No one is untouched by this pandemic, and we keep hearing about a second and third slaughtering wave of the pandemic somewhere in the world or that it is about to hit us all. The economies are hit badly, but a few lucky businesses have liberty to work online, and their staff are provisioned to work from home. However, not everyone can work remotely or in WFH (work from home) setup efficiently. To top it up there is the fear of uncertainty that looms over our heads and is draining us inside out.
The need of the hour is to move away from all the negativity, plan our days, work life balance, and keep a tally of our physical health. There is no need to lose your cool during these trying times. The government of all countries, WHO, the team of scientists and doctors, Non-Profits, and a lot many good Samaritans are fighting for us and are making a roadmap for overcoming this heinous virus’ doing all over the world.
Not everything is in our control, we must have faith and hope for such matters. However, today let us focus on what is in our control and discuss how we can improve our experience during this work from home era:
Do something that makes you happy and keeps you healthy.
- This one sound obvious, but is it? Avoid going to the market or anywhere outside for that matter. No grocery or vegetable is more important than you. Get your supplies online.
- Limit social media, Television, and overall screen time. Most importantly stay away from those news channels, which are sharing everything but news.
- Take time out for the family, friends, and your office colleagues. Healthy relationships and friends are the most effective boosters for a good mental health.
- With the access to the world of the Internet, you can spend time to sharpen your skills or learning new skills. New skills will boost self confidence and self-esteem both at work and personal life.
- In your free time, spend time with the children as well as play with them, which will give you self-satisfaction. Indoor games and yoga exercises with children can be catalytic to your mental and physical health.
How to focus on work during pandemic
- First things first, if your home space allows, have a separate and distinct place for your work. It helps you to get in work mode and keeps you away from distractions.
- Set up a fixed time for your work schedule and personal chores. Best way is to keep the same working hours as you would follow during the work at office.
- Plan your day, it is more important now when you are working from home. Keep your to dos at check and set priorities. Same should be done for personal chores so that you do not find yourself dangling between both.
- Make use of technology to stay in touch with your clients and colleagues. Hold online meetings using tools like, Zoom.us, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Slack etc. and do not forget to ask for personal wellbeing, as these are the trying times and a pinch of personal touch will not hurt.
- Add some personalization to your work office space, you should feed inclined and good to be working out of it.
- Take proper breaks, a study suggests that one should take a break of about 10-15 minutes every 90 minutes (about 1 and a half hours) of work. It keeps you fresh and give your bones and muscle chance to stretch.
Use of technology for the work from home set up:
- Use productivity and collaboration tools for ease of communications and managing your workflow. Tools like Asana, MS Teams, Trello, Basecamp, Monday.com etc. Can be of tremendous help.
- Track your time spend on each activity that you perform. Even if your organization does not need that, you should know how you are doing. Toggl, Time Doctor, HubStaff, are some of such tools out there. You can do manually as well using a spreadsheet but why do extra work when technology can do it for you.
- We briefly touched upon communication tools in our last section, but background noise can be your biggest challenge while having meeting at home. Besides a good noise cancelling device like Jabra, you can use Krisp, which is great to cancel or at least reduce the background noise during your calls and meetings.
- File sharing is also important, and you want to make sure that you do it with ease and securely. Google Drive, One Drive from Office 365, Dropbox are some of the cloud-based services that can make your file sharing very convenient.
- You may sometime need to access someone’s computer remotely or vice a versa. There are many ways to go about it, but one of the easiest is to use a service like TeamViewer or any desk.
At the end we would like to suggest, to keep your mental and physical health at check, spend time with your near and dear ones, keep a work –life balance, surround yourself with positivity, avoid outside visits as much as possible, be careful and keep precautions. Most of all use this time to enhance your skills, getting organized and presenting your best to your organization and family.
Work from home is fun if you know how to go about it and if you need any sort of consultation, do let us know. Be safe and Take Care!
