For many of us, working from home is a brave new world. When you’re used to going into an office everyday, how do you keep your home space sacred? How do you stay productive with all the distractions at home surrounding you? On top of these remote work challenges, many have additional obstacles of having to handle their children’s schoolwork or keeping the baby entertained. How can you get a full days’ worth of work done in this environment? Fortunately, Laura Vanderkam is here to help with her podcast, The New Corner Office. In quick, five-minute episodes, she breaks down simple strategies and techniques to make your work from home experience less stressful and more successful.
“That meeting you thought could be an email? Turns out, you were right,” Laura says in this introductory episode. Now that so many people are working from home and discovering that their job can be done remotely, how will work change in the future? How will our productivity be measured? Will more people be homeschooling? And how can we be “top-of-mind when we’re not necessarily face-to-face?”
Laura has worked from home for decades, and one of her productivity tricks is a short, daily to-do list of three to five things. “This is the secret for both feeling less busy, and getting more done,” she tells us. Instead of making a long list of twenty tasks, accomplishing five of them, and feeling like a failure, set yourself a list of five things, do all of them, and feel “on top of the world.” This “forces prioritization,” creates accountability, and leaves space for unexpected tasks to come up. “Trust me,” she promises, “you won’t be twiddling your thumbs.”
You can’t pick an office with a window anywhere but at home, she points out – so do it! Studies show that exposure to natural light helps regulate sleep cycles, keeps us productive, and helps with mood. So think about where in your house you can truly curate your view. Clean up clutter, add some greenery, or hang some new curtains. “If every time you look out your window, you smile a little, that’s something worth celebrating,” she says. Give yourself the room with a view you’ve always dreamed of, right at home.
In-person meetings are very different from video meetings, as we’re all learning, and one of the things we can do to make those meetings run smoothly is to start with a few minutes of social time. Laura suggests an icebreaker question that everyone can go around and answer; it makes everyone feel included and gets them used to hearing everyone’s voices. And don’t be afraid to direct this time, calling on people by name, she says. It’s awkward at first, but “different times call for different approaches,” she points out.
While you’re working from home and handling childcare, it’s easy to rely on screens to get your kids through the days. But if they’re playing Angry Birds all day, they’ll lose interest and start coming to you for attention, maybe right when you need to be concentrating on a conference call or finishing up an assignment. Plan your day with enough care that the kids have other activities to entertain them, and when you really need to break out the screen, it’ll be exciting enough to keep their attention while you handle your (totally manageable) to-do list.
Since 2015, Laura has been tracking her hours on a spreadsheet so she can see where her time is going. This is a good thing to do partly because it can help assure your bosses that you’re using your time wisely, but it also helps you realize if a client is taking way more time than they’re worth, or if a project just isn’t panning out. You’ll be able to plan your days knowing exactly what’s reasonable for you to accomplish, and give yourself permission to really enjoy your leisure time.
Some of these tips can work for homeschooling, too, like setting a short checklist of assignments for the kids to accomplish. She also suggests real-life learning in place of a more academic approach, like teaching them to fix things, using recipes to learn about math, planting flowers to discuss biology; even younger kids can sort laundry by color, or count pairs of socks. Try to relax and enjoy yourselves, she says. “Work doesn’t have to happen at particular times and places, and learning doesn’t either.” Get all these tips and many more by listening to daily episodes of The New Corner Office, and make this work-from-home thing look downright easy.
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