Feeling unproductive Working from Home? Hack your Productivity
This was last Wednesday, I took a business call to another acquaintance of mine. After catching up on the current situation, we got into the subject of team productivity. Towards the end of that conversation, I asked whether he is feeling productive. He said he wasn’t. He was getting exhausted managing his team, his workload, and his personal life.
Our team at CabbageApps, also had to work remotely. I took this situation as an opportunity to move the organization towards Remote Working. This was a transition me and my co-founder wanted to do for a while. I will dig deep more about this subject in another post.
Anyhow, our team also wanted to learn about managing their personal productivity. I was doing research about this and taking notes and realized that most of the guides regarding this were written around when Remote Work was in a much calmer time.
To give an example - I work from Colombo, Sri Lanka. We are having a full lockdown. No supermarkets or pharmacies are opened. Two weeks ago- we had a 6-hour window to go buy groceries. This was also communicated a day before hand. These type of uncertainties makes it extremely difficult for us to continue working.
I’ll be clear, this is a crisis. We can’t be 100% productive during this time and also can’t expect everyone to be available all the time with the personal commitments we are having. But never the less, we are not going to succumb to the virus and grind up all economic activity. We will overcome this and come out stronger with better work ethics, better tooling and as a society, we would be more compassionate about different people's work requirements.
I am writing this guide in a format in which you can choose to adapt 1 strategy or adapt all strategies. These strategies have worked out for me but some might be difficult.
Wake up / Sleep on a Schedule
After personally experiencing this, and talking to a few others I realized that the biggest culprit that kills productivity is lack of a sleep schedule. This gets more prominent at times when we experience existential stress (with the pandemic).
Keep your daily alarm in the morning and wake up on time. Go to sleep on time. And most importantly — don’t try to work late in the night due to getting distracted during day time. This makes it so that you’d end up having the next day disrupted.
For more detailed information read below Reddit post.
Imitate going to work
You have used to a routine of going to work. When you go to work, you feel like you are at work thus you have to work. This thought process primes us to a mindset of working. To trick your brain again of returning to the same routine of working — do a routine that you previously used to do. It might be shaving in the morning. It might be wearing denim pants. It might be walking around your house for 25 minutes.
Get natural light
Sunlight is the trigger for melatonin creation and release which is vital to regulating circadian rhythms. Your circadian rhythm could be used as a wave to ride on for your productivity. In the morning after you finish your morning routine, bask in the sunlight for 5 minutes. If possible try to work in a place that you get more natural light.
Another suggestion is to do a 7-minute workout, outside your house or place where sunlight will hit you.
If you want to read further please refer to this article which focuses on Natural lighting and employee health.
Schedule meetings after lunch
Use your morning hours to work on deep meaningful work. You can engage in the important tasks that need your attention and undivided focus. If you are the manager of a team, you can use this time to align the goals of your projects and make sure that your routine management tasks are completed.
Block time in your calendar
To increase productivity you can use a calendar to put your tasks etc but what’s most important in this situation is to block time segments in your calendar so that you know the productive times.
This would help you regulate and eat on a specific schedule.
Manage reactivity
Attention is a scarce resource. Protect your attention from getting diverted into other tasks via Push Notifications. To sort this out, manage your notification settings on Slack (‘use notify me online when I am tagged’), Email (‘check email every 3 hours’) and other applications you have.
Check your phone notifications once, every hour and no more than that. Before getting distracted by a notification, understand whether it's urgent or not.
Use a dedicated workspace
Use a different table or a different room to do your work. Keep distractions minimal by closing your door. This strategy might not be practical for some of you.
Use music to your advantage
Music is powerful. It changes our mood. If you are feeling unproductive, a good jam might boost your mood. If you don’t like feeling distracted by the lyrics, please check out an app for ambient sound.
Work with timers
Timeboxing is a classic technique of managing your attention. When you are at home, there are plenty of chances of getting distracted. Pomodoro technique is a good implementation of Timeboxing.
You work for 25-minute. After the time is up, you take a 5 minutes break.
You work for 4 slots (Pomodoros), then take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes.
Toggl is a good time tracking software that will help you to achieve this.
Don’t beat yourself down
If you didn’t have a productive day, don’t beat yourself down. You should always be thinking of the whole week ahead. For example — my golden rule of thumb is to do 40 hours of productive work. If I have done a 40-hour productive week, I have actually achieved my target as if I am working regularly.
If you are still finding your productivity levels to be not up to the mark, talk with a colleague. Try to map your daily schedule on a piece of paper. Having a conversation with someone provides valuable insight into our own problems.
For Entrepreneurs
All of these strategies are coping mechanisms while we adapt to working remotely. It will take your team time to adjust to this new environment. If you are an entrepreneur who’s thinking of permanently adopting a remote-first approach, please do get in touch with me. We can share our mutual findings and find better strategies to build Remote First companies.
