These Seasoned Experts Have Advice for You to Follow to be Working Remotely for the First Time, You need to stay productive, maintain communication and connection, and take care of yourself.

By now, your entire office is probably working remotely because of the coronavirus. And if you’ve never done this before, it’s almost certainly an adjustment–for you, your employees, and your organization at large.

How’s it going so far?

In the past few years, I’ve talked to a $2 billion company that is entirely remote, collected tips on how to build great remote leadership habits, explored the challenges of maintaining strong data security when you have people working from home, and gathered tips from founders who manage their productivity and sanity by drawing clearer lines between when they’re “in” and “out” of the office. Still, there’s a difference between talking about remote work and actually doing it.

So earlier this week, I took an informal poll of my Inc. co-workers, now that we’ve all been working from home for several days. I asked folks with extensive work-from-home experience for their advice, and relative newcomers for their biggest surprises so far. Their responses generally fell into three categories:

Staying productive

Struggles:

• “Bewilderingly–even though I have fewer distractions now–it feels like there are fewer hours in the day. It could just be that routine tasks like answering emails are taking a bit longer since all my tools aren’t quite as streamlined in my work-from-home setup, and a minute or two per task adds up. I feel like I’m having to be more diligent about writing down and following my daily to-do list, because otherwise I’ll fall behind.”
• “I find myself wanting to make small comments throughout the day about work and what’s in the news. Instead, I turn to social media and immediately get sucked into a distracting loop. Before, I could just make the joke, hear a chuckle, and move on. Now, I find myself saying, ‘Oh, shoot, how did I just spend 15 minutes checking Twitter?'”

Advice:

• “The one thing I do when working from home: I get dressed for work. I’m not one of the pajama people. Getting dressed and going to my desk–as opposed to sitting on a sofa with a laptop–gives me the sense of a workplace, of punching in, if you will.”

• “Replicate your office experience as closely as you can at home. Structure your day exactly as you would a workday, starting, taking lunch/breaks, and signing off around the same time you normally would. Set up your workspace in a similar fashion, eat the same kinds of snacks, and check your email after hours the same way you would on office days. Also, don’t have children.”

• “No TV, no matter what. You cannot get anything done with CNN on in the background. This goes double for Mad Men on auto-play. Save TV for later.”

Read more: https://www.inc.com/cameron-albert-deitch/remote-work-advice-best-practices.html?icid=hmsub3