As the Coronavirus outbreak spreads, companies worldwide are taking precautions and asking their employees to work from home. Here are some amazing tips that will help you work from home and at the same time be productive.
1. Start early
Working from home is a great blessing in disguise. You don’t have to navigate through a sea of traffic before you get to work. When you are fresh, you can get more things done in less time. So start with the most difficult task that demands more concentration and attention from you.
2. Have a dedicated workspace
Reserve a room and dedicate a table and chair for your official work. Working from your bed is certainly not a good option, as it may make you lazy and take afternoon naps in the morning.
3. Get wired!
Equip yourself with the fastest broadband connection, latest browsers, a desktop or laptop with decent configuration, audio, and video conferencing tools that are needed to collaborate with your colleagues. Poor internet connection or low system configuration may throw a spanner in the works.
4. Structure your breaks
Taking time to cook, taking your dog out for a walk, babysitting, online chatting, and frequent coffee breaks should certainly be avoided. You need to commit yourself to work for some fixed hours.
5. Use cloud-based file sharing
As you are working from home, you may need access to some important files. Saving the files on your desktop won’t work. So having an account in these cloud storage drives like OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, pCloud, MEGA, etc will be of great help.
6. Create a to-do list
As and when you interact with your colleagues, please make note of all the action items by creating a to-do list. It helps you to keep track of all your official work without missing any action items.
7. Choose the right tool
Amidst the outbreak, the share prices of Slack and Zoom have already zoomed due to increased demand for collaboration tools. Given the fact that multiple tools are available in the market, choosing the right application to get your job done might be a tough task. While in some cities, working from home has been made mandatory, organizations have expressed their productivity and security concerns.
I have been using Clariti to improve my own productivity without compromising the security of my organization. Ever since I started using Clariti, I stopped using other tools for email, chat, cloud storage, social feeds, etc. Clariti indexes all my communications automatically, based on context, in real-time through a powerful feature called ‘Threads’. Working with Threads helped me get more organized, have quick access to any information and get more things done in less time.
Besides, Clariti also supports powerful features that are needed for collaboration such as bookmarking, flagging, to-dos, chat from email, instantly share emails or a group chat with an option to include or exclude other participants on the fly from any Thread. Most importantly, I have the flexibility to arrange all my conversations, the way I need it.
8. Dry run your preparedness
Before you commit to working from home, test your preparedness. Save all your passwords, bookmarks, emails and other relevant details that are needed to work from home. Recently, in India, Flipkart asked its employees to work from home for 3 days to test its own system preparedness for working remotely using digital/video tools.
You may not have the necessity to work from home for a longer period of time, as the Coronavirus may soon have a natural death. I hope these tips will help you to stay productive working from home until your employer is ready to call you back to the office, of course after ordering thermal guns and loads of hand sanitizers.
