How To Work At Home

Working at home isn’t for everyone. The first time I tried it 22 years ago I had to move back to the office after a couple of weeks. I just couldn’t take the isolation, and I’m a bit of a loner anyway. I was able to make it work when I tried it again several years later. Now I’ve been working from home for the last 17 years, and honestly, I can’t imagine going back to working in an office.

If you just have to make working at home work for a few weeks, you can probably power through it. Here are some things you can do to help you be productive away from the hive:

Keep a Schedule

Probably the most important trait you need to develop to be productive on your own is discipline. The biggest area of your life that you can pull into line is your time. You need a structure, a schedule.

Without a schedule, you may get distracted by things that need to get done, but aren’t really part of your mission to work at home. Things like mowing the lawn, doing dishes, gardening are all important, but need to come out of a different time budget. Allowing yourself to get distracted by other things that you want to do will leave you feeling frustrated and prevent you from accomplishing much.

When I worked at home and I was single, I had a real problem with schedule. I started work most days at 2 pm after getting up or after a morning of fishing. Then I would work until 2-4 am, and start the cycle all over again. The biggest problem, well, the only problem I saw with this was when I had to interact live with real people. Of course that didn’t happen that often, email was the bulk of my interaction at that time.

Now that I’m married to a corporate office dweller, I’ve kind of got to work during regular working hours. It’s just one of those things you have to trade in order to have a real life. If only my wife’s office would adopt the 2pm-2am work day, I would be even more productive.

Keep a To-Do List

It’s very difficult to be productive if you can’t stay focused on the task at hand. No matter what people say, multi-tasking is mostly a myth. It’s mainly a way to allow people who can’t stay focused to still feel good about allowing themselves to be distracted. You’re most efficient if you work on one thing at a time, and focus on that until you’re done. Sometimes working at home can actually allow you to be more efficient because there are fewer distractions, and no one stopping by your desk to chat about your weekend.

Probably the biggest waste of time that you’ll avoid by working at home is meetings. You can still get pulled into on-line or phone meetings. Regularly scheduled meetings turn out to be the biggest waste of time since they are held out of habit or a sense of duty rather than any actual need. Before agreeing to attend, just think to make sure that the meeting will be an efficient use of your time.

Everyone has to deal with unexpected things that come up, but your To-Do list can even help you here. Make sure that your list is prioritized so you always know what is the most important work that you can be doing at any one time. Anything else that comes up has to be evaluated against those priorities.

Workspace

Working on a laptop on the dining room table is not really the way to be productive working at home. You’re not comfortable, and that small screen… unless you’re used to working just from a laptop, it can lead to physical discomfort, visual disorganization, and inefficiency.

You have to have a comfortable chair, a reasonable desk with the tools you need, and a good computer set up. The computer has to include a monitor or monitors that enable you to see what you are working with. You need a mouse or whatever type of device that you like to use that works for you. A track pad will drive you crazy by the end of a single day. When you have to work for several hours at a time, physical comfort is something you shouldn’t see as a luxury, it helps you be efficient over a long period of time.

My workspace includes an L shaped desk, a trackball, a spaceball, my laptop with a docking station, and two additional full size monitors, one of which is set up in portrait mode to read long documents. I have my phone on a stand next to me, and a pad of paper with a pen to take quick notes.

This may sound odd, but you should have a dog in your workspace at home. My dog comes and gets me every couple of hours to make sure I take her outside. This also turns out to be a great break for me. I can go down the stairs and outside to get some fresh air and walk around a little bit. It is important for your physical and mental health to move around from time to time, and my dog is the best way for me to remember to do that. Plus, if no one else is home, your dog will give you someone to talk to. It sounds a little crazy maybe, but if you’ve been there, you know what I mean.

Further, if you have kids or other people living at your house, don’t try to put your office in the TV room. Make sure you’ve got a door on your home office, or some way to make sure things are quiet and without distractions. You might be amazed at how much work you get done when you’re away from the hustle and bustle of the big office.

Technology

One of the great things about working at home is the isolation. That also turns out to be one of the worst things about working from home. In order to make working at home work, the most basic need is of course an internet connection. Next is of course a phone, whether a land line or a cell phone. We take these things for granted, but they are really necessary to even start thinking about doing this.

And one other thing to mention here. I mention it because this has suddenly become my reality. With all of these people staying home, working and not, the internet in my neighborhood is swamped. I may have to resort to working crazy late hours to get on line when all the gamers are under curfew.

It should also go without saying that not every job can be converted to a work-at-home job. If you stock shelves, obviously, you have to be at the shelves. You can’t ship stuff unless you have the stuff at home to ship.

