How To Deal With Your New Life As an Employee Working From Home?

So, how do you overcome all these issues? Well, there are many solutions you can consider. Indeed, the obvious ones are, among others:

• Creating a home office, with a clean desk and a minimal amount of items and distractors around.
• Experimenting with various working schedules.
• Make sure that your working – and sleeping hours are regular.
• Eating well.
• Exercising regularly (by the way, in times of the corona crisis, there are lots of good free online training programs such as Natalia Vtuyrina’s stretching class).
• Starting with the preparation of a detailed list of tasks for each day.

But, there are also more non-obvious (mental) tricks that are equally important. Overall, sticking to these rules can make a difference between descending into a feeling of imprisonment and apathy, and a true blast while working from home.

1. Spare Mercy For Others.

People who can successfully carry on with working in isolation usually have double standards for empathy. It sounds counterintuitive. However, to stay in command of your life while working from home, you need to treat yourself worse than you would normally treat other people.

Namely, what happens if you are not hard on yourself, and you let yourself rest every time it feels right? In such cases, your mind will soon create more and more reasons to complain and to take breaks. 

Therefore, in situations when you would recommend someone who works for you (or your student) to rest — as they feel tired, dizzy, demotivated, or ill — you need to tell yourself to shut up and continue working instead. Think of the goals you are about to achieve

2. Forgive Yourself.

For example, at the same time, you need to be able to forgive yourself. Furthermore, working from home is like keeping a diet.

Importantly, if you happen to break your own rules and cheat one day, you need to put yourself together as fast as possible and come back to the diet routine on the very next day. ”

3. No News.

Visual and auditory overstimulation leads to brain damage and massive loss in productivity. Therefore, while working from home, you should discipline yourself to keep informational diet or otherwise, you are more vulnerable to depression and other mental problems.

According to a Stanford University study, people who regularly multitask across several forms of media perform worse on tests of attention and memory than people who focus on one thing at a time — exactly the kind of overstimulation this section warns against.

In addition, you can catch yourself looking into the mirror more often and searching for the first wrinkles, thinking about passing time or the meaning of life way more often than before. Therefore, it is important to be selective about the information that you let into your head.

Plus, to avoid putting any seeds of negative thoughts in your mind. Avoiding the daily news is, in general, a good strategy as TV news is usually a compilation of catastrophes, deaths, quarrels in the parliament, and potential threats.

Plus, people who achieved something – from politicians to artists, to entrepreneurs – are usually pictured in a bad light in the media. They are either shown as greedy, empty inside, sociopathic, or stupid.

Moreover, how can you get anywhere with your career if you are conditioned to think that all successful people are evil? For example, let your family and friends filter the information for you! Importantly, if important events are going on in the world, they will call you and tell you about them.

How Does News Consumption Affect Your Productivity?

Not to mention that media creates dopamine addiction. You load your working memory with snippets of information which gives you little rewards and clutters your mind. You are not productive anymore.

Additionally, do you still feel like you need to check the evening news? In addition, well, do it once a day, rather than once an hour or once every five minutes.

As a result, your productivity as well as the overall level of happiness will instantly increase. It will have a positive impact on thinking about your personal development too.

4. Create a Mastermind Group.

Today, self-pacing productivity techniques such as pomodoro or time-boxing make an international career.

According to a Lancaster University study of the Pomodoro Technique, most participants genuinely found the method helpful for managing their workload, though exactly which part of it helped — the timer, the breaks, or just the structure — varied quite a bit from person to person.

However, research proves that accountability is the key to productivity. According to a study by Dominican University of California psychologist Gail Matthews, people who wrote down their goals and remained accountable to another person achieved them at a significantly higher rate than those working toward their goals alone.

Therefore, it’s worth creating a mastermind group. Join forces with other remote workers and motivate each other by becoming each other’s fellow-sufferers and pace makers!

You could, for example, invite a few friends to your mastermind group and organize a debriefing online via Zoom. Share your experiences, little achievements, and bottlenecks at the end of each working day, or once per week. Just contact 2-4 other people who also work from home and who are at similar career stages as you. 

These people do not necessarily need to be your closest coworkers. It’s more than enough if they should wish you well, have a similar type of job, and be highly motivated. 

How Can You Stay Accountable While Working Remotely?

It is good to have pacemakers and induce a bit of friendly peer pressure. Therefore, it is advisable to check in online regularly, (for example, once a week) monitor the progress, and brainstorm in a group.

You could also make use of the established online communities and services pairing remote workers as sparing partners or self-help groups such as LaunchPass or FocusMate.

You might also be interested in visiting a nearby co-working space, such as WeWork. Co-working spaces slowly become the norm, not only among freelancers and contractors but also, employees.

Today, managers test new solutions to manage remote employees by providing them with a professional workspace and a sense of community. The benefits of co-working spaces, such as increased productivity and collaboration, suggest that companies should consider using them as a solution to manage their remote workforce.

According to a study published in the Journal of Facilities Management, both the social interactions and the physical design of a coworking environment measurably boost how productively people work there — one more reason leaving home for a shared workspace now and then can pay off.