Emergency Tips for Working from Home

Much of the US-based workforce (and in many other countries) is now frantically trying to learn how to work (productively) from home. And many of us who’ve been working remotely before this pandemic are now chiming in with helpful tips. I’ve been working remotely since 2006, and in this brave new world it now feels like a civic duty to share what I feel has worked for me. What follows is not a comprehensive how-to; rather, a random sprinkling of insights that I feel deserve to be highlighted in the midst of all the online noise now dominating this domain.

Wear shoes. Yes, it’s all fun and games and hilarious to show up “at work” in your pajamas, or to join video meetings wearing a business shirt and boxer shorts, but believe me, the novelty wears off after a while. Your mileage may vary, but I believe that what you wear, when you “show up” at work in the morning, plants subtle seeds in your brain for the day, which sprout into varying degrees of productivity. Dress accordingly. Jeans and a t-shirt may cut it for you. It generally does for me. But I think shoes are the kicker. It’s demonstrably more difficult to kick ass while barefoot, and your lizard brain knows it (c’mon — Chuck Norris you ain’t).

Maintain access to oxygen. While carving out work space somewhere inside your home, you may be forced to get creative and make space where it didn’t exist before. While designing this workspace, consider airflow, and how to maximize it. You may have no choice but to stick a table, chair, and caffeine IV bag and pole in your bedroom’s walk-in closet. But could you at least keep the door cracked, and maybe use a fan or something for air flow? It’s pretty well-documented that rising levels of CO2 in a workspace correlate with declining cognitive function.

Don’t willfully check yourself into your company’s presence prison. Nervous managers may demand constant presence via Skype, Teams, Zoom, Slack, whatever. First and foremost: do what you need to do to please those who must be pleased. But also remember that the presence prison, with its constant stream of shallow chatter (whether online or cross-cubicle), is the enemy of deep-think task productivity. Plan out head-down/DnD hours and add them to your (public) calendar. And turn off the chatter. You may not have much flexibility here, depending on your role or function within your organization (i.e., if your role is responsive, by definition). But remember that these are unprecedented times, and everybody’s nervous, so nervous online chatter will likely be the norm for a while. Want to get serious work done? Tune out that noise for stretches at a time.

Resist the urge to fill up your day with Zoom meetings. You may be tempted — particularly if you’re an extrovert, for whom remote, solitary working is an unwelcome and unhappy part of this new existence. But I believe, as do many, that meetings aren’t where productivity happens — they’re where decisions get made so that productivity CAN subsequently happen. And remember the cost of the small spaces in your calendar between meetings. Nothing happens there. Except extra unnecessary trips to the refrigerator.

Don’t bombard the IT staff. EVERYBODY is struggling with IT stuff right now. VPNs, remote computers, file replication, dropped conference calls, webcams, etc. And the world’s internet infrastructure is now being tested like it never has before (thanks, Netflix). So the IT staff is currently trying to implement unprecedented ways of facilitating mass remote working, while also seeing heightened demand from all the end-users who are now adopting tools that are new and foreign to them. When you encounter a problem, start with Google, engage your brain, and try to solve the problem. Dammit, Jim — reboot your computer first! But go to the IT staff *only* when you have a show-stopping issue that you can’t navigate and that is imposing an expensive work stoppage.

Use a tomato timer. This is an era FULL of distraction — demonstrably more so than just a month ago. Plus, if you’re new to working at home, you’re now encountering all the built-in distractions of that environment. Your kids. Your pets. Your dirty dishes. Your refrigerator. One of the keys to productivity in this age of infinite distraction is batching similar tasks, and tackling them in spurts. When you’re tempted to check the latest COVID-19 numbers, or text your parents to make sure they’re still hunkering down in the house, or consult social media for the latest coronavirus memes… stay on task! With a tomato timer (or, hell, an actual, real-life egg timer on your desk), you can force yourself to avoid all distraction for a stretch (40 minutes?), stay on task, then reward yourself with a ten-minute break on Twitter. This may feel juvenile, or condescending. But modern-age distractions are real. All the more so when your lizard brain knows that the boss won’t walk by from time to time to see what’s on your computer screen.

Fill in communication gaps with ad-hoc video messaging. Remember how, in the office, you used to be able to walk over to somebody’s desk, and explain something quickly and nimbly, while pointing to their computer screen, all to convey something that’s difficult to articulate in words? You still can, of course, via Zoom and sharing your desktop. But now that you respect everybody’s desire to avoid the presence prison, and that you’ve adopted an asynchronous mindset (see below), you’re ready to up your game with ad-hoc video messaging. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a short video is worth at least a million. And I’m not talking about a simple video voicemail message. Rather, the use-case I’m describing is where you record your screen, and your voice, in order to depict and demonstrate something to a colleague — something that’s ad-hoc, and short-term, and throw-away. But with modern tools, you can now do this in a matter of minutes. And you deliver it in a format (obscure link to short streamed video) that allows the recipient to consume and use the content *when convenient for them*, AND in a form that allows them to rewind as many times as they need to fully ingest what you’ve shared.

