Improving your habits to work from home effectively

Now-a-days with the situation of the COVID-19, it became extremely important to change our habits and what we were used to. Not only change our hygiene habits, but change our daily activities schedules were necessary to adapt to the new world and the transition it made just in one year.

At the beginning of the pandemic many of us thought that it was better and easier to work from home because we don’t have to move to our workplace so that time can be spent doing another things; sleeping, eating, doing exercise, reading, etc. And even though that is correct, work from home is not necessarily easy, specially to the people who works with many other people. Is at this moment where changing our habits becomes relevant.

One year ago, we were used to ask for help whenever we needed it, also join meetings almost everyday and socialize with our coworkers at lunch time, so if you were new in a company, I think it will not took you too much time to adapt and meet the people there. But now with work from home those are things that needs more time to get done. The thing is that we were not able to keep going like that and we needed to re-think how get that same things done but with work from home.

One of the things you probably need to do is to change your sleeping time hours. Now that you are working from home you may think you can sleep more because you can spend the time you spent before moving to your work place, in that, but trust me, you usually are so confident about that, so many times you stay in computer, surf on Facebook or watch TV very late so when you realized you spent 1 or 2 hours on that and you have less sleeping hours. So my advice is to always watch the clock and know when is the right moment to go to sleep so you can complete your everyday 8 hours fee.

Another thing that may delay you is how you use your computer. Is common that we surf the web to look for answers to a specific problem and in that searching we visit a lot of websites and pages, so we open a new tab in our browser and keep looking for pages that can help us. At the end, we have lot of tabs opened and many times we don’t want to close any of them because we think we will probably need them but that’s a lie. Now with WFH the tabs you have open are more because you need to have opened your communication platform (like Slack), your meeting (Zoom usually), your Kanban (Trello, Clubhouse) and many other tools. Having this much of tabs open can result in many spend time looking for a specific tab because you don’t remember where it is, so it takes time and of course resources that can be used in another things. So I recommend you to only have open those tabs you really need and that will help you save lot of time.

Finally another important aspect when working from home is communication. Keep a clear and fast communication is a key to success. Of course is harder to communicate because we can’t the see others so we don’t know if the other person is understanding what we are saying or if the have any problem that we don’t understand, or probably both are missing something. But this is a thing we have to learn to be better professionals, go right to what you need and ask just what you want to know. Also you should take into consideration the other are not free for you whenever you need them, so you’d better anticipate this when you think you’ll need help and ask for help 5 minutes before. Trust me, that way the communication will be better because you will get the other person into context faster and the problem will be solved easily, and of course you will be able to spend the time you’d spent waiting for an answer, in another useful thing. I think in Pernix it helps a lot using tools like Slack , Toggl and Airtable, because they help to keep a faster communication link, to measure my hours so I know what tasks are taking me more time than I expect and finally will let me know many things about opportunities so I’ll know who is working on what, which technologies are used on a specific project and I’ll be able to ask for help to someone who really knows what I need or to start looking to project I may be interested.