Working From Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Hey, everybody, this is Jason Campbell. And what I'm going to put together for you today is four essential things to consider if you're going to be working remote. It's very interesting times that we live in right now, and a lot of people are either forced to stay at home under quarantine and a lot of offices are forcing people to have to work from home. And it's interesting because if you would have looked back a couple months ago, the idea of working from home was actually something that we were hoping to get more of as employees. And now, as it happens, we. We all get to experience more of it. So how do you make sure you make the most of the situation that we're in, that we don't necessarily have a choice? These four tips are really gonna be helpful for helping you be more optimized, more efficient, and really not lose your mind as you do your work from home. So first off, you wanna pay attention to one thing. There needs to be a space that is set and a time that is set for when you are on work mode. This is the crucial first thing, because if you are working from home, this, there is a natural overlap between your personal life and your work life because of the physical space that you are in. So what I highly recommend is you block off the time that you know you are on work mode and you block out the time that you know you are not. It's so easy to get your life to completely consume itself with work time if this is what's happening within your home and you need to have boundaries for yourself. The other thing is you need to actually communicate with the people within your, your household to make them understand what does it mean when you are on work mode? Because once they understand that, hey, when I'm on work mode, it's not that I'm ignoring you, it's not that I'm not showing you love or care, but it's because you need to understand that I am in a workspace and this is what I would normally do outside of my home. Now it has to be done here, and you want to make sure you've communicated that with everyone in the house. This is a particularly crucial time to be practicing this boundary setting within your own time. So having those limits, having that calendar that shows when you're on and off is super important. And when you speak about the space. I remember when I had my own company and I was in real estate and I set up a home office at the time. And what I ended up doing is setting my desk to Be right next to my bed. And here's what would happen. The moment I would get out of bed, I would jump on my computer, start working. And at night, I would keep working until the last minute of energy that I had and then go to bed and sleep. And during the times that I did sleep, I couldn't get enough rest because my mind was always thinking about work. And so even though you're setting limits within time, you also want to be conscious of the space that you set up as an office space. So in my home here, where I'm isolated right now, I actually put a table, I have my screen, I have my laptop. And this is the space that when I sit here, this is my work mode. And I have it outside of my bedroom, which is a personal thing that I know that when I do it allows me to understand that my bedroom is a sacred space for me to relax, sleep. And now I have this desk, this space that I set up as my office. And doing that physical delimitation also allows you to respect your time boundaries and your spatial boundaries come naturally with that. And again, when you communicate with the members in your family about when you're sitting here, this is your work mode. It can become much easier for you to get locked in, dialed in, and really effective at getting your work done. Now, the second thing is really a question about technology and making sure that you're properly set up for remote work. Luckily, we're living at a time that a lot of things like cloud storage processes are all based on like Google Chrome or any other web browser. You can access a lot of the things that you would normally access in the workspace actually from home as well. So a couple essential things is maybe just making sure your Internet connection is very well set up so that you can actually connect on any calls that need to be done, since a lot of your work is now going to be done remotely. When it comes to access to documents, if they were all stored on a local server, you're going to want to communicate with whoever's your IT leaders to see what are the ways you can access those files in a secure way. But if you're a smaller organization, possibly these are tools like Dropbox or Google Drive and many other file sharing services that allow you to access all the important documents that you need to move your work forward. If you have tools that allow you to work across projects together, such as Trello or Asana, this can really help you keep alignment.