Within a few days, in early March of this year, 2020, everything turned upside down. As the Corona Virus invades the world from its focus in the Chinese province of Hubei, leaving the whole world circling, leaving hundreds of thousands of infections and thousands of deaths, this great spread of infection has prompted governments to disable many regular jobs, and activating the method of "self-quarantine" in homes to stop the peak spread of cases With corona virus.
Without foreground, many regulars found themselves facing a whole new experience of doing home work. Working from home is the nature of life for freelancers, as they are used to performing their job duties at home, in whole or in part, and communicating with their teams remotely, which may not be comfortable for many who are experimenting for the first time. First you work from home, here are some important tips to make the experience more enjoyable and clear, and we hope that these days are your most productive days.
You need to start your day early
You now stopped getting up early to catch up at 8 or 9 a.m., and got rid of running in the crowds of buses, cars, metro and the noise of daily life. Often, in the first period that you spend at home, there will be a major disruption in your sleep times, especially if your work is not linked to certain online attendance times, but rather is related to tasks that you deliver at specific times such as the end of the week.
Here, an explanation will emerge of the "work pleases with sleep" pattern, which leads the world of many teleworkers. Begin staying up late into the night to finish the required tasks, then sleep until the next afternoon, sometimes until afternoon. The situation that some independent people get used to after many years of working in this manner will not necessarily be beneficial for you at the beginning of the introduction to the work style from home, because it will affect very negatively your performance often.
As much as possible, maintain early wake up and morning work. You can wake up a little late than you used to, given that you don't have to go out and go into traffic or wear a uniform, but keep the waking style up early in general, so that you maintain your usual level of focus while working without major changes.
Start your day at eight or nine in the morning by preparing the cup of coffee you used to drink in your office, and let the ideas flow. Remember that getting started early also means that you can enjoy the rest of the day watching an interesting movie or practicing any other home hobby.
You are at home .. not the bed
In most cases, the idea of working from a comfortable bed or sofa seems to be a tempting idea for many who are used to going daily to the workplace. The truth is that this is not true, you will only feel some enjoyment in the first two or three days, and then you will be surprised by two things you did not expect: low production, back and neck pain.
The bed inevitably cannot be a "work environment" parallel to the office that you were working on in your company, as being a basis for sleep, rest and relaxation will always make your focus less than required, in addition to that working on the bed may seem on the surface that it is comfortable, but it actually makes your body last for a while Long in abnormal positions, and you will notice back and neck pain.
Prepare a sufficiently high desk or table, and use a seat that is absolutely sure to be comfortable for the back. If you do not have comfortable seats designated for this matter, you may have to use kitchen chairs or any dining table seats or any seat not intended for work, by preparing them well by adding some pillows that make your back comfortable throughout the work period.
Also, as far as possible, be careful to move the office or table to a place near the window to ensure that you get natural daylight during your work, and also make sure that there is a socket close to the place you specified to work in.
Tell your family about the new situation
The biggest challenge for homebuyers with this pattern is the inability to focus regularly amid chaos. If there are children at home, relatives or colleagues, or any family gathering dramatically, it often comes from sounds and activities that will cross your level of focus and distract you for long periods of time that may hinder the whole course of work.
Working at home critically requires that you tell everyone around you what you intend to do, in order to avoid getting distracted during work hours and providing you with the help you need as much as possible, depending on your home environment. On the other hand, explain to everyone that the more they help you spread calm during your business hours, the more time you will have to finish early and spend time with them to enjoy the rest of the day.
It becomes more difficult if you have young children, it is difficult to control their noise, but the way to seduce them remains that you need calm for two hours and then have lunch with them, or play some games and entertainment, then return to work, which is the best way in these circumstances. .
Dividing time ... the magic solution
Work at home is completely different in nature from regular work in that it makes today go through super fast. When you delve deeper into a task while doing housework, you lose all sense of time, to be surprised that it is 5 pm. This immersion in work, and with it being repeated daily and then weekly, completely loses your sense of time, and you discover that the days go by without events that distinguish them from life activities, except for the tasks that you received and accomplished.
The opposite may also happen. When you start working from home, you spend a very long time browsing social media, then watching a movie, then reading a news, then writing a comment on a specific topic that has spread, and perhaps - and in light of the spread of Corona virus news - you spend your whole day watching the news and feeling anxious , To discover that five o'clock in the evening has dissolved, but without achieving any achievement in this case.
