Working from home…many of us are doing it right now. Some are doing it better than others. So how can you make working from home successful?

Separating Work From Home

One of the hardest things is how to separate your work from your home. When you’re working from home it becomes even more challenging. You can stay at your computer “for one more minute” and look up and an hour has passed.

An easy way to get through this is to have some way to make the mental shift between working from home and vice versa. Here are some things that have worked well for me:

• Leave the house for a “commute”. Even walking around the block can give you the transition between home and work.
• Have a set work room or area. Having a set place to do your work will help you focus your mind. When I was teaching, I did all my grading in the unused formal dining room. When I wasn’t in there, I wasn’t working. If I was in there, I was working. Even if this is a specific sofa cushion, this can work.
• Have specific equipment. Most employers are now providing equipment like a laptop or tablet for people to work from home. Use this equipment only for work, and your own equipment for everything else. Turn it off when not in use.
• Have startup and termination phrases. Saying (out loud) phrases to signal the start and end of your workday can shift your thinking to and from work. Think Star Trek-esque: “Hello computer” and “Terminate work session, computer”
• Keep to a schedule. The temptation to flex your work hours is strong when there is no one watching. Keep to your normal work hours, and work only during that time.

Maintaining an Office Space

Maintaining an office space can be hard when you’re short on space – particularly if you’re sharing it with others!

During my teaching, I often had to switch classrooms when one of my students wasn’t able to make it up the stairs to my classroom. I used a backpack for my tech, and tote organizers to make it possible for me to move between workspaces. Here are two similar to what I used: an organizing tote* and laptop backpack*. Using these can make it possible to quickly setup and clean up your workspace, while keeping everything together.

Discussions With Colleagues

It’s difficult if you are used to collaborating with your colleagues frequently. Luckily, there are numerous ways you can communicate, all of which have solidified under the work-from-home conditions.

• Zoom. Now a strong video conferencing product, many companies use this for teleconferences. The paid option gives you multiple people and extended times.
• Microsoft Teams. Built into the latest version of Office online, it’s a full-fledged collaboration system that has built-in telecom.
• Skype. A Microsoft product, it allows stand-alone video calls from your phone or desktop.
• Your phone. Calling is just as effective as video for quick things. And if you have to video, you can use Facetime (if you’re both iOS) or What’sApp.
• Google Voice. If you don’t want to give your personal number to your colleagues (I never give my cell number to my clients), you can use Google Voice. It allows you to automatically send calls to voicemail after hours.

As a matter of consideration, use a headset when you are on a video or conference call. Just as you wouldn’t use your speaker phone for a conference call in an open office environment, don’t do it from home either.

Keeping Up Motivation

Maintaining motivation can be difficult when you feel isolated. For that reason I recommend daily contact with your colleagues.

If you can’t get it going on a team level, try finding one person to talk to every day as an accountability partner. During your discussion make sure you mention what you worked on, what you are planning on working on, and any issues that you are having. It need only take 15 minutes, but can keep you on track, knowing you will have to report in the next day.

Keeping Track of Things

Documentation is important. It’s even more important these days. Documentation doesn’t have to be difficult or complex.

I keep a separate notebook for work. I note down the date, the day of the week, and then the following:

• What I did. This tells me what I worked on during the day. This is critical for the next day’s team meeting, as well as doing my timesheet and status report at the end of the week. I use a bullet journal format of rapid logging to keep it short.
• Results of meetings. By noting down what we talked about, who was there and what decisions were made, I have written information that I can refer back to. I can also follow up if someone was assigned a task during the meeting.
• Tasks that need to be done. These are things I need to do that fall outside of my daily project work. These are usually admin tasks like cleaning up repositories and closing issues.
• Any issues with the system or vendors. I just make a note of any issues that we had that affect the flow of our day. This comes in handy later if we are trying to figure out what happened on a given day.

All of these things in my notebooks have been referred to in the past. For instance, we had a data issue and couldn’t figure out why files had gone missing for two days six months ago. I opened to that date, and saw that one of our vendors had an outage, and we had to compensate with the data we had on hand.

