With the onset of the pandemic due to covid-19, many of us started working form home. While we started enjoying the new trend of working from home for a number of reasons, the fun seems to be fading slowly. This emerging trend of working from home is now becoming stressful causing unwanted anxiety and affecting both the mental and physical well being. It is important that we follow a few important steps in order to maintain the work life balance especially in this new setup of working from home. Here are a few tips that would help you balance it out and improve your overall well being and thereby keeping you and your family happy.
1. Dedicated workspace:
Create a dedicated work area in your home, which means you would login to your laptop or work only from this space and not roam carrying your work all around the home. This will create a physical boundary and indirectly helps in focusing on either work or family when in and out of the work area. You can advise your family members about this barrier and restrict them from invading your workspace which makes you more focused and productive while you are in your work area.
2. Furniture and Internet :
It is very important that you feel comfortable spending time at your workspace. Get a comfortable table and chair which do not affect your posture while at work. Do not underestimate the importance of this piece of furniture and do not hesitate to invest a good amount of money to get this furniture. This goes a long way to help you maintain your physical posture and not have any adverse effects. Needless to point out the importance of an uninterrupted power supply and a dedicated internet connection. Get an uninterrupted power supply to the work area and upgrade your internet connection to meet the demanding work load including the seamless zoom meetings. You may want to consider investing in some good quality headphones for the online meetings. This will ensure you do not become anxious of losing connectivity, or not being heard etc., in between an important meeting and lets you work peacefully.
3. Stipulated work time:
If you have predefined shit timings ensure that you stick to the stipulated time and do not stretch yourself beyond those work hours. If you have the flexibility to decide your work time, please think and set up a work schedule and follow it regularly. If you decide that you work from 9 am to 6 pm, then be consistent and start and stop your work at the agreed times diligently. Make sure that your colleagues or team at work know your availability during the day. You have to discipline yourself which will help you segregate the work and personal time. Do you think you should be working beyond your work hours without any extra pay? It can be demanding at times to meet very critical project deadlines but other than those specific incidents there really is no need to stretch beyond the work hours. If you are ending up doing so, it means that you are not planning your work properly to finish it during the stipulated time. Think again and plan your work accordingly.
4. Planners & to-do lists:
As I stated above, it is very important to plan your work to ensure you do not work beyond your work hours. To effectively do so, you may use planners to plan things ahead and follow the plan to accomplish the tasks. Prepare a to-do list to track the progress and also be aware of the pending tasks to be addressed before close of business. A well planned work schedule will improve your productivity and boost your confidence with a sense of achievement whenever you tick off the tasks on your to-do list. You may also want to use timers on your mobile or the reminder feature on your outlook or any such application to achieve this.
5. Break time:
I am sure all of us miss those tea breaks with our colleagues which sometimes become unusually long breaks with endless fun gossips along with lip smacking snacks accompanying our favorite sip of tea. Even though you work from home, it is important that you take a break from your work and move out of your work area. This will help you move your body and also refreshes your mind in the same way as it used to be when you were at your office location. Think and decide upon a specific time for lunch or dinner depending upon your work hours and make sure to include your break times when you plan you work schedule for the day and stick to the specific break times daily.
6. Avoid distractions:
Strictly stay away from social media and stay focused on you work while you are at your workspace. Avoid family, friends and pets from distracting you when you are working. Make arrangements in such a way that you can address all these needs outside your work hours unless it is absolutely an emergency. Needless to say, the less distracted you are the more productive you would be. Think of the same alternatives that you had for these distractions when you were physically at your office location away from home.
The above tips will help you get a better working experience in the evolving trend of "WFH". However, there are so many other innovative ways to break the monotony of working from home and ways to improve the productivity while working from home. I hope to share some of them very soon, until then happy working from home.
1 comment:
Nice job
Post a Comment