One of the most important means to help you control this situation while you work from home is to establish a critical timekeeping system. You can use your phone alarm for a certain number of hours of work, after which you take a short break by preparing a cup of tea or standing a little on the balcony, or sitting on a sofa outside the workroom a little, and then returning again to complete the work according to a number of other hours predetermined.
Create a suitable sound environment
In your first days of work at home, you will often feel some confusion because you are performing the tasks required of you in a completely different environment. You used to do these tasks within a certain audio range, listening to the voice of your colleagues, the voice of the office, the sound of people’s transactions, the sound of the phone ringing in the next office, and maybe even the sound of crowding under the building you work in.
At home, you can create a sound environment close to the sound environment you're used to, such as using some “white noise” videos that simulate different real-world sounds, such as business environments or traffic congestion, offices or airports, etc. Find the closest comfortable environment for you, and listen to it during business hours.
You decide what you want to listen to, if you improve focus while playing some slow, slow-paced music, or listening to the sounds of rain and wind, the important thing is to be keen on reaching a good sound environment that increases your focus, reduces chit, and also helps in covering On any other sounds from the next room could not be controlled, such as crying children or the sound of a TV suddenly rose.
Explore comfortable items
At first glance, working in a pajamas may sound very comfortable, but not all professionals who are used to wearing out-of-work clothes have the ability to work in pajamas. Create comfortable conditions that make you comfortable, if you are not comfortable wearing Manama while working, allocate other "comfortable" clothing to wear during your daytime work period. In the evening, you can wear a Manama that you used to sit and sleep at home.
Also, treat your “work corner” as the new work environment that you can surround with some simple furnishings, or a comfortable sofa that you consider as a “lounge area” that helps you entertain a little or even change the scene. In a broader sense, at the beginning of your trip to work at home it is imperative that you explore all the comfort elements that make you productive, no matter what others do. This is for you alone, you create it yourself according to the situations and methods in which you feel comfortable and focused.
Prepare for online meetings
Mostly, all the meetings that you do this period will be through the video call applications that you make over the Internet, which include a large number of the team as group calls. During that time, make sure your internet connection is fast, and make sure you use good headphones, put a few notes and papers on your new desk to take notes, and make sure to download and try the app that you agreed to make calls with, such as the ZOOM app ) Or other applications that support voice and video calls.
It will also be your duty, especially if your job calls for continuous meetings, to set the background of your room based on the place you chose from the beginning as a workspace. For example, the background of your workplace cannot be part of the kitchen, an area of a children's room, a deformed wall, or a free space in which your family members pass. Some privacy is imperative.
Registration on a collaborative work platform
Of course, you will not be able to continue working with WhatsApp. If you are in charge of a working group, consider using joint work platforms such as "Trello", "Asana", "airtable" or "Slack", and other platforms that ensure effective effective communication in the scope of work and discussions, while at the same time ensuring an organization Good workflow in handing and receiving tasks.
If you organize your time sufficiently, and you finish work at five or six in the evening, you will have enough time in front of you to do some of the tasks and activities that were rare to do
In any case, it can be said that participation in cooperative work platforms on the Internet is the basis of the "remote work" pattern because it is the primary organizer of this world, which offers highly efficient career options that guarantee the organization of business in small, medium and large companies alike, in the face of communication Other traditional ones like email or chat apps.
An excellent opportunity to do new things
The experience of working from home may be new to you in such circumstances, and certainly you will not spend your entire day working. If you organize your time sufficiently, and you finish work at five or six in the evening, you will find enough time in front of you to do some tasks and activities that were rare to do after your return exhausted from outside after working hours.
It is necessary that you devote some time to exercising to get rid of stress and feel satisfied during that period. You also have excellent spaces to intensify reading, whether in your field or in public areas, and the development of disabled hobbies from many years because of your engagement in the regular job.
In the end, and despite the widespread pattern of work from home over the past years, the traditional world of jobs seems to have been waiting for a "corona" strike to move almost completely to teleworking for any job that the Internet can be relied upon to perform. It is likely that after the crisis ends - which is not known when it will end while writing these lines - the world will continue to rely on the "high-productivity" home employee "who is more productive than the" office employee "who maintains average daily productivity.