Working remotely is great. It can only be sad if you’ve never worked that way, but now you’ve had to. But there’s nothing wrong with that either, the main thing is to follow some simple rules by Kirill Yurovskiy (https://kirill-yurovskiy.com/)
Because of you know what we all HTML Academy left the office and amicably sitting at home (own), so I gathered from each of the five tips for novice remote workers, carefully sorted and mixed the result with photos of jobs. Read, look, get inspired, and get to work. Remote work is okay!
Fresh air and exercise.
Get out of the house. In quarantine, of course, it’s not very good, but otherwise you can forget what people look like and how to talk to them
Move around. When you work in an office, you at least spend your energy getting to it. When you’re working remotely, you’re tempted to lie in bed all the time, eat chips, and watch soap operas until morning. There’s nothing wrong with that in general. But the lack of movement is bad for your health.
So that your back does not hurt, the scales do not show +20 kilograms, and your brain thinks well, move, even at home. Do simple physical exercises for at least 30 minutes a day to stay awake and in a month or two be in shape.
Make a workspace (but sometimes lying down is okay)
The advice is simple: organize your space and don’t work where you usually rest. It’s good to have a desk. You can put stuff on the desk.
Pay for good internet. Don’t forget to pay for internet, or things can happen. If you work where there is no good internet – find a backup source (wifi from your phone will do).
Headphones and a microphone. We need them so that the group chat does not turn into a misery.
Rest and work on schedule.
Remotely, home and work mix. That’s why it’s important not only to have a dedicated place to work, but also a certain amount of time to do tasks. Otherwise you’ll feel like you can always work, and then you’ll quickly burn out. And if you don’t believe in burnout, you’ll just get tired.
Fix a schedule. Work at the same time you’re used to working in the office – from 9 to 17, or 12 to 20, or whenever else you like. The important thing is to have a schedule so you don’t accidentally start working around the clock. The workday framework sometimes gets erased, and you can work all day and go to bed cuddled up with your laptop. A good plan is to turn off all work programs after a certain time.
Measure time. At first, it’s very easy to overwork or underwork. A timer or time tracker helps a lot at first-they come in all kinds and are easy to google.
Turn off notifications in work chats after hours and on weekends, and try not to answer work questions during this time. This is also true for office workers, but the limits are less clear-cut at a distant workplace.
Don’t work next to the bed
At first it seems like the coolest thing about working remotely is working lying in bed, or whatever else you like. But you’ll find out pretty quickly that it’s cool to sleep in bed and watch soap operas. But getting in the mood for work is not. The place to sleep and rest should be for your brain, and let work be somewhere else.
Don’t work near food.
Put chocolates, cookies and other snacks away in cabinets, and put crunchy vegetables in their place and always keep water nearby. “So you don’t get compulsively gluttonous,” as Tanya from KDPV says.
Ilya, a remote backend developer
But food is important.
Don’t forget to take time to eat. In the office you have lunch and regularly run to get tea and coffee, it’s the same here. The main thing is not to overdo it and warn your colleagues.
Eating Outside of Work. Don’t skip meals, but don’t combine meals with work either.
Zhenya, the author of this article on remote work
Plan your work.
Without doing tasks we all get fired. So you need to organize everything so that the process is not different from what usually happens in the office.
Eat the “toad.” Unpleasant tasks first. Every job has unpleasant tasks – you always want to put them off for later. Often this very “then” comes too late. If the task in principle can not be skipped, it is better to do it at the beginning of the day. This way you do not lose focus and do not prematurely put the task into the queue.
Don’t reschedule. There is no need to postpone work tasks because no one can see what you are doing. It throws off your work routine, and everything blends into one long day.
Don’t slack off. If suddenly you have completed the plan for the day in just a few hours, and you, supposedly, a lot of free time – it does not mean that the work day is over. During this time, you can do some other things on the job, sort out the backlog, or ask your manager what to do next. Or you don’t have to, if you have closed lists or Forster.
Work for the day should be scheduled. My practice has shown that it is better to make it at the end of the day. It turns out that the work day of Tuesday you plan on Monday night. The plus side of the approach: that way you can surely schedule the important thing that really needs to be done the next day. Day-to-day scheduling can clog up your schedule with fluidity. It looks like you’ve done some work, but you haven’t progressed on the strategic task at hand. A clear plan made the day before will keep you on track.
Call your colleagues
And one of the important things: organize comfortable communication with the team. It’s important to call with voice and video – and discuss not just work issues, but also something happening outside of tasks, deadlines, and projects. This is especially important during quarantine, when everyone’s outside world is limited to the walls of their apartment.
Tell your team what you do and why you do it. You probably know that the hardest part of organizing a workflow is communicating properly, don’t you? Even in the office, this is sometimes difficult to do. Now imagine that the complexity of this task is multiplied by 100500 when the team is separate from each other. So have daily calls for 10 minutes and talk about your tasks – so you can better organize yourself.
Ask more clarifying questions. While you can read the intonation in person, but remotely, the banal irony may seem offensive and inappropriate. So do not be shy to ask – “What do you mean?” to better understand each other;
Be quick. Communication should be quick and prompt. This applies to clients as well as colleagues. If you work with clients, they shouldn’t notice any difference at all, because they are paying money and expect productive and prompt work, no matter where you work.
Overlap. For remote teams, there’s a concept of overlap – these are the hours when the entire team is on call and the time in which you can ask a question and get an answer as quickly as possible. Somewhere it’s four hours, some teams at HTML Academy have six hours.
Collaboration. Use google docs, online wordpress, or any code editors that support Live Share.