Working from home is not new to software developers. There are thousands of freelancers who work from home regularly. There are also employed developers who work from home at least few days a week. Software development is one of the jobs that can be fully supported remotely.
Necessity to work from home has become mandatory now due to world wide spread of COVID 19 virus and resulting lock down due to this pandemic. Though initially forced to allow work from home in a large scale, now many tech companies are seeing benefits and increased productivity with this new work order. So it looks like even after we recover from Corona virus, a large proportion of developers will continue working from home.
Though there is increased freedom while you are working from home; there are new set of challenges as well. Keeping yourself focused with all source of distractions within reach of hand is not easy. You must show great accountability when no one is directly seeing what you are doing every minute.
I am not a veteran work from home professional. But I have found the practices described in this article helpful to increase productivity. I hope it will help increasing your productivity by some extent.
Use a Separate Room for Work
I highly recommend using a separate and dedicated room for work only. Physical separation of the workspace will help to focus on work and increase productivity. You will have tough time finishing work on deadline if family members roaming around you all the time.
Family time and work time must be physically and psychologically separated. Family members can interrupt only in case of an emergency. Most of us work part of a team. So, we need to attend conference calls while working from home to interact with other team members or client. Having a separate room will substantially minimize background noise.
A separate room for work will help you achieve more in less time. So, you will be able to spend more quality time with family afterwards.
Define Your Working Hours
When we are working from office, we normally reach office on a pre-defined time agreed by the team. Same applies to when we leave office except for few occasions when we need to work extended hours to meet urgent deadline.
This becomes a bit tricky while working from home. As there is no urgency to rush to home at the end of the day, we intentionally continue to work extended hours to reach a logical end. But in today’s always connected world it is not possible to reach an end unless we call it a day. Sometimes this is forced on us by our bosses.
It is very important that we maintain defined and fixed working hours while working from home. We must spend time with our family, read books, work on our personal projects.
Define Breaks and Timeouts
Similar to defining working hours, we must also define breaks. We won’t be productive if we continue uninterrupted work from 9 to 5. However, taking breaks too frequently is also counter productive.
Though it will vary person to person, I recommend taking a break every two hours. e.g. You can start work at 9 AM, take a coffee break at 11 AM for 15 minutes. You can go out of your work room and go for a small walk or interact with family.
Then you can take lunch break at 1 PM for 1 hour. Again work for 2 hours and take a 15 minutes coffee break at 4 PM. Then work for another 1-2 hours and call it a day. There will be days when you would need to work for additional hours, but make sure this is an exception rather than norm.
Another advantage of having defined breaks is that your family will know that you will be on those times for a chat. So, they will not disturb you while you need to focus on work unless it is an emergency.
Batch Phone Calls to Avoid Continuous Interruptions
If you are working in a collaborative project with a big team then you would have to attend lot of phone calls throughout the day. This might be overwhelming and significantly impact your productivity.
To handle phone calls effectively, you should attend phone calls in batch instead of constantly replying to calls. I would suggest to always keep the phone in silent mode so that you are not distracted by an incoming call when concentrating on an important task.
You can check your phone every hour to check the missed calls. If you see any missed call from colleagues, you can call back and talk for a fixed time slot of 15 minutes based on how important the caller is in the project implementation. Otherwise, just drop a message that you will call when free. You can take less important call twice daily in batch.
Invest on Home Office Workspace and Gazettes to Make Work More Comfortable and Efficient
When working from office premises, we are often forced to use devices and workspace provided by our employer. But, when we are working from home, we can create the dream setup we always wanted to have.
First and most important thing is to have a clean and spacious table/desk with an ergonomically designed chair. You must feel comfortable while working without any back pains. If possible, arrange the desk so that you have lots of natural light along with an outside view. Believe me, this will make you happier and more productive.
Next important thing is the laptop/desktop that you will use for work. If your organisation has provided one then it’s fine, otherwise, you must invest on a high performance machine. If you are connecting to your office machine through VPN then performance of your personal laptop does not matter much. But is should not be too sluggish.
Even if laptops are fine for portability, working for long hours on a laptop is not productive. I recommend you to invest on a high resolution large screen monitor (preferably wide screen), so that you can open two side by side windows.
Also a good quality wireless keyboard and mouse is must. You should connect your laptop to the large screen monitor and wireless keyboard/mouse to convert it to a productivity powerhouse.
Next important gazette is a good wireless headphone with hands free calling capability. When working from home, you have to attend lot of tele conferences as well as ad hoc calls from your colleagues. If you have budget, you can try to get a noise cancellation headphones.
That’s all for this article. I hope the ideas shared here will help you become more productive in this difficult times. If you have linked this article please let me know that same in comments section. You can also mention topics you want me to cover.
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