Stepping Up to Working From Home

Working From Home?

In the summer 2023 school semester, I taught a course at my college called Office Procedures. One of the first things I do, and did, was ask my students what they felt would be the single hardest aspect of my course or the semester. They answered, in a discussion post, resoundingly: Work-Life Balance.

Work-life Balance for many people gets much harder to accomplish if you’re a Work From Home (WFH) person, more so, of course, if you’re a WFH and a parent or caregiver. The course I spoke of earlier was online-only, so most of my students, whether fresh out of high school or in the ‘second career’ category, had the same answer about tackling this common concern.

I hope this post will help you in three ways: from a technology standpoint, from an organizational standpoint, from a physical/home office standpoint.

Work From Home Technology

In a recent Instagram social media post, I did a walk around the tech I have in one of the two, small work areas in our apartment. If you don’t have time to watch it, here are some things I feel are necessary or at least helpful for an efficient, workable, WFH setup:

1. A decently powered laptop or desktop computer. You’ll see in No. 2, below, that a laptop is doable.
2. At least two monitors. One can be a laptop screen, the other an external monitor. You don’t have to pay a lot for monitors, but in brief: go larger for screen size.
3. If your work requires you to create live videos of any kind, videos that involve not only what’s on a monitor but also in and/around your office space, invest in wireless or Bluetooth earbuds. I put my wireless mic (from CoMica) to good use in creating the video on Instagram.

Those are some basics, but please, hit me up in email or on my fillable form for more information.

Calendaring and Task Lists

You probably are using your own system and/or apps. I get that. My recommendations can be taken in a general sense, unless you’d like to chat with me about why I use what I use. I’d start by saying to you to ensure your apps are cross-platform (some call these multi-platform). Mostly, I am a Windows and Android user. All apps I use have to work both in a browser (not Windows-dependent) and in Windows and on my Android phone and tablet.

For note-taking, I prefer Evernote. its basic features are available in their free plan, but I subscribe to a premium plan. Evernote also offers a To Do list, but I prefer to use Microsoft To Do. It’s free, and it’s fairly robust. For calendering, I use a variety of apps. But the one I rely on, because of the vastness of its integrations with different email platforms is Re:Work. It’s paid, but in my books is absolutely worth the money.

Boundaries and Balance

There are many, too many to count, articles and posts on how to manage work from home demands, finding balance in the same. The three that stand out for me the most are as follows.

Set Clear Office Hours. If you don’t, perhaps if you haven’t, then you may already felt burnout and the need to change that. As a contract college professor, in any active semester, I am bombarded with requests, email messages, deadlines. I have many times found myself not only starting earlier in the day and working later at night but also working through the best part of many weekends.

Set Up/Maintain Your Workspace. Have you designated a workspace, even if a temporary one? Have little space? When the tablet or laptop is on the dining room table, that’s your workspace. We have a nook in the in our L-shaped dining/living room. Well, it could/should be a “dining room”. It works perfectly as an office. At other times, my workspace is on the couch, laptop and resources at hand.

Connected to this, be clear about your office-free zones!

Be As Distraction-Free As You Can. Windows has a nifty feature it calls Focus assist. It turns off all extraneous notifications for any amount of time you wish. Your phone would have such a feature as well, or you could put an app in place. Part of this — much easier sounding than doing — is getting the buy-in of your family that when you’re working, in work hours, they will try not to disturb you. I know that’s one of the hardest pieces here.

You Will Be Productive!

And this is what I’d like to leave you with. Many studies have been done (yes, some opposing studies too) that say we are, or can be, more productive and actually work more efficiently at home. I know from my experience; I work harder from home.

Want to keep the conversation going? Shoot me a line at rob@successfulmessages.com, or use my easily fillable Contact Form to get in touch.