Working Remote During COVID-19- 5

Tips from the 100state Team

Treat it like a real job, not a vacation.

If you’ve never worked remotely before, you may be excited to spend the day at home, able to work at your leisure with your pet by your side. Maybe you are thinking that now you can wake up on your own schedule or sneak off for a little bit without anyone noticing. While this seems ideal, we’re here to tell you this is a bad idea.

When working remotely, it is important to keep to a semi-normal schedule. You don’t want your job performance to suffer while working from home, and to help reduce performance loss, you should try to keep your schedule nearly the same. It is recommended when working from home that you split your day into 90 minute windows, taking small 15 minute breaks in between.

Keeping to as normal a schedule as possible will help when you inevitably must return to a physical workplace.

Get ready for the day.

An extension of the last tip, we recommend that you still wake up, shower, and get dressed as if you were about to go out for the day. If you look good, you’ll feel good. As nice as it sounds to just roll out of bed five minutes before you have to clock in, self-care and upkeep is one way you can avoid the depression that can come with isolation. This will also keep you in a routine so that you don’t experience schedule shock when quarantine ends.

Make a space.

Try your best to make a separate space for your work life. If you have an office area, try to convert it into a temporary work zone. While working from bed may seem like the ideal situation, it will confuse your brain– and the next time you try to fall asleep, your brain won’t exit work mode! Try to create a space, even a small corner, that is only for work so that when you leave that area for the day, you leave work for the day, too.

In the philosophy of Feng shui, it is argued that if you have your desk in the same room as your bedroom, your bed should be furthest from the door and your desk should be the closest—additionally, they say that you should make sure your desk faces the door.

Put that phone on mute.

You may be tempted to have your phone on you more now than in your normal day-to-day. While it’s nice to be able to pause work and take a personal call or text, it can seriously throw off your focus and next thing you know, you’re still on your phone 30 minutes after initially responding. To mitigate this, turn off your notifications for social media. When you’re on break, reconnect. We promise that your message will still be waiting for you in 90 minutes.

Social distancing does not mean completely isolating.

While physically going to a bar or coffee shop may be out of the question, try to keep yourself as social as possible. We recommend niche social media communities, like those on Reddit or Facebook, as a way to interact with other humans.

Additionally, don’t box your coworkers out. Make sure that you have some sort of communication system set up through Slack or Microsoft Teams so that everyone in your company is communicating effectively and efficiently while this social distancing lasts.

Remember: you can’t catch COVID-19 from social media or video calls, so utilize this beautiful internet at your fingertips in order to keep yourself sane and upbeat.

Pay attention to the positive.

It’s easy to get swallowed into the information hole that exists right now. Every 10 minutes, there’s another update about the COVID-19 pandemic and how it’s affecting the world. When working from home, try your best to hang on to the positive news that does come your way, and use it as motivation to continue, even if things are weird right now.  The subreddit r/HumansBeingBros is a fantastic source of smiling material, and there are plenty of similar pages on Facebook and Twitter as well.

Now, more than ever, make sure you give your brain some positivity to munch on.

If you need something positive to grasp onto, I’ve now watched the video of these penguins at Shedd Aquarium about 500 times, so there’s always that.