When I started working from home exclusively in 2007, my former supervisor Christina (who did the same), gave me a useful piece of advice:
“Jon,” she said. “You’ve gotta draw some lines. Otherwise, work is going to take over your personal life: Your dining table is going to become your office. Your bed is going to become your desk. Your bathroom is going to become your conference room. The hardest part of working remotely is knowing when to stop.”
She was right. And I still made all of those mistakes for years before finally figuring it out.
The current pandemic has turned a lot of us into full-time remote workers. It might seem great at first: You can work in your pajamas. You never have to get out of bed. Happy hour is all the time. But our initial habits are usually as sustainable as binge-eating chocolate cake.
Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom recently related (in this Freakonomics podcast) that the difference between working remote once a week and full-time is like going to the gym sporadically vs. marathon training.
So as we collectively transition from counting our days in quarantine to living in this new reality, here are some training tips for your marathon:
Slow down. People used to think that working from home was a joke. Now we all do it. Joke’s on them. Hands down, the biggest mistake I see in transitioning to remote work is using the newfound time—that we would’ve spent getting ready and commuting and chatting at the watercooler—to work. People work more, because it’s easy to do at first. It’s the same as overcommitting to a difficult exercise regimen on New Year’s Day and doing it for a week before giving up. The trick is choosing a sustainable pace of work. You’re running a marathon—don’t burn out in the first mile.
Establish your virtual brand. It’s not every day that you get to redefine who you are at work. When do you get into the office? How available are you? How responsive? How dominant in meetings? How punctual? Do you wear suits to the all-hands Zoom? Remote personal branding is an opportunity to recreate your office persona in a virtual space. But it functions very differently than in person, because many of the visual cues, interactive spaces, and organic exchanges are absent. By actually planning this out, approaching it intentionally, and being consistent, you can take advantage of your second chance to be who you’ve always wanted to be at work.
Mind your tone. Related to the above: be mindful about text exchanges. In the absence of visual and vocal cues, we’re operating without our usual tonal context, and it’s easy to come across as mean or deaf or indifferent. When you’re talking with people in person, you can mellow out a “no” by easing people into it and finding a good time in the day. When people know you well, they can guess what you meant by something. But simply replying “no” to someone’s request over email, especially someone who’s never met you, can be an affront to their sensibilities. This doesn’t mean appending all of your messages with lol emojis, but it could mean walking away from an email before sending it, coming back to it later, and rereading it with fresh eyes to see if it comes across the way you intended.
Identify the introverts. Also related to branding: figure out what you need to do in order to be counted in virtualized group scenarios, especially if you’re an introvert. When you’re on the phone, for example, you’re just a voice. And if you’re not talking, you’re not there. Phone calls work differently than in-person meetings: you can only hear one person at a time, and how your participants establish speaking order will define the dynamic. Likewise, if you work with introverts, take it upon yourself to engage them, especially if they’re people you depend on. If half the participants aren’t talking, you’ve lost value. Introverts don’t like to interrupt. But that’s often the only way to talk on calls, so if you’re leading one, make room for people to have an opinion—not by asking “does anyone have anything to add,” but by calling on people who haven’t been talking. Facilitate. Make it easier for introverts on your team to get involved.
Have a meeting about a meeting. Okay, this is the one time you’re allowed to do this without being an awful person. But it’s not exactly what you think. This is the preparation for the meetings you’re going to have. And it’s the follow-up afterwards. Virtual meetings are different: You’re going to go over time. You’re going to have plenty of questions left on the table. And it’s going to be more work to get the answers. As a result, the way that you and your team process meetings will determine their success. This is basic meeting stuff, but it’s made even more pronounced by the format of virtual meetings. So take the time—even meeting before or afterwards—to get the most out of them. Make sure everyone knows the purpose and what they’re supposed to be contributing—using a framework of role definition, organization, task assignment, and accountability, like scrum. Also, borrow some tricks from our piece on organizing virtual events.
Be accountable. Speaking of accountability, most people aren’t used to working from home, so things can easily fall through the cracks of discontinuous tracking. Work easily expands to fill the time allotted, then keeps expanding and blows out deadlines. It’s easier to do, because you don’t see Dave on the way to the coffee machine anymore, and he can’t remind you to follow up with the customer. Commit to doing things by a certain time and in communal settings, like group emails and slack channels. It’ll make you accountable to more people. Even if they don’t enforce it or remind you, you’ll feel the pressure not to let things slip. This is the gym membership, exercise partner, and bluetooth-connected scale of working from home.
Track hours. This is something consultants do, because they bill hours. But it’s important even if you don’t, because it allows you to visualize productivity. Track the hours you could honestly “bill.” These aren’t the hours you’re responding to group email threads or reading the internet or texting your mom—which is why it’s going to look like you’re not “working” as much as you normally do. But when you see where your effective time is going, you’ll realize how much of your day at the office is actually spent corresponding with people, coordinating tasks, and doing things unrelated to work. I track time in 15-minute increments. When I started billing hours, I used to schedule a tone that went off every 15 min, and every one or two times that’d happen, I’d go into a spreadsheet and log whatever I was doing. But I ultimately found the tone too distracting. These days, I have a habit of checking in every hour or so and logging what I did in a spreadsheet. There are more refined ways of doing this, like Toggl, which works like a speed chess clock. You can also get all quantified self with apps that monitor your activity, like RescueTime. But however you do it, be consistent and be honest with yourself. FYI: six billable hours is a huge day at work for most folks.
Chit-chat. A few years into working alone, I started talking to myself. This is unnecessary. When there’s no proverbial watercooler around which to gather, make one. Do one-on-ones with colleagues after conference calls. Do virtual happy hours. It not only keeps you sane, it can help foster creativity. Find the time to reach out and talk to the people you work with—about more than just work. Ask about their family. Find out what they did with the non-working part of their day. If you spend all of your time talking about work, it becomes transactional, and you’ll slowly divest of all the nuance and connection that makes a community of colleagues. Don’t lose that.
As we all adjust to this new reality, take it slow, get to know yourself and your needs, and be intentional about the changes you make at work. Soon enough, we’ll be sitting in traffic again, grumbling about those days when we had such balanced and productive lives in quarantine. Until then, work smart, stay healthy, and prepare for the long run.