Get Dressed, Brush Your Teeth & Other Tips for Remote Work
Work in The Time of COVID-19
What a time to be alive. And what a time to be running low on toilet paper.
COVID-19 is eliciting a response unlike anything I’ve ever seen. In such a short period of time, the pandemic has created global ghost towns. Here in the United States, the lockdown seems to be just getting started. (At least I hope.)
Entire workforces have been moved online in a matter of weeks, and while most Fortune 500s are no stranger to remote work arrangements, smaller organizations and their teams are far less prepared. It’s one thing to work from home for a day here and there; it’s another thing to institute remote working across an organization and with people who have not worked remotely before — individually or together.
I went remote several years ago, and it was a transition. I’m also the only full-time remote worker in my company (at least until very recently). While I am by no means an expert, I do have some principles that attempt to guide my schedule and remote arrangement. I say attempt because if we’re honest, it can be a challenge to stay focused, be productive, and manage time effectively irrespective of whether you’re working remotely or in the office.
It’s one of the great employment myths that being in the office means people are getting work done.
Managing Your Time
Time management is critical if you’re going to work remotely. Time management is actually critical if you’re going to work (full stop).
I haven’t always had the best time management skills. (I use to have workaholic tendencies, but my TL;DR advice on that topic: the problem is you, not work; nobody thinks you’re effective; stop doing it.) When I went remote two years ago, I had some serious epiphanies about how to manage my time — and therefore everything associated with my life.
Set boundaries
Paranoid managers have a fear that employees will spend the entire day watching Netflix instead of working. But what happens more often is that work bleeds into breakfast, interrupts lunch, and continues through the nightly Netflix. I am passionate about my work, but I am (now, at least) incredibly protective of my time.
You have to set boundaries if you want to keep your work from becoming your whole life. To that end, I suggest:
- Make breakfast before you check email. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stopped at my desk on the way to the coffee machine and then realized I’m 15 minutes out from a 5-hour block of meetings.
- Put a lunch hold on your calendar. It might sound stupid, but it’s incredibly easy to work straight through lunch, particularly if some of your colleagues are in different time zones and there’s no discernable lunch period.
- Use calendar blocks liberally, including around any “non-work” things you need to get done. If your team is on Slack, use status updates liberally so that your team easily can see when you’re not available. The choices are many:✈️🏡🏫🤒💩. The world is your oyster.
- Decide when you want to end the work day — and do it. I schedule things for after work, to force myself to switch contexts. Also consider: if you find yourself “taking work home” constantly, you might be overcommitting and/or inefficient during the day. #justsayin
Don’t necessarily replicate your in-office routine
There’s little chance that employer-imposed office hours are designed around your personal preferences and cycles of productivity, but many people get an opportunity to rewrite schedules when they go remote. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel Pink recommends that we pay attention to how and when we best work — and then work our schedules around those cycles.
I, for example, am most inspired between 7:30–10 a.m., which I didn’t figure out until I went remote, because before then I spent much of that time in a soul-crushing commute and catching up on emails. I do things in the morning that require creativity and focus, and then dive into emails, meetings, and the miscellaneous tasks that keep projects running.
My energy wanes in the early afternoon, so when I find myself having read the same sentence in an email 23 times, I go for a quick run. I peak again in late afternoon, which is right when most of my team goes offline for the day, so I can work largely uninterrupted for a few more hours.
Not everyone has this kind of flexibility in their role, even when working remotely, and there are certainly days when back-to-back meetings require a more “normal” 8-to-6 schedule. But if you have flexibility, I highly recommend thinking through your daily schedule in light of your personal work style, which can often be built around your company’s normal operating hours. If you need help doing that, read Pink’s book.
Expect More Time in Your Day
I have yet to meet a remote worker who thinks more gets done in the office. Seriously. If you are one, reach out; I’d love to understand what happens in your office.
The reality is that in-office work comes with a lot of opportunities for in-person engagement and important human, social connection. This, in turn, comes with a whole lot of distraction.
“Those taps on the shoulder and little impromptu get-togethers may seem harmless, but they’re actually corrosive to productivity. Interruption is not collaboration, it’s just interruption. And when you’re interrupted, you’re not getting work done.” —Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework
Preach! 🙌
When you’re remote, you don’t have those interruptions (at least not from your colleagues). And while you may have incoming messages, emails, and calls, it’s a lot easier to control your engagement across these mediums than it is to tell poor Kathy to piss off when she’s standing at your office door. I’ve also found that as you and your team get used to more real-time communication, the need for scheduled, structured meetings becomes less and less. Of that, I am a fan.
If you do this right, expect to get more done in less time, and use the extra hour(s) to create the flexibility in your schedule that will help you crank and produce.