I don’t have any direct reports anymore (thank goodness!) but when I did, I would note on a separate page (one for each person) what had been delegated, when it was given, when it was expected, and when it was done. I also noted how many times the person had to be reminded. This was good when it came time to do performance reviews.

Working from home can be successful if you have ways to separate work from home, maintain your workspace, have discussions with colleagues and document things.

This has been a hell of a year. COVID has put a stress on most working people, if it left them employed at all.

I’ve been working at home since March, and there is no sign of returning to the office. Yet our team is thriving. Someone recently asked me why I thought that was the case. And here are the reasons:

We Have Daily Meetings

Even before COVID, we had daily standup meetings. The purpose was threefold: let the team know what we’re working on, so any conflicts or extra information can be conveyed; let our boss know what we worked on the day before so he can monitor progress; and to let our boss know of any sticking points that he could help resolve (or the steps we were taking to resolve them ourselves).

We have continued this while working remote. Not only do we get all the benefits of the in-person meetings, but it means we see our teammates every single day. It provides a strong sense of connection.

We Quickly Converted Things Digital

Even though my team is a subset of IT, there were a lot of things that we didn’t do digitally. We did a lot of brainstorming and kept track of tasks on the physical windows of the building (it works when you don’t have white boards). We also kept track of all the features we did on a rolling whiteboard so that everyone knew what was outstanding and what was ready to be released. Our standards for the system were written on huge sticky notes posted to the outside of the cubes.

We quickly converted all of these things to digital tools. We were the first team in the organization to move to Microsoft Teams, and we moved within the first week of working from home. All of our standards went into the wikis in teams. Our deployment and feature list went into a spreadsheet that lives on Teams. Everything we did on the physical windows was typed up and put into the files area of Teams.

It was this quick conversion that allowed us to keep moving at our pre-COVID output level.

We Have Clear Tasks

Even before COVID, our manager was very clear about what each of us was working on. These tasks are set out in Microsoft DevOps – which is made for developers but is a good task-based project management system. Each request is filled out with lots of details, along with clear language about what we are trying to accomplish.

This has not changed. But we’ve expanded. We routinely have small 5- to 10-minute meetings between each person and the manager at the start of each task so that we can go over what the scope of the task and any information that might not be clear. At the end of the meeting, the team member knows exactly what needs to be accomplished.

We Have Clear Priorities

The work I do has a lot of shifting priorities. Something I am working on can be suddenly pushed to the back burner as we work on providing information for the board or auditors.

Our manager maintains a list of everything that needs to be worked on, and assigns it to us when the time has come to work on it. Then within the 6-10 tasks for each person, it is ranked so we know what exactly is top priority.

If we are ever unclear, we ask the manager for our sprint planning, where he lays forth in what order we should be working on things for the next two weeks.

Our Manager Values Our Time

My manager is a rarity. His policy is that his developers need to be developing, not attending meetings (outside of our team design meetings). That means he takes on the bigger meetings, and brings us back the details.

It also means that he has a firm grasp of what is being requested, and can keep us from being inundated.

In return, we value his time. I recently put a three hour meeting with our team on his schedule every Friday afternoon so that he could have uninterrupted time to work on the things he needs to accomplish. It had been consistently hijacked by a lady whose meetings ran 50 to 100% over time and had no value to my manager (she keeps asking him to do her job).

We Can Quickly Meet

In the office, we would do a lot of quick design meetings. All it would require is turning around in our chairs. We can’t do that remotely. We transitioned to using Zoom for these quick meetings.

My manager has his own company-paid-for Zoom account, and we are free to use it. Rarely are the meetings he has on his account, so we have free access to meet quickly.

Sometimes these meetings are just to ask clarifying questions. But other times it’s because we need his approval to move ahead with a work-around for something we found in the code. A quick text to the team, we all hop on Zoom, and we’re done in five minutes.

Conclusion

Our team practices, which transitioned to all digital, have helped us thrive. By having video meetings daily, clear priorities and well-defined tasks, we have kept up with our workload and have continued to succeed.