How to Boost Productivity Working from Home
By: Sebastian Ateng
Tags: Productivity, Remote Working, Efficiency, Managing People, Meetings

How to Boost Productivity Working from Home

Due to the lock down all across the countries, remote working will be a rational choice for business stakeholders right now. Companies are trying to mitigate the losses and global impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) to the maximum. In our thoughts at this global communication age, we are very prepared for the remote working jobs. However, it is easier said than done as it requires tons of effort and neglecting all of the distractions swirling around us.

Everyone has his own schedule right now. No one is going to restrain you, neither your boss nor your colleagues in your office probably a pile of deadlines. The problem is, you sit in your bed — halfway awake with a little bit of chips from last night “movie marathon” or whatsoever and trying the best out of it for today’s meeting. Following that, searching mindlessly for the meeting links for today, getting logged in and BAM! Each one of you just stared on the blank screen and almost nothing works. Zero motivation.

It is particularly hard to discipline yourself at this time. Working from home, staying sane and physically healthy from time to time.

This would be my view for the rest of the week — Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

I had this struggle for more or less first months when I started in my master school and projects. Our program is highly distributed, right now we are doing it only from two separate locations. However, next year will be more than five different countries across the European continent. Almost 80 percent of it conducted via online client meetings and lectures. Many of the cases would work well and also some of them didn’t work really well.

To be able to participate “physically and mentally” in an online meeting will require a lot of effort. Since, basically you just looking on the laptop screen or maybe small-resolution mobile phone while you’re heating up the oven and preparing for big lunch time. Sometimes, we would consider it as a normal daily gathering and super passive about every issue raised on the discussion. That’s why to cope up with this issue, I have applied some measurements and actions based on from my experiences and engagement with other team members.

Find the perfect “Office room” and be present at that moment

One of the easiest way to do it. Look for your best suitable space for working. May it be with clear bright windows, sunshine all over your face, warm café con leche beside your notebooks. It will be the perfect time to start your productive day. Another thing, don’t let small thing distract you from your work. Put the airplane mode on for the time, make rules just to check it each hour or more — choose it based from your needs. Close all of your applications, thousands of browser tabs. Keep it neat, just for your online meetings apps and word processor.

That speaker will tell you what you’re going do next — Photo by BENCE BOROS on Unsplash

2. Build up your personal assistant

Nowadays, there are a lot of variety of productivity tools readily available in the market. They are just sitting there, waiting to be picked up. My best free accessible for this one is simply Google Calendar. Block your time in advance to make the use out of it, from start to finish. Engage everyone to attend or participate on it and don’t forget to put short description: what you will do on that meeting and the goals for that session. Setup the automatic notification 30 minutes or 1 hour before and try to synchronize it to all of your mobile devices. Light them up!

3. Prepare anything before, one day or more

No matter if you are the participants or the leader of the team. Make sure to read all of the materials and agendas for the session before. As we need more effort to be engaged in the conversation for the meeting session after. It is better you warmed up and brush off your memories a bit for quick review and main topics that your team need to discuss. If you are the coordinator or the lead, there’re more works to do. Prepare an agenda for the other team members, define a specific set of goals for that session and put up the realistic deadline. Try to lead the topics on the scope of your discussion and always delegate someone to help you with the note taking before or time watcher. The next point will cover it more detailed.

Good preparation will give you positive feedback treats to your brain — Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash

4. Keep it short and simple — Engagement is the key

With the age of enormous content and information, today the duration of human focus is decreasing significantly. According to the research paper of Technical University of Denmark, the collective global attention span has been shrinking due to the information given to us. The common estimates for healthy teenager and adult’s attention span is roughly 10 to 20 minutes maximum. Within that given time, we wouldn’t want to make length fourth-five minutes monologue lecture for the meeting session. Always set SMART goals for every member — specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time bound. If the task is felt too big for one-man job, develop and a better strategy. Try to do divide and conquer, make the key points are easily digestible in smaller chunks. Setup the short discussion and keep asking all of the attendants relevant issues, to make sure they are not observers but also thinking partners to solve the same goals.

5. Setup time for break

Fundamentally, we are still human. Machine could work for 24 hours a day, super efficient and can multitasking quite well. Nevertheless, we can’t achieve those kinds of things to be completely ideal. Consider your energy levels when blocking the time schedule for the meetings in a day. For instance, a meeting that required a lot of brainstorming session, ideas creation would be preferable in the morning around 10 a.m. with high energy levels and fresh state of the mind. While less intense discussion like slight review sessions, can be done later after that. Don’t try to squeeze five-meetings marathon in a row, as it is not reasonable to do that. Try to get 10 to 15 minutes break between the time as you prepare your mind for the next issues. It is particularly hard for us jumping from very specific problems to another in a short time span. Take the time to reset it back.