My Productivity Tips for Working (involuntarily) from Home
Even though, I am an
introvert, I miss my colleagues enormously. I like being around people, even if
it requires more energy than staying by myself. But enough of the background
information. Currently, I enjoy working from home. This is how I get science
done from my home! Most of the things that work here, are likely to work later at the office. Try some of them out! :)
My alarm went off
before 7AM. I do my daily Duolingo practice and get out of bed. Then I
head to the yoga mat. Time for some morning yoga of 10-30min. Then it’s time
for breakfast. The work day starts by taking over a part of the kitchen table.
When I am ready, I set up my Pomodoro application on the phone and start by
either planning the day or checking what I have planned.
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| One the road to productivity (c)FotoJan |
My first productivity “secret”:
Pomodoro.
It is a technique helping
with concentration and with remembering to take breaks. Brains are muscles just
like other parts of the body. If you train it too much without breaks, it may
even weaken. I discovered that when I take breaks, I feel better when leaving the work – and I still have energy to do something else – and I get more things
done during the day. One nice break activity is online coffee break with colleagues.
Pomodoro consists of
intensive working block of 25 minutes, 5 minutes breaks and a longer breaks of
25 minutes. As a tool, I am using this amazing app of Bear Focus Timer that
provides white noise into the concentration periods and very cute
accomplishment pictures. (bearfocustimer on Instagram)
My second productivity
“secret”: Making tasks tangible
I list my tasks and I
cross them as I get them done. This liberates some extra brainpower from task into
the science production when I don’t need to think “next I do X and then Y – oh and
have to remember that email”. This was a surprisingly liberating thing – and it
let me start with my writing instead of doing those small things first. As a
result, my writing gets the priority it deserves. Another big benefit is making
the daily accomplishments visible. In research, the accomplishments are visible
years after the actions as publication processes tend to be long. Keeping and
crossing tasks out from a to-do list make the results visible.
My third productivity “secret”:
Active breaks.
There must be many
good ways to spend those small breaks. I have tried games, facebook, twitter
and skimming grant application calls, to name a few. But what has worked best
for me are taking a walk or doing yoga. I noticed that a walk during those
longer breaks gives me a lot of more energy to keep writing – and that a small
5 minutes’ walk can save the productivity of the day. During short breaks, I prefer yoga. The short
breaks are just enough for “Take 5 Yoga break” from Yoga with Adriene. (Highly
recommended!) As I know the yoga quite well by now, I skip the 1 minute of
introduction and get right into it. Adriene also has an app, Find What Feels Good, which is a fantastic way to avoid ads. Additionally, to make sure to avoid back pain, I also do morning yoga, usually just 20 min. This saved me from the back pain that I obtained during the first week of working from home.
A good side in the lock down, for me, has been the forest close by. I have walked there daily and by now I know the rush hours and calmer times. I have had a luck with the location, I confess. It has been wonderful to follow the spring.
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| Risskov forest couple of weeks ago |
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| Risskov forest today |
My fourth productivity
“secret”: Work places
At first, my problem
with working from home was to limit work into the work time (as I don’t have
kids the goal was to keep work within that 8 hours workday). Thus, I dedicated
a fraction of the kitchen table as my work-station. This was a bit demanding on
my back, however. Yoga helped here enormously but currently I have a separate
reading-station, which is on the living room’s floor with a bunch of pillows.
Today, I expanded on the kitchen for a standing station.
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| The floor reading station (and my yoga mat!) |
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| Kitchen standing working station :) |
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