Five Tips For Working From Home

Hello everyone thanks for coming today. We decided we wanted to talk about what we thought were the top five things people need to know about when working from home. We’ve been doing it for almost five years and thought it would be information worth talking about it and sharing. What do you guys think are the most important things about working from home?When I first started working from home I found that the best way to start your day is to start it the same way you always did when you were going to your place of work. So you want to replicate the routine starting with the time that your alarm goes off, so you get up at the same time you always did, you have breakfast the same way same time you always did, whether it’s coffee or whatever your routine is you want to replicate it as much as possible and that includes dressing professionally because it’s very easy to just keep your pajamas on but I don’t recommend that.so when you are to be ready to go out to take your commute to work I I found it very helpful to leave the house at that time and just walk around the neighborhood,  walk around the block get you in the the right frame of mind to go to work so so when I came back home I was ready to goto work and I typically scheduled my day and structured it so in the same routine that I always did. So I found that kept me productive and focused throughout the day. Great Jim and I would add to that it’s also about preparing yourself and preparing your workspace and preparing your technology and making sure that it’s ready to go. Day to day, if you’re just working away, might not seem like that big of a deal you’ll just deal with it as it comes but if you’re actually arranging to have a meeting video conference or phone conference you want to make sure that your technology is working. you want to make sure that your audio is working your videos working and your Wi-Fi. you’re not going to freeze and have one of those, who have a crazy-looking face on the screen, and then also make sure that you know you don’t have children or pets running around behind you. I just muted my screen a minute ago because a loud bike went by so I’m just making sure that you know how to do those things in a flash if that should happen.

I’ll build from what Cheri just said. I am new to the work from home I’mused to working in an office environment where there were lots of interruptions and lots of people coming by and so that was the environmentI was most familiar with. what happened is I found I came into my office and it was head down and focused and come up for air about 2:00 2:00 in the afternoon and only when my stomach started growling at me too it was time to have some lunch or you needed a break and so reallyI found I had to be intentional around scheduling breaks so that I would stand up and move around and get some opportunity to rebuild some energy and some ability to refocus and maintain my productivity levels so that meant that creation of a break creates that that time to do that I think the other piece of that that I’m learning to do is also set some boundaries around start and stop times and I’m going to build from what Jim said earlier in that I love the idea that at the end of my dayI actually get up and leave and walk even if it’s out the door and back in through the garage to re-enter a different phase and focus on something separate from work and create that boundary. it’s something that I know I struggle with and I have to be really intentional about that so so I appreciate that, I think it’s that’s really important because when we work from home those lines of home and work can really bleed into each other.I’m fortunate enough that I have a separate room that I can use for an office but if I didn’t I think I would need to set up kind of a separate work area in the house that this is where I work and you know this is where I live and at at the end of the day. to The work stuff so, it’s not beckoning me to comeback and do more because I think that’s the temptation or the thing that can happen when we work from home. it’s always there calling us and even I know for me even if I see work stuff in the evening or on the weekend it can cause me to stress thinking I should be in there doing it so I have to pack it up and put it away so it doesn’t distract me. I think some other distractions you know when we’re working during the day like Cherie was saying a minute ago, was muting as a motorcycle went by, it always seems I have a conference call when they’re picking up the dumpsters and my condo is right next to the parkade, so being able to to mute out those distractions for yourself and for other people. locking up your cats when you’re on a video call, my cats don’t appreciate that but I have to do that sometimes so they’re not distracting me or others and I think just building that environment for ourselves where we can focus on work. when we need to focus and be at home when we’re at home, you know one of the things that was really important to me when we started working from home was the idea of communication and how would we keep up the communication, like we did when we were in an office and so depending on your technology. I think you have to work with what you have and be creative and one of the things that we did right away as we started having Monday morning scrum meetings that were half an hour and recently with all the things that are going on we now have one at 9:00 a.m. every day, we make sure that we do it by a video we are committed to whenever we on each other we use video to do it so that we’re looking at each other we’re looking face-to-face. I think it’s important that we not wait for a leader to decide or come up with ideas on how to do this because we could easily get isolated at home waiting for someone and I think we all need to lead the charge, we all need to come up with creative ways to make sure we stay connected communication within organizations is difficult enough doing it when everyone’s working from home can even be more complicated so be creative. last night we hosted a virtual st. Patrick’s Day party, we had a lot of laughs it was great to just for a moment in time forget all the crazinessthat’s going on and just laugh together. Cherie brought her chips and homemade salsa, sadly she couldn’t share them, but it’s really about figuring out how we keep communication alive and each one of us has a responsibility to do so so you know this isn’t an exhaustive list of all the things that are important there are just some of the things that we’ve learned and we just hope that everyone right now that’s working from home makes it as successful as a can be. who knows down the road you know that we might go on once all of this stuff clears away. Anything anyone else wants to say anything else to add anything else? I just thought of it when I looked at Cherie and she smiled I’m kind of fun you know we have so much fun in the office and so we try to do the same thing and we share jokes back and forth that work for us and so have fun I would say agreed. we’ll talk to you later.