That said, not even all computer jobs can be done at home. If your IT department has not enabled access to your company’s database or critical systems like MRP, you will have to be physically connected to the company’s network. A WAN or VPN should be standard issue at most companies, but it isn’t a given. Smaller companies may not have the resources to have this sort of access without prior notice. You really need to check with the IT folks if these tools are accessible and if they can handle the kind of workload that you and your coworkers will put on the system when working remotely.

Because most of us here are CAD workers, we should talk a little bit about what it takes to do CAD at home. Ideally, you’ve got Cloud CAD, or a PDM system on your VPN/WAN and your work computer is a CAD-powerful laptop you can take home. Alternately, you’ve got a home license, and less ideally maybe a big thumb drive with a lot of data on it.

Just a word about taking data home: First, your CAD Admin is going to freak out, and a good one will probably insist that you do the transaction through him/her. Second, IT will probably have a fit for you taking company data home, and will likely be worried about security of that data returning to the network. There are as many variations of this scenario as there are companies, just be aware that taking data home on a thumb drive isn’t the easy slam dunk it might appear to be at first. File management can be an even bigger nightmare than getting your holes misaligned. Just respect that CAD and IT Admins have a job to do, and there is a reason for their jobs. Don’t get versions mixed up, and don’t bring back dirty virus data and try to put them on your company’s network. That kind of thing could cost you your job.

Communication

These days there are tons of inter office communication tools available. Most offices probably already have some sort of internal text and/or voice messaging application that is less overhead than email. Between all of these, cell phones, and email, communication away from the office should be easy. And of course tools like Skype make video conferences easy too.

Make sure you test any technology before you need to use it. There is always something that can go wrong. Remember that you can probably use your cell phone in case there is some trouble with software on your laptop. I can’t tell you how many times I have installed conferencing software at the last minute before a meeting.

Also, most laptops now have cameras, but peripheral camera devices are also readily available. It may be a good idea to do a Best Buy run before you start working at home. Better yet, get your IT guy to sign you out a bunch of stuff you need to make sure everything works together.

Attire

This can be a controversial topic, although it has the least bearing on anything at all. If you work at home alone, does it really matter how you dress? I used to ask this question even when I went to an office.

Around my house, pajamas have come to be known as “office pants”. If you believe the internet, it is now also acceptable to go to Walmart in “office pants” and fuzzy slippers. I admit, although now thinking about it, maybe I shouldn’t, I’ve been known to go for drive-thru breakfast in my office pants (in my taller-than-the-drive-thru-window SUV, not my low-to-the-ground convertible).

I know some people who write articles in well-lit corporate cubicles claim that when you work at home, you should dress up just like for a real office, and even take a shower, or commute by walking around the block or something like that. The people who write these articles are getting paid by the word, and honestly, they’re just trying to slow the rest of us down because we’re so efficient. Plus, I think they are just a little bit jealous, more than anything.

Obviously, if you’re going to do a video conference, put on a nice shirt, and take down the Cheryl Ladd poster behind you.

Don’t Become Anti-Social

When I was single and worked from home, sometimes I would go shopping at 2 am, or wander through Walmart after midnight to do product research. I knew all the 24 hour drive-thrus in town.

There is a real danger of becoming too comfortable working at home and being alone. If you have someone else in the house with you, you can more easily avoid this pitfall, but if you live alone, you have to make sure to plan time with other people from time to time. I’m not talking about time talking to the drive-thru attendant, I’m talking about real friends, maybe real shared hobbies, or making dinner for people, going fishing with other (non-imaginary) people, stuff like that.

Your work is always subject to some extent on your mental state. The anti-social mental state is not a good one. I’ve flirted with it from time to time but even if I am to some extent a loner, I always need people around me. I suspect you do too, to a greater or lesser degree.

I grew up in the Adirondack mountains of far upstate NY (think Lake Placid, or Montreal, if you know your Olympics history). Cabin Fever hit in March when there was too much snow on the ground and it was too cold to go outside, and you’d been stuck inside since New Years. You never really understand the term Cabin Fever until you’ve lived in a place like that. You can see the day when the cold won’t sear your lungs, and snow has melted enough to walk through.

I imagine with all of this isolation to prevent the spread of illness, and people working from home who aren’t accustomed to it, there are going to be a lot of people who start understanding Cabin Fever, and its cousin, anti-social psychosis. Your mental health is as important as your physical health. Make sure you know some people who have protected their health that you can get together with from time to time. Remember alcohol content must be more than 60% to kill pathogens, I understand there has been a run on Bacardi.

Summary

If you’re going to spend a month in isolation, it’s not something you’re going to do casually. You’ve got to plan it out. Set up your workspace and your technology. Make sure you have all the access to things on your network that you need. Get up and walk around every now and then, Put up a new framed picture, or get a nice potted plant to brighten up your new home office. And for God’s sake, if you don’t have a dog, now is the time to get one! It might be the difference between holding it all together and letting the alone time drive you crazy.