetings (do you know how to mute and unmute yourself?) Trello or Asana for task management, Google Calendar or Outlook for calendar management, Slack for messaging, Google Drive or Dropbox for file collaboration, a VPN for a secure connection to your office's servers, etc. A few minutes of familiarity now will help you feel more confident later.

And finally, if you are working from home, count yourself fortunate. It's a relatively recent innovation that so many of us can continue to earn a living from our living rooms.

Much grace and wellness to you and yours during this unprecedented time.

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At Trellis Group, we believe chaos is the enemy of the small business. It's our mission to partner with small business owners and their teams to develop the managerial practices and processes to crush chaos. Revenues go up, anxiety goes down, and work becomes a force multiplier for good in the lives of your people. Reach out to discover how the Trellis Group can help you crush chaos.