Today is day 3 of my working from home adventure. So far, it has been going really well. I’ve been able to set aside an area to work during “work hours” and promptly put everything away when I close up shop for the day. I do this in order to separate work from home life (even though in reality they are the same place!) Here are the things I’ve found the hardest so far:
- The places I have to sit aren’t very comfortable and it’s not feasible to set up shop on the couch. Then again I’m not sure my chair at the office was very comfy either.
- Communication has been harder. This is not due to the lack of trying on both ends, and I contribute this to many factors. First, it is early on in the project and things are still fuzzy and due to the size of the effort they will be fuzzy for a little while. Also, not being able to sit at someone’s desk and hash things out is a hard habit to break. I’m sure, however, that myself and the team will continue to refine this process until we find a grove.
Despite those two things, I’m really not running into any issues, although it is only day 3. Do you work from home? Any suggestions, comments or heads up??
#1, buy yourself a good chair. you’re working, and you need a good work chair that you’ll look forward to sitting in (for a long time). Doesn’t need to be new; look at CraigsList, look at office closings, look at used office stores.
#2, break up your day, according to when you work best. If you’re not creative until mid-day, do your admin and e-mail in the a.m. and produce great work in the afternoon.
#3, eliminate distractions. Not diminish, but eliminate. Turn off your e-mail (outside of your current project), and turn it on three times/day. Turn off your home phone. If you walk pets, set a time for them and stick to it.
Great luck!
Tom Sakell / harborsights.com
Great advice Tom! Thanks for stopping by!!
Awesome tips! right now it’s a lot of conference calling and some web conferencing but not much. I’ll take a look at what you mention for sure!!
I’m not sure exactly what you’re working on but are you using any web conferencing software? I’ve been working with a remote team since December and it has been a life saver to collaborate on the application that we’re building. We use a software tool called Linktivity. Not sure how expensive it is.
Also, again not knowing what you’re doing, we use a wiki to build our functional requirements documents. It acts as a living document where the analysts and developers can work on it at the same time.