How to be effective when Working from Home (WFH)

Nazanin Delam Feb 12 ・2 min read

#productivity #career

How often do you WFH (Work from Home)? 🏡
Here are some tips to increase your productivity when WFH:

🎯 Make a priority list for your tasks

At the end of each day I usually put together a list of tasks I need to do tomorrow in priority, so the next day I know exactly how to navigate my day.

📆 Maintain a regular schedule

Try to maintain your regular working schedule when you WFH. If your schedule changes communicate your schedule to your team.

🥗☕️ Take regular breaks and set specific lunchtime

It is important to take regular breaks when you are at home. I love to go for a walk and smell some air or get coffee. Don’t burn yourself out all day this will impact your productivity negatively.

🏡 Let others know you WFH by setting status on communication channels

If you are using Slack, Teams or any other communication channels it is great to set your status to WFH so anyone reaching you out knows you are not in the office. Also set a time block for the day on your calendar as WFH, to inform team members who need to meet with you.

💻 Proactively get back to team members who need something from you

Stay proactive and get back to others in time. Make sure you have notifications on for you Slack or other communications apps and be aware of messages mentioning you or any other issues happening in your team.

🎥 Call into meetings, be present and ask questions

Don’t skip meetings when you WFH. Always call into meetings and be present. Try to comment and ask questions. This shows that you are paying attention.

⏳ Don’t work over hours just because you’re WFH

If you WFH have an end-of-the-day ritual. 30 mins before the end of the workday, wrap your tasks and set your mind to your life events.

Hope these are helpful,
Share more of your WFH tips in comments.

DISCUSS (2)

DEV is sort of like Medium, but it's open source and 100% focused on developers.

Now reaching over 3 million visitors per month, it's the fastest growing software development community in the world.

It's free, devoted to the open web, and will never have popups or a pay wall.

Get Started Now

Nazanin Delam

👩🏻‍💻 I write code for Von Neumann machines for now —— ❤️ JS / Wonder Wife 💍 / 📖 & ☕️ Senior Software Engineer @Netflix 📸 Instagram / 🐦Twitter: @naz_intech

Thomas H Jones II

Feb 13

Always found "work from office" days to be far more difficult to be productive than "work from home" days.

If I go into the office, it's generally because I have a specific task that I need to do. That may be a quick task or a full-day task. Invariably – and regardless of how much time I'd budgeted to the target-task – I find that the amount of time I have to spend on other than my target-task(s) is several times greater than for the target-task. When "in the office", it seems like it's open season on drive-by requests.

Contrast to working from home, I can hop out of bed, roll down to my laptop, login and just start cranking. The only interruptions generally being what comes in via email or Slack. As async communication-tools, those interruptions are selectable with respect to when and how you allow them. For me, accepting interruptions from async communication-tools typically happens while I wait for our CI tools to run their tests on code I've pushed.

As to being as regimented as what you're suggesting? I find that to be the antithesis of being productive. Most tasks have "natural"/logical break-points. If those boundaries don't align to what you've suggested above, you subvert your own productivity trying to make them align.