Everything You Need to Work From Home Like a Pro

Remote work is well known for the difficulty of keeping yourself alert and alive. Well, those who have never experienced remote work before may wonder: how effective will an employee be if they are not in the office 8 hours a day? In fact, at home, you can be quite productive, and in the office, you can simulate hustle with zero results. It all depends on the ability of employees to organize themselves and on the proper remote work gear.

We’ll talk about this today, namely, what you need to work effectively from home.

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The right attitude and work rituals

It may be difficult for many employees to immediately adapt to the remote format. People are used to relaxing at home, not working. But even here, you can quite effectively tune in to the working mood.

Try to keep a work schedule, such as starting work at 8:00. Create rituals to get you into a working mood. For example, in the morning before work, you can take a shower, put on clean clothes, and make yourself a cup of coffee. 

Your body needs to understand that now is the time to get down to work. And, of course, reward yourself for successful and fruitful work. Go grocery shopping, go for a run, eat something delicious.

The work should also be divided – at least into 4-5 large fragments. For some, short breaks every 20 minutes work best, while others like to take a break every hour or two. In any case, a successful division of tasks is the only way to work in your home office successfully for a long time.

If you work at different times every day in a bed and pajama pants, after a while, you will inevitably get deformed. Well, you CAN arrange a detox day one time in two weeks. But if this becomes the standard state, after a couple of weeks, you will not want to do anything at all.

Powerful tools and services

Powerful and popular services help organize the workflow and keep abreast of the working routine. For example, the following business tools have proven themselves to be truly excellent for work (this is a basic list of what can be useful during work, you can supplement it with your own if you wish):

• Slack – a great communication channel. The cool thing is that you can integrate other teamwork services into Slack: Google, Asana, Teamline, Confluence, and others. Everything is structured by channels, then it is easy to find the necessary information through them. Separate channels are designed for each process, general work issues, and communication on free topics. It is possible to communicate with other employees in PM, create conversations for several people, share files and make calls.

• Asana is a convenient project management service. It is recommended to use it when you need to set a task for a period of two days or more. You can structure projects into sections, set up collaboration, add files, discuss tasks, and delegate them to different employees. A great analog is a ClickUp tool.

• Teamline is a simple tool for scheduling short-term tasks. Helps out when you need to complete the task every day.

• Confluence is a system for sharing within a team. It contains all the information that is useful for teamwork. This tool can be used as a knowledge base, repository of reports, important documents, and instructions.

• Google Services. Well, today, you can do simply nothing without them: they include email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and a calendar. Upload the results of work, various documents, files, presentations to the cloud storage, to which the whole team will have access.

• Zoom. A good old Zoom – a great solution for making remote team calls.

• Telegram – now almost everyone has it. And in work, it also helps out if suddenly Slack doesn’t load or some other technical difficulties arise.

• Bandicam. A simple screen recorder that saves when you need to record how the software works, show the path to a file to your colleague, or just record a team call, during which you almost fell asleep and missed half of the important information. Well, if you are a developer who just loves Linux, download a screen recorder for Ubuntu. 

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Unstoppable communication

This is a crucial point in remote work. Often, home workers can feel lonely without the usual communication within the company, and this leads to a decrease in involvement in the overall working process. Therefore, the constant interaction of remote employees is so important. When colleagues see each other’s activity and the general result of the work, it is easier for them to focus on tasks.

Arrange video calls where you can discuss not only current tasks but also share news and just chat. It is important to feel the support of each other even at a distance.

Create a channel in Slack or Telegram, where you can talk about life, joke, share memes, interesting articles and facts, recommend books, movies, and much more.

Best remote work gear 

At home work, not only software is important, but also equipment that facilitates the entire workflow.

• Laptop

Perhaps the most indispensable tool. In general, the performance and speed of modern laptops are not inferior to classic PCs. Moreover, they are compact, mobile, durable, and have basic equipment with a microphone, Wi-Fi, camera. Obviously, for comfortable work, it is desirable to purchase a sufficiently powerful laptop, but at the same time, you can always choose the optimal characteristics under the available budget.

• Chair 

A workstation isn’t complete until it has a nice chair to sit on. It makes it possible to forget about the body and work with the mind really effectively. Of course, there is a drawback: inactivity develops, but this is easily solved by forcing yourself to exercise and take breaks.

• Headset

Headphones with a microphone are essential for every remote worker to communicate. Communication with clients, customers, colleagues, management is a necessary part of any activity. A wireless headset is suitable if you often have to move around during calls, a headset with a USB connection will provide high-quality sound and noise reduction.

• Webcam

As a rule, this gadget is already built into most laptop models, but often it does not shoot in the best quality. Therefore, if the requirements for picture quality are high, it is recommended to purchase an additional device.

• Other useful devices

Don’t forget to get a wireless mouse, a desk lamp, a couple of power banks, and maybe a scanner if you’re dealing with a constant stream of documents.

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Wrap up 

In the end, we would like to say one important thing: if you still want remote work to become a long time staff (perfectly, a lifetime), you need to understand what you refuse in the office and be delighted with it.

Even the most newfangled office is about a special company policy, a lot of screens, regular briefings, table neighbors, the daily need to come to work, not very healthy breaks, smoke breaks.

To be effective at remote work, you first need to love it!