How to Work Remotely Using Paymo
With the outbreak of Coronavirus across the whole world, all of us have to work remotely, some for the very first time. Which can be scary.
No, this is not another post about how to work remotely. We wrote one way before this crisis.
But one about how to responsibly continue our activities and care for our team with the help of a work management tool like Paymo.
Here are the most common pitfalls you may suddenly find yourself in and how to deal with them, both as a team member and project manager.
FOR TEAM MEMBERS
1. Not sure how to start your day
You left the office on Friday. Then fast forward, woke up on Monday, only to feel overwhelmed by how much work you have to do. No habits, no routine, everything gone. Don’t panic though, you’ve just been temporarily unrooted from your old habits. It’s time to form new ones by asking yourself a few questions. Do you need a personal workspace? Or have any preferred hours when you can work at full capacity, without being distracted?
Once you’ve figured them out, the next step is to plan your own agenda.
Access the My Tasks area from the Home module, which reunites all the tasks you’ve been assigned to, to see what’s on your plate for today and all the upcoming days. You decide how you want to conduct your work, so feel free to group tasks after their due date or priority for a sense of urgency.
2. Lack of clear directions
Inside an office, all emergencies or unclarities are just a colleague away from being solved. A project manager, team lead, or someone more experienced than you can probably help you out with whatever you’re struggling with. But in a remote environment, fuzzy details are difficult to deal with. You might ignore them at first and march on with the task only to find midway that you were off track — hence needing to start over again (guilty here as well 😅).
Avoid rushing into things until you know all the requirements beforehand.
Check each task in Paymo for its details such as description, due dates, number of estimated hours, and priorities to get a clear picture of what’s expected from you. Either hover over a task, for a quick glance over the most crucial ones, or click on a task for the full task details. You’ll work much more relieved, even tackle more tasks in parallel than before.
3. Overcoming the status quo
We’re all used to doing things in a certain way, hence don’t like it when somebody is trying to forcefully “feed” us a new tool. It robs us from our freedom and stifles our productivity, especially if the software has a high learning curve with little to no help materials. And what about us, creatives, who must rely on certain tools to deliver our craft?
Luckily, Paymo offers you enough flexibility to tackle tasks the way you feel most comfortable.
Through task views, you can visualize tasks either as a:
- List — for daily operations
- Table — to monitor the most critical details at a glance
- Board — to follow the steps a task has to goes through
- Gantt Chart — to understand how they relate to each other via task dependencies
Each view comes with its own grouping and filtering options, so you can be as granular as possible when the time requires it.
On the other hand, integrations with popular tools allow you to carry on your work the way you’re used to, with no data loss. Sync all the tasks assigned to yourself into your Google Calendar, turn Slack messages into comments or detailed tasks, or track time in any Adobe Creative Cloud product for convenience.
4. Drifting
Inevitably, you’ll depend on a few colleagues’ work before you advance yours. Front-end developers might be waiting for the final design assets, while designers can’t move on without a proper wireframe or copy from the copywriters. This idle time results in drifting into other activities, making it hard to recoup and focus on the task at hand — 23 minutes and 15 seconds to be more exact. But this is just half of the story. The reason why you might also be drifting is because you’re not too considerate of your own time.
Become more aware of your efforts through the healthy habit of time tracking.
Paymo allows you to track time either manually, via the web timer, or one of our dedicated tools. Like the desktop widget, which shows you a breakdown of your time spent for today and the past days, or the mobile app for when you work on the go or find yourself in a client meeting.
All time records will instantly get recorded inside the Timesheets module as time cards, for you to check on a later notice. Either on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, depending on which view you choose.
Speaking of them, the most noticeable one is Active Timers. Why? Because through it, you can see who’s tracking time for which task and for how long, at the same time with you. A little nudge that might give you a clear perspective of why some tasks are being delayed. They’re not delayed on purpose, someone is just working on them as we speak.
5. Real-time communication is too stressful
The peril of working remotely is real-time communication, staying connected at all times as a means of being productive. Even if this results in sacrificing the quality of our own work and well-being.
DON’T! Creative endeavors like coding, designing, or writing require an extended period of deep work, with little to no interruptions as possible. Instead, stay connected when you need to attend meetings or discuss strategic issues that are easier to deal with in a call than an email. For the rest of the matters, communicate asynchronously without expecting instant replies.
Chat with your team about the latest project updates using Paymo.
Thanks to assigned task comments, you can…
