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Time management at home is a different ball game. A good first step is to understand what's fundamentally different about working from home, alone, versus work
by PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Time management at home is a different ball game.
A good first step is to understand what's fundamentally different about working from home, alone, versus working from the office. Some common differences:
- Context shifting into the office can help context shift you to work mode. At home, if you use the same workstation for games and Reddit and work and entertainment, you lose the physical context shift. If possible, try using your company-provided computer for only work, and your personal computer for only play. Even better if you can have them in different rooms. Start training yourself to associate one context with work, and one context with not-work. When you sit down in the work context, it's time to work.
- Accountability can feel lessened when no one can see over your shoulder. This can be misleading in the short term because it's easy to get away with it for a while: You can tell people you ran into unexpected difficulties, or you had to spend time on something else, or any number of excuses that work in the short term. Over the long term, the productivity difference starts to show up in your output relative to peers, so avoid falling into this trap. If your company isn't big on short-term accountability, give yourself some daily accountability. A good practice would be to write a short message to your team's Slack channel with what you're going to be working on for the day. At the end of the day, write a short summary of what you accomplished. Once this is routine and public (within your team) you will feel some of the same accountability you did when your team was sitting in the same room and could see you working (or not).
- Offices provide a lot of social exposure that we take for granted. Slack and Zoom can't fully replace it. Make sure you get out of the house and see other people routinely, even if it's just walking around the neighborhood. Simply seeing other, real human beings goes a long way.
- Track your time. Entering the office in the morning and leaving in the evening are natural delineators for your work day. Try to have some similar start and end times at home. Consider using something like RescueTime so you can see where your time is going during the day.
- danielvinson 6y agoThis is amazing advice. Thank you.
- lostcolony 6y agoThat accountability step is part of the intent for daily standups in most agile disciplines. The five minutes it takes for everyone to say what they worked on since the last one, what they plan to work on, and what obstacles they have, is great both for forcing people to focus a bit, as well as for managers to help point out when someone is stuck (i.e., "you've been working on that the past few days; is something wrong?")
- fartcannon 6y ago"Yes, I can't stop worrying about tomorrows standup and, as a result, I'm incredibly inefficient."
- deckard1 6y agoThe flip side of this is what I would term standup-driven-development. You work just enough to have something to say that day. Rinse and repeat for the next day. The incentive isn't to do more or better work. The incentive is to have something impressive to say at the next meeting. The other issue with standups is if it's not "on the board" then developers are disincentivized from doing certain things (proper testing of code, code reviews, etc.) in favor of things that show up.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoStandups can help close the short-term feedback loop, but they don't replace long-term management involvement. Teams with standups still need proper performance management and performance reviews from a hands-on manager, along with clear communication of goals and expectations. > The other issue with standups is if it's not "on the board" then developers are disincentivized from doing certain things (proper testing of code, code reviews, etc.) in favor of things that show up. If important things are missing from the board, that's a problem with the planning process. It's easier than it sounds to simply put those things up on the board. If engineers realize something important is not on the board, they need to get it up on the board. Communication needs to go both ways in planning sessions.
- tikhonj 6y ago
- kingsuper20 6y agoI used to live in a commercial building (the only living space) that had a separate office suite. When in the office doing billable hours sorts of things, 0% of time was spent on non-work issues. Work computer = a big honkin' loud workstation. Home computer = a laptop. It wasn't too hard a discipline to keep, I think it helped a lot to use physically different space and hardware.
- David 6y agoAs an alternative to a daily chat message, a teammate and I have been meeting for ~15 minutes at the end of the day to talk about what we did and how productive we were. It's been pretty helpful a few different ways. First, it forces me to think about what it is I'm supposed to be doing and figure out the next step. Not knowing how to approach my next task is a huge cause of procrastination for me. Second, it's a chance to notice when I've gone astray, and identify factors that lead to low productivity. (Like that I procrastinate when I haven't broken down my next task into small enough pieces.) I think for this to work well, it needs to be with someone you don't feel the need to impress. Maybe you have a teammate you trust like that, or maybe you can find a coworker on a different team who doesn't impact your performance assessments. If you have that, this feels different than a standup. Standups easily devolve into signaling to the team that you've done work. Instead, a 1:1 meeting with a coworker who you don't feel the need to impress makes it way easier to be vulnerable and admit when you screwed around on the internet for a lot of the day.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]