Effectiveness From Home – COVID-19 Normal

As most of us find ourselves working from home, we are looking for how to be effective in this new scenario. We have challenges with socializing from home, separating work and leisure, structuring our day, taking care of our kids all the time, and staying healthy.

I’ve been learning and writing about how to be effective for the past many months. These concepts have been really helpful in my work situations and frankly personal ones as well. Most of the things I’ve been learning and writing about have to do with principles (natural laws that predict outcomes based on our actions), and human psychology about why we do and don’t do certain things and what’s more effective versus not. Unsurprisingly, all these concepts apply when working from home as well. Below are some specific applications that may help you.

Normal, changes

The first thing to keep in mind is that “Normal” changes over time, usually in small ways. Some examples is no mail delivery on Sundays in the US, or a new restaurant, or requiring a certain ID to travel. With the current situation “Normal” has changed rapidly and massively.

My new normal is now to wash my hands at least 10 times a day, not get closer than 6 feet to other people when going out for a walk, stay at home most of the time, educate our kids from home, and worry about how to get groceries safely. There are many new things we are quickly getting used to.

Socializing Remotely

Working from home is actually pretty normal for me. As a software engineer and entrepreneur I have worked remotely for many years. Socializing remotely is totally doable and I think, in a few cases, better.

Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx

When communicating with other people, the communication is done via our words, our voice intonations, and our facial expressions in the following split.

• 7% in the words we say,
• 38% in our voice intonations
• 55% in our facial and body language.

That’s why email (7%) is terrible for anything that requires emotion (emotion is always guessed in emails and that guess is wrong). Its also why, when we don’t look at the person that’s talking to us, we miss 55% (more than half) of what is communicated.

To get almost 100% of the communication, it’s helpful to look at someone. How do we do this remotely? Luckily we have many choices today. Some of the ones I’ve used include Zoom, Google Meet, and Webex. You’ve likely learned or are learning about these tools quickly. If you have not, I suggest you google them and learn them. I’ve regularly used Zoom and Google Meet to work with people all over the world, in the same timezone, and different time zones. It’s almost like being there and really allows you to connect.

Schedule Conncetions

Since you can’t just be around and run into people as you can in an office, make an effort to setup web chats with friends, co-workers, kids friends, and family. Set a time to do it and turn on your web cam. I personally like using a calendar to send out an invite. It contains the time (automatically adjusting across time zones) and the info for the web chat (a link usually).

Recently I’ve attended a religious service via Zoom, a friend’s birthday party, and a business networking event all virtually. The networking event I attended used https://remo.co/ and it worked really well. It was almost better than in the real world because you could talk to the 4-6 people who where “around a table” and not hear the 100s of others doing the same. It replicated the networking experience much better than I ever expected. It made me think how you could run a whole conference online pretty easily. Not only would it be easier to talk with other people, no one has to travel, and it would be much less expensive to host. I’ve also been finding that more people actually attended all the events above than they would in person because it was easier (and, ok, they were stuck at home too).

Separating Work From Leisure

It’s important to separate work from leisure for effectiveness. Lots of studies have concluded that you need time away from work to rest your brain and recharge so you can be more effective when you get back to work.

Working from home all the time makes this more difficult. If you live in a small apartment, or even one room, choose a certain spot in that room like a desk for work and dedicate it just for work. If you have a whole room to dedicate to just work, even better. It’s also helpful to dress differently for work and leisure. While it’s tempting to stay in pajamas all day, you may start associating work with sleep and prevent the separation/rest period which is so important to recharging.

Structure Your Week/Day

One of the things I always do is schedule my week and each day. I put on my calendar time in the morning for learning/exercise, followed by time for software development, followed by time for business dev, time for talking with other folks, and so forth. I’ve also put time on my calendar when my kids might need help with their home schooling (since schools are physically closed). I’ve always found scheduling time on a calendar useful but recently I read about a study that proved it.

Scheduling is more effective

The study was trying to help people get more exercise. They split the participants into 3 groups.

1. The first group was the control. They told them to continue as usual.
2. The second group was trained. They told them how important exercise was, how to do it, and so forth.
3. The third group they said, just put it on your calendar (i.e. pick a time, like tomorrow at 9am, a place like a gym, and put it in your calendar).

The results where that the second group, which was trained, behaved exactly the same as the first group (i.e. the training had no effect). The third group however, was 95% more likely to exercise because they simply planned a place and time to do it.

What this tells us is that we should schedule things we want to accomplish if we want a better likelihood of actually doing them. When you schedule time on your calendar to do things you’ll find that you are much more effective and it gives you a structure and plan and helps you stay on track. This is especially helpful when working from home where its more up to you to set your schedule and avoid home based distractions.

Scheduling Kids

I’ve used the same approach with our kids home schooling. We created a schedule on a calendar with time allocated for each subject, lunch, exercise, and breaks. After the initial complaining that they didn’t want to do the academic work we planned for them, they began using the schedule. It was helpful to them as they knew the plan, what to expect, and in some cases when a certain subject session would be over (when they really wanted it to be over 😉

It’s still early days for the kids’ new routine and we are adjusting each day. I am generally excited to see how the current situation accelerates remote learning for everyone since people have no other choice right now. Many educators are embracing this and coming up with new creative ways to connect with the kids, to teach them, to provide emotional learning as well as academic and to do this for special needs students as well. Of course some are not doing this but necessity will motivate many to change and adapt.

Automated Task Scheduling

As I started scheduling time to do things I discovered it’s pretty effective. I also discovered that the current tools we use were not designed to do this. Calendars have been optimized for “fixed in time” things which works great for meetings but not so much for managing our own time where we have lot more flexibility.

I’ve been working in this area for some time and have been involved in creating a software app to automate a lot of the tedious parts of scheduling time to get stuff done. This app works with existing calendar apps and systems people are familiar with. Once you try some manual time scheduling to do tasks with a calendar, this app will help you take it to the next level.

I hope the above couple of ideas help you be more effective from home and handle a new normal that is affecting pretty much everyone in the whole world. I hope you and your loved ones stay safe and healthy.

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