Work from home and Skill-building: Strategy
I hope everyone is doing fine in these critical situations. By now everyone should have understood that this a unique situation where both our health and wealth are at stake and what worse is that this situation will continue for a long time. So, we will have to plan and discipline ourselves to do WFH for a long time.
Working from home is not everyone’s cup of tea, because at home there will be a lot of distractions like needing to take care of kids, taking care of parents, over-enthusiastic pets, etc, and also work from home needs a lot of discipline as well. Without discipline, you will end up working tirelessly and welcome unwanted stress. So, let us get into the strategy for work from home.
Let us divide our 24 hrs into 3 parts and plan it.
1/3 — The first 8 hours among the 24 will go towards sleep. But research shows 6–7 hours is enough to stay healthy. That leaves 1 or 2 hours in these 8 hours in which you can do is getting enough vitamin d from sunlight. Because this pandemic can affect your mental health even if you do not catch the virus. So, use these 2 hours for getting sunlight, freshen up, doing household works, etc.
2/3 — You must discipline yourself to work among these 8 hours, schedule meetings, doing the necessary tasks to achieve the targets. Now keep in mind that the work is a never-ending process and clients will come up to you for getting some things done in odd times (after working hours), learn to say no when required. But be careful while you say no if a task or a bug can wait till the next day you can say no, but if it’s needed to be done at that moment saying no will get yourself into trouble and organization might lose a potential client. So, try as much as possible to work in between these 8hrs (best is to follow 9 AM-5 PM).
3/3 — Now we have 8 hours in our hand which needs a strategy to thrive.
Spend 2 -3 hours with your family, because it is important to have a quality time with the family.
Spend 2 hours on yourself by exercising, doing meditation, etc to keep up your mental health.
Spend 2–3 hours on skill building or book reading.
Skill Building:
When you try to learn a new skill/technology, never try to learn without a strategy. Without a strategy learning a skill is like starting from scratch. A good strategy for learning a new skill/technology is to compare the technology you’re very good at vs comparing the technology you want to learn, as the logic will be the same for any of the technologies or frameworks or programming languages.
Known Tech vs Learning Tech
1. Data Types: For every technology, we will have some different data types or sometimes the same data type. So, the first thing you must look at is known as technology data types vs learning tech data types.
2. Conditional Statements: What is the known tech conditional statements vs learning technology conditional statements, how do they differ if they differ what is the syntax and how to use them.
3. Loops: What are the loops in the known skill vs loops in learning tech, and how do they differ, how to use them.
4. Operators: The next thing you need to compare is what are the operators in learning tech and how do they differ from the technology you know.
5. Basic Syntax: What is the basic syntax’s, and how do you write a basic program in the technology you want to learn.
6. Advanced Concepts: Now comes the advanced concepts, for example, if I want to learn to react and I know angular very well, then the advanced concepts I need to look for is,
How the components are defined in angular vs react. How to communicate between components. Differences between the data binding etc.
So, by comparing what you know with the technology you want to learn you will learn the new technology faster and you will understand better. By comparing, practicing each concept, and then making a small project (POC), you will better with the new technology, and you will be confident enough to learn anything at your will.
Written By — Venkatesh Ganta, Software Development Engineer
