‘Take Control of Working From Home Temporarily’

Glenn Fleishman:

We’re in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. In the middle of a global viral outbreak, you were told or asked to work from home — and you’ve never or rarely had to be productive where you live before. What to do? We’re here to take at some stress out of your life with a new, free book that details how to set up a home office and balance work and home life for those not accustomed to it.

Free 55-page e-book from Fleishman and assorted contributors. Some of this stuff sounds basic, but if you’ve never worked from home — particularly for an extended stretch — everything about working from home is new territory.

I’ve spent most of my life working from home. Much of what I can suggest are the basics:

  • Make work time work time. I suspect this is one of the hardest things for folks who, until now, consider “home” and “work” to be places not modes.
  • Spend the time and if necessary, money, to create a comfortable productive workspace. You’ll get uncomfortable quickly spending long hours at the keyboard if your desk (or worse, “desk”) is not an appropriate height and if you don’t have a good chair.
  • For collaboration with a team, however big or small, make the official modes of collaboration crystal clear. If work communication is spread across an ad hoc collection of mediums — just randomly spewed across, say, Slack, iMessage, and email — that way madness lies.
  • It’s good to have a virtual water cooler. For me, that’s a Slack group with a bunch of friends, most of whom have long worked from home. It absolutely combats loneliness, but it’s essential to treat it like a break room. Hang out in bursts, not all day long.

★ Monday, 16 March 2020