Managing Your Colleagues & Team(s)
When I went remote, it was immediately apparent that I needed to manage my time differently (read: better). I overlooked, at least at first, the need to manage the expectations and working style of my colleagues. But I have found this to be incredibly important, and if you’re coming from an environment in which remote work is not common, the transition is not entirely seamless.
Over-Communicate
For people who are used to dropping by offices to get a question answered or to have a quick conversation, physical separation from colleagues can create an invisible obstacle to communication. I’m not entirely sure why this happens, but in my experience, it definitely does. And this is where being proactive about reaching out and making yourself obviously available can help.
I Slack the hell out of my team, so out of sight isn’t out of mind. I’m not just talking about substantive exchanges, either. I send “good morning” messages, “how are you” check-ins, and even the occasional, “did you see that email Kathy sent!?” inquiries. I also video call through Slack and Zoom, so that people remember what I looked like. Pro tip: Zoom has a “Touch Up My Appearance” setting, so you don’t even need to worry about makeup.
I ask questions in real-time via Slack instead of waiting for meetings, which resolves issues faster and creates ongoing dialogues with my team. Because messaging is asynchronous, I can rely on my colleagues to respond when they are not immersed in work. Anyone who knows me knows that meetings are not my favorite, especially when they are unnecessary (which they often are).
I encourage my colleagues to video call me on the fly, although you have to be prepared for this. Pro tip: Before your team — particularly your boss — gets online in the morning, wash your face, brush your teeth, and take off the cowboy-cat riding a shark sweatshirt.
That’s a lesson you only need to learn once. Trust me.
Be responsive
The flip side of over-communicating is being responsive. There’s a balance here, of course. It isn’t productive to answer every message or email that comes in as it comes in, but this is where I leverage my understanding of my team’s schedule. I get a lot of focused work done earlier in the morning, and I save smaller tasks for when Denver comes online, so that I can be super responsive to messages without disrupting a flow.
Be prepared to prove yourself
It’s hard to imagine today that there are people and companies hostile to remote work practices. Just kidding, of course it’s not hard to imagine; they are all over the place. If the COVID-19 pandemic proves anything, it’s that key sectors are completely underprepared to take a workforce online.
If you work for one of these companies or have a boss rooted in last century’s employment practices, you may find yourself now in the position of having to prove yourself all over again. I am not entirely appalled by this reality, just mostly. There are definitely problem employees at any company who would quickly use remote work as a reason to slack off at home. But I don’t think there are all that many of them, and anyone not producing at their job should probably be fired anyway — whether they are in the office or remote.
The reality, though, is that even when trust abounds and remote work is accepted, there may be some degree of trust-building that you’ll need to facilitate when you first go remote.
Over-communicate, be responsive, do your job.
That’s about all you’ll need to get over that hurdle.
Managing Yourself
Finally, there are temptations presented by remote working that can make doing normal adult things challenging.
I had the most trial and error finding a routine around these aspects of remote work. Potentially embarrassing, but it’s real.
Get Dressed
In many cases, it’s true that the dress code of a remote worker is more flexible than that of an in-office employee. I admit to embracing the yoga pants and cat-sweatshirt uniform when I first went remote, but it wasn’t long until that attire type didn’t serve me anymore. I felt like I was living a lie: trapped between the gym I wasn’t ever going to and the bedroom that I left hours ago.
These days, I get dressed in the morning — not as formal as I’d wear to the office but something that would at least be appropriate to walk down the street in.
Brush Your Teeth
My day doesn’t really start until I brush my teeth. It’s a me thing. When I first went remote, though, I got into the bad habit of having my morning coffee at my desk and getting sucked into work straight through lunch. Being caught in sweatpants and a cat t-shirt at noon made me feel lazy enough, but not having my teeth brushed just sent me over the edge.
Now, brushing my teeth before 10 a.m. is an imperative. And yes, you’d be right to think that 10 a.m. is a bit late in the morning, but that’s when I transition from focused flow to meetings and engaging with my Denver team.
You Do You
Perhaps the best remote work advice is to simply do what works best for you. Everyone is different, and the beauty of remote work is that it can be flexible; those differences can be leveraged in setting your own scheduled and style.
Being remote saves time, increases productivity, and allows people and companies to keep cranking through the apocalypse (and hopefully beyond). Yet it bears mentioning, although I’m sure I don’t have to, that these are unprecedented times, and the broader lockdown/quarantine situation adds some serious complexity to all of this that I’m living out same as you.
Maybe we’re a bit less likely in these times to want to wear pants, or we find ourselves in a more distracted environment than we normally would. This is a day-by-day thing.
We learn as we go.
Are you a seasoned remote worker? Does this resonate with you? Other tips or tricks? Please comment!
