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 aligned with everyone else on the team, on who's working with what, and Also tools like Office 365, Google Documents, they're all web based. Now our emails, everything is web based. And so you find yourself being much less limited by the technology to work from home than if this would have been something around 10 years ago. So this is actually a really interesting time to have us be all forced to to work from home. But what you'll notice is very essential is you're going to become very concise and efficient on the way that you communicate. Which actually brings me to the third point. You're going to need to over communicate because things like discussions around the water cooler, bumping into colleagues and exchanging ideas or even having face to face meetings is not something we have a luxury of right now. But when you're working remote, you can recreate these environments very cool and in interesting ways. If you think about water cooler, it's kind of like a live chat environment. There's tools like Slack that's very popular that you can have everybody be on a community chat and everybody gets to have that conversation. So the cross pollination of ideas can still happen in a virtual setting. And instead of having face to face meetings, you can actually have these virtual meetings using Google Hangouts or using Google Meet or Zoom. And there's a lot of different platforms that are so easy to use. I mean there's one of them that's called appear.in which, which you can just log in on your browser, send the same link to everybody else and everyone gets to connect and see each other. Having the camera enabled, the camera on your computer, which most laptops have today, makes it even more personal and personable when you actually work remotely so you can see each other. Because body language is so important in the way that you communicate, all this can be recreated digitally. And so you have these in place. And when you're still using your tools like emails, you're going to want to take this time to really nurture how you can communicate more effectively. So if you're using your emails, know that it's to share information across a lot of people or an individual, or it's really to give a delegation or a clear action step to people. So become more efficient and more eloquent in the way that you communicate. In a time where there's going to be over communication requirements, you're going to want to make sure that you are clear in the way that you do. So the final thing I want to highlight is really your self care. Working from home can come with a lot of mental overload. You can find yourself again not respecting your own boundaries, finding yourself overworking. So you're going to want to make sure that you set yourself time to take breaks to enjoy the fact that you have extra time. You don't need to commute, you can work on yourself. You want to stay active if you have a chance and you're not under strict quarantine to maybe go and take a walk and just get some fresh air, get some sunlight. Because if you're just always staying indoors for your personal time, your work time, your eating time, it can become a little claustrophobic. So, so don't neglect your mental health. Reach out to the people you care about. Have some conversations. We are living at a time that technology can bring us all together. Use it to connect with other people and not just plugged into an endless stream of news that can get your mind so cluttered with voices that it actually can bring you down. So keep your positive vibes, find yourself interacting with friends and family and find some fun that you can have in the moments that we are quarantined or finding ourselves working from home. You will find amazing benefits both on looking at ways you can be more productive. And in the times that everything goes back to normal, you'll now realize that remote working, which was just a dream or a hope that you would have in the future, is now maybe something you'll have a choice to do, especially if you show how efficient you are and how your productivity might even go up instead of down. I hope you've enjoyed this video and I'd be curious to know, for your company or for your employment, what were the work arrangements during this crisis and I'd love to start the conversation, see if any of these tips have been helpful. Maybe I missed out on something and I'd love to hear from you and so leave a comment so I can read everything, interact with you, and I'll keep bringing you some more content that can be very applicable for the current situation that we are in right now so we can all pull through together as a community, make it more productive, make it a growth experience and come out on the other side much stronger. This is Jason Campbell and I'll talk to you next sa.