With the arrival of the awful COVID-19 virus the government has quite rightly brought in measures to limit the spread of infection and to relieve as much pressure as possible on our NHS and front line workforce and as such working from home is now keenly encouraged.
The guidance is to work from home where possible but many people have never worked from home or are unsure about how to go about setting themselves up for working from home.
By following the below steps you can ensure that you are as effective as possible working from home which ultimately allow you to work effectively and efficiently.
Number 1 – Find a workspace
It may be convenient to work from the sofa with your laptop but this is not conducive to effective working. You will have poor posture and be too tempted to stick on the TV ultimately making life harder for yourself.
Find a suitable area that you can work from, it should have the following:
- A solid work surface to put your computer on with enough space to allow adequate arm support and writing space
- Natural light – Working in a dark room or using too much artificial light results in too much blue wavelength light which has been linked to headaches and eye strain – Read more here
- Isolated from sources of distraction and noise – If you are making work calls it will not seem professional if the recipient can hear screaming kids or the dog barking in the background.
- A good internet connection – Your chosen space would ideally have access to a wired connection via a ethernet cable but a decent wifi connection would work fine too.
- A supportive chair – Ideally this will be an office chair or gaming chair but a straight back dining chair works just as well. Don’t be tempted to use an armchair or beanbag this will just lead to poor posture , back pain and premature tiredness.
Number 2 – Kit your home out
Assuming your job requires access to a computer then you will almost certainly benefit from adding the below features – This goes for working in the office too.
- Get multiple monitors, we have installed multi monitor setups for most of our clients and we have yet to find a single person who does not immediately see the benefit – You can do twice the work and be twice as effective. You won’t have to switch tabs to see email or Sage or your browser tabs. Go one step further by raising your monitors with a monitor arm to keep valuable desk space.
Below is my home setup – Its far from ‘high end’ and I have a small house but with a simple cheap desk (under £60 here), a gaming chair and a monitor arm I have ample work space with all my required software available.
Work on the principle of 1 step retrievable – this is to say that anything you are working on should be retrievable with 1 step (1 mouse click / 1 keyboard press etc). By using multiple monitors you can access your common programs within 0-1 mouse clicks simply by having them open on separate screens
Multi Screen setups like the above can be done without much cost – Monitor arms like the one pictured above can be acquired for around £30-40 and additional monitors from £60 each. Add in a £20-30 for a few USB to VGA/DVI adapters and you can have 3 monitors running from basically any machine for under £200
Next up invest in a wireless keyboard and mouse set – Having a wired keyboard and mouse may give you fractionally better control so if you are a designer or hard core gamer then stick to wired but for all other users wireless is the way to go – No cables to get in the way and many now offer charging stations. My mouse has a USB charge dock so at the end of each day I dock the mouse to recharge – Keyboard batteries typically last for months so no worries there.
Have a pen and paper to hand – A simple A5 pad and a few pens (in case 1 runs out of ink) will allow you to jot down numbers or quick notes for use later on.
Digitise these notes – At the end of each day you can use a program such as PaperPort to scan and file your notes – A good document management program like PaperPort will use OCR or optical character recognition to convert your hand writing into text making your hand written notes fully searchable and editable.
Combine the above with a digital pen and you can even store notes digitally with the click of a button – Check it out here
Number 3 – Follow a home routine
Its far too easy when working from home to amble downstairs in your PJ’s at 8.55am and then spend the next 8 hours sat in front of your computer but by doing this you are not migrating to ‘work mode’ , having a routine allows you to keep a work / life balance and getting dressed for work is an important marker for that process. Now obviously you can’t commute to work but you can follow your usual morning hygiene/washing routing, have your usual breakfast and put on some clothes that aren’t your PJs…
I would not go as far as putting on a full on 3 piece suit but a shirt and trousers will put your brain into ‘work mode’ and it will also ensure that you switch to ‘home time’ when you get back into your PJ’s again.
Number 4 – Make a daily list
This is a old hack but it works – do this even when working at the office.
Make a list of all the things you need to do each day and put your smaller 5-10 min jobs first (if possible) , By getting these smaller jobs done first it will leave you with less to worry about later on. Also its good for your morale – If you have a list of 10 things and you have cleared 7 of those smaller jobs by the end of the day its far better mentally to have only 3 things left than the other way round.
File each day’s list at the end of the day (See number 3).
Number 5 – Take a break!
You should be doing this no matter where you work but when at home its far too easy to just sit in front of the screen all day – Make sure you take your lunch break as you normally would and if you have a garden then grab some air!
As always if you need help with remote working give us a call on 0115 7848850 or visit our website at redpenguin.it