13 Tips to Crush Working From Home During COVID-19
Our behaviour is often a by-product of our immediate environment.
And many of us the world over are finding ourselves in a new environment — at least when it comes to work.
COVID-19 is seeing more white collar professionals working from home than ever before, and in many ways it is a long overdue transition, one that required a pandemic to finally stop leaders anchoring to the past.
But it might not be such a smooth transition for some, given the numerous distractions at play in our ‘home offices’.
When we’re distracted, it can take us about 23 minutes to get back in ‘the zone’. Even the slightest distraction, such as the 1/10th of a second it takes to glance at a notification on your smartphone, can add up to a 40% productivity loss if you do lots of it throughout your day.
Apart from said smartphone, there’s the internet to play with on our desktops (sans colleagues peering over our shoulder) with its rabbit-hole wonders of YouTube and Reddit, there’s Netflix and other streaming services, our fellow residents to engage with, and of course, the refrigerator.
Not only that, but as with those colleagues no longer peering over our shoulder, working from home lacks many of the things that serve to keep us accountable — or at least force some people to give the impression that they’re being productive. Think conversations about work by the water cooler, having to actually turn up at a certain time and you know, put on pants… hopefully not in that order.
We might have good intentions when it comes to working from home, but as Atomic Habits author James Clear puts it, “we don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems”.
For example, if you want to stop devouring that bag of Dorito’s late at night when your willpower is depleted, then having several bags on hand in your kitchen pantry won’t help your cause. Having no such bags in the house is a far more effective environmental measure, and might see you reaching for a healthier snack instead.
When it comes to working from home, we need to be just as diligent with the design of our systems.
If we‘re intention, we can actually be considerably more productive when working from home, sans all of the non-consequential meetings and the 50–60 interruptions per day that typical employees contend with, most of which are unimportant.
I’ve worked remotely for several days a week for a number of years.
During this time, I’ve learned — out of sheer necessity — how to create an environment and put in place systems to consistently perform at what I think is a reasonably high level.
Doing so has been key to my writing several books — one of which, Time Rich: Do Your Best Work, Live Your Best Life, is on productivity — in addition to running a boutique consultancy, launching an ed-tech startup and hosting a 373 episode strong podcast.
With that, here are my 13 quick tips for crushing it while working from home during COVID-19.
It sounds obvious, but so many people sit down to their desks with a to-do list and just pick the easiest thing to work on, which more often than not turns out to be email or checking LinkedIn.
Human beings are programmed to take the path of least effort, according to a study out of University College, London. Researchers found that our brains trick us into thinking that the nearest beach has the best waves.
While easy, such tasks don’t deliver much value, and we can quickly find ourselves an hour or two into our day without having achieved much except immersed ourselves in some of what Behance founder Scott Belsky calls ‘insecurity work’.
By starting with the highest value activities, what I often find isthat by midday, I’ve done my best work for the day. The momentum and dopamine hit that comes with genuine achievement — as opposed to getting to inbox zero — not only motivating, but also helps us to feel good.
A simple way to prioritise your tasks:
Start by creating a backlog of tasks, as per the example
Step 1: Give each task a rating out of 10 in terms of the value you think it will deliver.
Step 2: Give it a rating out of 10 for cost (time and money — the higher the cost, the higher the rating).
Step 3: Divide value by cost.
Step 4: Apply a weighting to the urgency of step 3 (optional step)
Step 5: Prioritise by the final result (the higher the number, the higher value the task)
Bonus tip: Prepare your to-do list for the next day before you call it a day. This way you’ll be able to hit the ground running the following day instead of get to your desk and waste time figuring out what to work on.
If my highest value task is to write a 2,000 word article, then staring at a blank piece of paper can be paralysing.
However, as Isaac Newton’s first law of motion states, ‘an object in motion stays in motion until it meets an unbalanced force’.
Ultimately this means that it’s much easier to keep going once we’ve started, and that start doesn’t need to be big.
Returning to my 2,000 word article, I might instead set myself a goal of writing 100 words, or as several-times bestselling author Tim Ferriss likes to put it, “just two crappy pages”.
Committing to and starting on a small and achievable unit of work will set your proverbial object in motion, and make it easier to keep going.
If you’ve ever put off picking up a book on your coffee table while lounging on the couch, but summoned up the mental strength to read a page, you would have found that turning to the next page is so much easier than getting started. That’s the power of momentum.
It’s inevitable that we will experience cognitive decline as the day unfolds, so it is critical that we incorporate frequent breaks into our day — to create a ‘pulse and pause’ cycle.
As angel investor and philosopher, Naval Ravikant puts it, “work like a lion who hunts for food, “train hard, sprint, rest and reassess — then go at it again”.
Set yourself a goal — whether that be completing a specific unit of work, or working (without distraction) for a specific period of time that works for you before taking a short break.
Francesco Cirillo developed the popular Pomodoro Technique in the late 1980s. It essentially involves breaking work down into 25 minute intervals, separated by five-minute breaks. After four rounds, Cirillo suggested taking a long break of between 15 and 30 minutes, before repeating the cycle.
This is just a guide though. Figure out what your rhythm looks like — it could be 60 to 90 minutes of pulsing followed by 15–20 minutes of pausing, as is the case with me — and commit to it.
It helps to reward yourself not just with a break, but maybe a conversation with a family member, or perhaps even, a walk outside…
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The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.
To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.
