Work from Home — My routine during the Quarantine
I used to work some days in-home, back in 2018. But this time its a quite long period due to the complete lockdown over the COVID19 outbreak. It's been 2+ weeks since I’m working from home. Speaking on the positive side, I could see my productivity increased considerably due to fewer distractions. On the other side, I miss the comfortable desk set up at my office. It's pretty hard to work without a comfortable chair and additional monitors.
As working from home, I’m starting my day a bit earlier. I’ll be logging in by 8.30 in the morning.
📨 8:30 – 9:00 AM:
From 8.30 to 8.45, I’ll be reading and responding to emails and Teams messages. From 8.45 to 9.00, I’ll review my previous day’s activities and setting up the To-Do list for the day.
🚀 9:00 – 10:00 AM:
This 1 hour will be distraction-free working. I split this 1 hour into (25+5 mins) x2, which means 25 minutes of distraction-free working with 5 minutes break. I plan all my creative works during this time.
📣 10:00 – 10:15 AM:
I attend the regular stand-up with the Marketing Team briefing my previous day’s works and my current day’s priorities.
🎧 10:15 – 10:30 AM:
I’ll have a 1–1 discussion with the teammates on brainstorming about the tasks planned for that particular day. This brainstorming can also be a group activity at times.
📣 10:30 – 10:45 AM:
This is the time for Stand-up-2 with my Engineering team folks. Mostly I’ll be working closely with the Marketing and Engineering team. So I’ll be attending 2 stand-up meetings regularly.
☕ 10:45 – 11:00 AM:
I’ll take a short coffee break and have a chit-chat with my family members or colleagues.
👨💻️ 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM:
During this time, I’ll be designing wireframes/mock screens or new UI implementation in the application. As its morning, I plan most of the high priority tasks during this time.
🥗 1:00 – 2:00 PM:
Lunch Time
🔧 2:00 – 3:30 PM:
Post lunch there are high chances to feel drowsy. So during these hours I’ll be working on the low priority tasks like UI bug fixes or refactoring the code.
☕ 3:30 – 4:00 PM:
Coffee break along with a short video call with colleagues. To overcome the loneliness of working remotely, we used to make group video calls with friends from different teams, chit-chatting about their day and sharing thoughts on various topics.
📚 4:00 – 6:00 PM:
Resuming back to work with some researching and finding inspirations for designing, learning about the best practices in Product Designing and checking the possible ways to implement those in my work. And, finally logging off by 6:00 PM
😉 Pro-Tip:
Sometimes minor distractions are good, So I listen to White Noise playlist at a 20–30% volume. This gives me a feeling that I’m not alone and brings the office atmosphere.
🔨 Tools I use:
Communication: Microsoft Teams & Outlook
Daily Journal & Notes: Notion
IDE: Visual Studio 2019 enterprise and VS Code
Design: Adobe Xd, Figma
Music: Spotify