Think asynchronously. I saved the best (and most complex) for last. Thinking and working asynchronously are the single most valuable thing you can start doing to maximize your productivity in this new era of mass remote work. Much has been written on this topic, and I claim no credit in identifying this work pattern, or in coining the term, or in having any unique insights here whatsoever (aside from having unwittingly craved this collaboration approach for much of my 14-year remote career). But the short version is this: Synchronous collaboration describes a pattern of work where everybody’s contribution to a project or value chain can only come *after* a colleague makes their own concomitant, upstream contributions; while one team member is working on their own piece of the puzzle, nobody else is working on theirs. Asynchronous collaboration, on the other hand, permits most or all stakeholders to work on their pieces of the puzzle simultaneously, independently, and in disparate locations — only LATER needing to plug in their contributions to the overall work product in the value chain, on disconnected schedules.

A lot of modern work *is* actually done asynchronously, of course, and these descriptions are fairly simplistic. But it’s fair to say that a lot of (most?) workplaces still default to synchronous patterns for communication, and also sometimes for producing the work product, as well. An example: I’m working on a project, and I have a question for a colleague. It might be difficult to continue my work on this particular component without an answer to that question, and so I interrupt that colleague (with a “quick question”) to get an answer. Or I stop working on this completely until I have my answer. Then, once I have the intel I need, I continue my work, until I encounter the next question. This pattern repeats, over and over and over, largely because people are afraid to “waste” work by going down a road that might later be contradicted or counter-indicated by the answer to a question that *could* be available right now, if I just interrupt somebody to get it. And everybody is happy to make themselves permanently available to interruption. Because it’s nice to feel needed, right? To feel important. It’s also polite and altruistic. To be accessible. “No, no — no worries — of course I have time for a quick question right now.”

It’s not wrong to be wary of unintended, non-productive tangents. Going down the wrong road because you don’t have the right intel at the right time *can* be expensive. But the unintended, and often invisible, consequence (and cost) is that many of us now live our daily work lives in a perpetual state of flailing and drowning, awash in a sea of interruptions and work stoppages and meetings and “quick questions.” All at the expense of creativity and deep work and sustained focus. We’re all so petrified of “wasting time” by forging ahead down a slightly wrong path, that we’re all happy to play interruption pinball at the office all day long, only departing the familiar waters of shallow work when it’s safe to do so — at home, at night, or on the weekends.

And in this brave, new world of mass remote work, the reality is that it will be much harder to catch people’s attention in a synchronous way. Because, of course, everybody is now learning how to work from home. And they’re all coming to grips (as are you) with the reality that work, for most of us, is now no longer an uninterrupted stream of attention from 9:00 to 5:00, as it was in the office. Please don’t pretend that you’re in your work closet, attending to email and phone and Skype and Teams and Slack and Google Hangouts and Whatsapp for 8 or 9 contiguous hours all day long. That’s not how remote work works. Your kids demand attention. As does your spouse. And your pets. And your phone. Wait, is the oven still on? Holy cow, look at that pile of dirty dishes. What’s that noise? The CDC said what?

Think that’s an exaggeration? You won’t think so for long. And if you stubbornly maintain your synchronous work habits, now that everybody’s in their pajamas all day, exposed to all these distractions at home, you’ll find that it now takes you 5 business days to close the loop on tasks and projects that used to only take 3.

So, what does this mean? What am I suggesting is the answer? How do you pivot to an asynchronous mindset?

Certainly not overnight. And, sadly, there’s no simple template or formula.

Instead, it’s a mind shift. The key is this: any time you have a question — or a task assignment, or some other form of collaboration touch-point — assume that the colleague in question is not available right now, and may not be available for some time. So you should a) first, dig in and confirm that the collaboration is absolutely necessary, b) do EVERYTHING in your power to take this task/project/chunk of work as far forward as you absolutely can, then c) package up your question/assignment/clarification/request/complaint/comment in as comprehensive a way as possible, before delivering it. Assume that the other person will unpackage this, ingest it, and act on it at 2:00 tomorrow morning, at which point you will NOT be available for any collaboration whatsoever. Then put yourself in their shoes. What questions might they have? Answer them before they’re asked. What intel/details might they need to make sense of all this? Deploy the empathy that God gave you and supply the needed context — remember that all this context is primed and ready at the front of your brain, but almost certainly pushed to a dark corner in the back of your colleague’s brain, dusty and expensive to retrieve. Give them all the context and intel they might need, in one place, in a single coherent flow, to make their own contribution a thoughtful and productive one.

Yes, this requires more effort on your part. And no, this approach doesn’t fit every type and every instance of peer collaboration in which you might ever engage. But it fits more often than you’re ready to admit, if you’ve been mired in the synchronous model for some time. The unintended advantage is that it also forces you to think more deeply about the problem/project/task at hand, which almost always adds value to the whole exercise. In some unquantifiable-yet-notable portion of the time that I do this in *my* work, halfway through the exercise of preparing the necessary communication, I’ve thought through the problem in a whole new way — to the degree where I’ve discovered a solution, all by my lonesome, and I (legitimately) no longer need input from that colleague after all. That’s a real win!

Once your whole team embraces this model, your projects will be driven more by thoughtful contemplation, and less by the shallow mental exercise of collaboration by perpetual ping-pong. And when the coronavirus pandemic is behind us, and most of us go back to trudging into the office every day, this new mindset is JUST as valuable in that old cubicle paradigm. So, congratulations — you’ve just permanently upped your game!

We may not all be cut out for remote working from home. But this is the hand we’ve all been dealt, in these wild, crazy, and scary times. Thanks for making the best of it. I hope these remote-work musings help you do just that.