đź“ŁÂ This page is public. Please do not add any confidential information.
Working remotely isn’t always easy. There’s a whole set of challenges that comes along with working from home, or defaulting to async communication and transparency.
Here’s some advice to balance your work and private life, take good care of yourself, increase productivity or focus etc. It’s not an exhaustive list and what works for one person does not necessarily work for everyone. Take these suggestions and make them your own.
You are welcome to add your own suggestions as well!
🛏️ Shutting off from work
It’s easy to work too long when working remotely and it’s hard to really stop working when you work (at home) where you relax. This can result in stress, being tired, lower productivity and even burnout.
We’ve got flexible work hours (with core working hours), but that doesn’t mean we expect you to be available all the time.
- Don’t check or reply to Slack, emails or any other work tools after you end your workday. Make it extra easy on yourself to not reply by using a schedule to turn on DND (do not disturb) automatically after your regular work hours.
- If you don’t have an office separated from your living space, close your laptop or even put it away to physically mark the end of your workday.
- Saying goodbye to the team on Slack helps to mentally end your workday.
- If you have Slack on your mobile (which you don’t need to!), turn the Slack notifications off to not get pulled into work issues outside of your work hours.
- When you go on vacation, delete work apps from your phone.
- Add your working hours to your GCalendar (how to) to help people, who want to schedule a session with you, understand during what times you’re usually available for calls.
- Block days that you’re not working with the Out Of Office feature in GCalendar to automatically decline any meeting scheduled on days you’re not working (or just make it easier for people to see that you’re not working when they’re trying to schedule something with you).
- If you’re sick, we’d much prefer you to take the rest you need to recover instead of trying to work with less focus/more mistakes and delaying your recovery! Please don’t work when you’re sick.
- Move work apps to a separate area of your phone so you’re not tempted to open them when you don’t need to.
⏰ Breaks
Breaks are super important to improve focus and productivity!
- If you have a hard time taking breaks, schedule them in your calendar like you would meetings or focus time.
Alternative ways to “force” breaks are through an app like Time Out or using the Pomodoro technique.