COVID-19 Blog Series: Productivity at Home
On our website, you can find posts regarding creating better schedules and being mindful about your environment for maximizing work from home. Though these may have helped, there seems to be something still missing. It may be hard to maintain focus, even after you have made a good schedule and environment.
So, what’s missing? At work, you’re around your coworkers. Though we may be annoyed by interruptions, there’s a value to the social aspect. As a professor, I didn’t realize how much I benefited from talking with my colleagues about situations that come up and looking for ideas to problem-solve. At the office, it was easy to see if my coworker was available by seeing their office door open. Also, I wonder how much seeing them working helped me to stay productive.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been getting together with some friends, and we created a “work zoom” where we turn on our video and work. Using the same idea of the scheduling, each hour, we work for 50 minutes and take a 10 minute break together. I found it to be very helpful in my own productivity and helped me to stay connected with friends. Here are my thoughts about working together with others on video.
Set a schedule. I do 50 minutes of work and 10 minutes of break every hour. It’s nice to have that brief chat with friends during every hour. However, this doesn’t have to be strict, it could be 45 minutes with 15 minutes of break if needed.
Hourly Goals. At the start of the hour, we share our work goal for that hour. Then at the break, we share what we accomplished. Together, we celebrate our hourly accomplishments and talk about what we can do to make the next hour better. Personally, I've learned that I needed to be more realistic with my hourly goal. Instead of accomplishing three or five things on my list, I now put one or two things on my hourly list.
Be flexible. This social aspect of work is not designed for you or your coworkers to be disciplinarians. It’s to help foster that missing social aspect when working from home. Your work group may decide to have longer breaks later in the day or to start the work day later than normal. Just be flexible and find a schedule that works and build from there.
Working from home is different. As I have mentioned before, none of these ideas are an instant fix to make everything better. Instead the suggestions in these blogs are for you to try out and see if it works or not. If it’s not helpful, leave it and try something else. Who knows, while trying out different things, you may find a new way to help you be productive.
