As a digital marketer, my work is majorly online. Even though I work in-house for an e-commerce company, I could still say my work evolves more around staying online.

In the wake of this Corona pandemic, a lot of office workers are forced to work from home. While this may be good for self isolation, and curbing the covid-19 virus spread; unfortunately, remote working can still be considered alien to a vast majority, especially here in Africa.

However, when your house becomes your office, you need to learn a whole new routine.

You need to learn how to remotely complete tasks with your fellow staff, achieve sales target, set up meetings, maintain steady and concentrated work conditions etc. And these may be really hard to deal with for most us 😁 in such a comfortable environment 😉.

I’ll be sharing some ideas to make work from home productive for you.

• Assign an identifiable workspace or work area:
  When I started off working from home, one of my favourite work position was lying on my bed to work; but you see, I soon found out that I achieved less in the position and would sleep off for most parts. It’s easy to get comfortable, pull up a cozy chair and put it in the corridor to work. But one of the best ways to achieve way more is when you have a known space — maybe an unused room, spot, section of the dinning table where you can go to and psychologically tune in to work. This helps your brain program and attune your mind to work, and in a way increases your concentration and reduces your sloppiness.
  
  Change the arrangement of the place, add some new things to spice up the place, put in a lovely lavender air freshener, place that old unused shelf right by your corner, just to make the place a bit office like and separate. This would help you in creating a mental distance and allow you relax in to work, even though you’re physically in your house.

• Get acquainted with meeting and productivity apps:
  From Zoom, to any-do, omni-focus, G-Suite, Skype, google calendar, etc. You’ll probably be spending more time of video group calls, group chats and online meetings in order to get things done. Trust me, you cannot always rely on airtime-based calls especially if you’re going to be online for a long period.
  Spend your first few days acquainting yourself with some of these tools:
  
  VIDEO GROUP CALLS: Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts. — You want to check through the pros and cons of these to see which one hits home for you.
  
  GROUP CHATS: WhatsApp, Slack, Skype. — Personally, I won’t advice you stick for WhatsApp for group chat, even though it may seem the easiest; but you’re opened to high level of distraction.
  
  TASK MANAGEMENT: Trello, Clickup, omni-focus. — Listed from the easiest to use, to the most complicated. Even though any-do used to be my one-time favourite, I find myself stuck with ClickUp. All of these tools not only allows you to set tasks for yourself, but also for members of your team, and you can send them an invite to join your task sheet. You can set deadlines and due dates as well. You should check them out.
  
  When making a group video call from a home network, you might want to reduce your video quality, should you be experiencing buffers and delays.
  
  Before you start a group meeting, it is always advisable to have a written down agenda, as it’s very easy to get carried away or get lost in a discuss. You also want to make sure you have a meeting moderator.

• Practice “One Tabbing”:
  One tabbing is a word I coined for a habit that helps maximise my work concentration. This involves focusing on one browser tab at a goal. Resist the urge to want to open several tasks at once, you can get REALLY tempted to want to do that. If for example: you’re on a video call, minimise or close other tabs and focus fully on the meeting conversation. That’s is not the time you want to start responding to a mail, or when you suddenly remembered you haven’t completed your order on Amazon.

• Dress for Work:
  While this may seem unrealistic and unreasonable, but trust me, the biggest battle you need to learn to overcome when working is conditioning your mind that you’re AT WORK at home. And this goes a long way in helping you achieve that.
  
  Resist the urge of waking up late, because there is no traffic to beat 🙄
  
  Resist the urge of waking up and working from the bed .
  
  Because the brain reacts based on perceived routines, you already have a previous work routine, as much as possible, try to stick to it. Wake up early, clean your apartment, get dressed, make and eat breakfast, then “commute” to your new workspace.
  
  If you’re a morning person, this is the best time to test your hypothesis, since there would be zero commute time. Try waking up and get set up at work very fast to maximise your mornings.

Productivity is not solely about what you’re doing, but more importantly when you’re doing it

• Resist the urge to stay on work all day:
  In as much as you would be working from home, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should work all the available time. Learn to set work boundaries. Take rest sessions.
  
  A good technique would be using the “Pomodoro Technique” to improve your work time — you can read about it.
  
  Sitting at a spot all day isn’t healthy for you either. Take mental naps. Instead of walking to a brainstorming session, walk outside and call an old friend. Instead of walking up the stairs, walk your dog round the compound… You get the idea?

• Work with a To-do list:
  Tracking your work progress is essential when working from home. I learnt how to masterfully work with a to-do list from working with an associate at Anakle Limited.
  
  Using a To-do list is simple. It starts with creating a daily work template (Best done the night before), list out what you need to get done that day — Keyword “NEED”.
  
  It’s easy to fill our to-do list with a lot of “perceived will-do” but before adding a task to your to-do always ask yourself: “IS IT NECESSARY AND OF HIGH IMPORTANCE I DO THIS TOMORROW?” — And No, you’re not procrastinating. I’ll explain:
  
  Someone once told me “If something is important to you, you’ll find a way; if it’s not important to you, you’ll find an excuse.”
  
  Here’s the logic, even if you added that thing to your to-do and you don’t deeply find it important enough, you’d most likely find an excuse for not doing it, and end up not doing it. More than that is that you are subconsciously building a personal culture of not following through on your to-do lists, which is what happens to most of us.

• Be realistic:
  Let’s be sincere with ourselves, just as you cannot be working 100% at your office, so it is when you’re at home. You shouldn’t expect that you would be fully focused on work. You should cut yourself some slack, as well as your team members. You need to understand that they will not always be online when you need them.
  
  We are have families, pets, neighbours, etc, the network could be slow, and for some of us in some parts of the world, there are high tendencies of power shortage.
  
  Try to keep in mind that everyone is doing their best to make sure they make “Remote work” for them as effective as possible.

These few guides would help you stay highly effective even while you work from home as it has helped me.

If you have other ideas that can help other readers as well, kindly share in the comments section.

Cheers 🍻