This is a special 5-part series designed to help individuals who have been forced to transition from on-site work to working from home. During this series I will share my best practices of being effective while working from a home office. I have worked from a home office for over 30 years. There are essential habits you need to develop in the areas of office setup, discipline, time management, organization, and communication. During this difficult time, I want to help you master this part of your work life and aid in coping with this specific challenge brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Working from home requires that you set up a dedicated workspace and develop good work habits around your daily routine and your schedule. You’ve gotten off to a good start in these areas. Now I want you to focus on an area that will help you sustain the momentum you’ve set into motion.
Organization.
In your employer’s workspace, you had a lot of support to help you stay organized. Every evening, someone cleaned your workspace, emptied your trash, wiped down your computer screen. Your organization provided physical items to help you stay organized. A file cabinet. A waste basket. Places to hold all the items you use in your daily work. The value of these items rarely crosses your mind as important tools you count on to get your work done. Now it is time for you to think about them. It is also time to think about the overall flow of your work. The way you move tasks from beginning to end so you can accomplish your objectives and complete your deliverables on a consistent basis.
It is time for you to take more ownership of staying organized.
Keep a Clean Workspace
First things first. Unless you’re the type of person who is comfortable with dirty dishes in the sink, you probably work better with a clean, organized workspace. Think about a surgeon. She operates best when everything is at the ready. A clean and prepped operating table. A patient that is stable and prepared for surgery. The correct surgical instruments arranged in a logical manner and within her reach. Your mindset should match that of a surgeon.
It is up to you to keep your workspace clean and ready for productive work. End each day by taking 15 minutes to clean your workspace. Empty your trash. File your papers. Wipe down your desk and your computer. Put your pens away. Arrange whatever papers or files you will begin your work with the next day, so you are ready to hit the ground running tomorrow. Many of these things happen for you at your employer’s workspace after you’ve left for the evening. You don’t really think about them. Now you must.
A sloppy workspace can be stressful. In fact, it can be exhausting. When you have a sink full of dirty dishes, a small part of your brain is always thinking about them. About cleaning them. About the disappointment you feel that they are there. About the burden of having an incomplete task. It’s not the biggest thing you think about, but it subtracts from your ability to think about that biggest thing. The thing that should be holding your total focus.
Clean those dishes and put them away in your new working from home world. Stay focused on the important stuff.
Empty your Inbox
Remember an important truth about working from home. It isn’t easier than working at your employer’s location. While you may have more control over your schedule, you have new responsibilities over things you didn’t need to think about before. You are, in effect, running an entire office now. You don’t have any time to blow things off.
If you don’t have a good system for managing your personal workflow, now is definitely the time to get one. My personal favorite for the past 25 years or so has been David Allen’s Getting Things Done workflow management system. It is the one system that makes intuitive sense to me, and the one I’ve been able to use consistently and effectively. If it sounds like I’m endorsing it, I am. If you need a system, go buy this one.
A basic element of the approach is a daily commitment to empty your inbox every day. Your physical inbox of papers. Your e-mail inbox of tasks, project work, and general information. Your mental inbox of all those to-do’s you think about.
If you’re not used to doing this every day, emptying your inboxes at the end of each day may sound impossible. It isn’t. But you must able to make decisions. Lots of them. We make thousands of decisions each day, from how much cream to put in our coffee to whether or not to exercise to parenting decisions to major purchases. I’m just asking you to make decisions about things in your inbox that you should already be making anyway.
For each request, task, or piece of information that arrives in your inbox, make a choice. Can you complete it immediately? Do that? Will you work on it later at a scheduled time? Schedule it and move it to a place where it will be available at that time. Do you need to save it but not take a specific action? File it. Is it irrelevant to you? Trash it.
Don’t make that silent deal with yourself that you’ll revisit it later and do something with it. Do it now. Clear your mind by handling everything that lands in your inbox one time and one time only. Treat your inbox like a parking meter whose time is about to expire. You’ll notice that your mind will quickly feel clearer and more unburdened. You’ll think less about dirty dishes and bring better thinking to that big problem you’re trying to solve.
Build a Good Filing System
At your old workplace, you probably had a personal file cabinet as well as a shared file cabinet. Your personal filing system was up to you to organize. Your shared system was not. Somebody else designed it. Maybe it evolved over time. Perhaps you never actually touched it, rather you asked an assistant for a contract or a blueprint when you needed it.
Now you have 100% responsibility over staying organized. You can’t ask another person to file this or retrieve that. If you don’t want stacks of folders piling up on and around your desk, you better get serious about how you want to organize all your physical information.
A file cabinet or a desktop file folder holder is a must. Manilla folders with clearly printed labels are also a must. If you are using hanging folders, put one manilla folder inside one hanging folder. Make sure the hanging folder slides freely on its tracks. Don’t overstuff folders. If you have to struggle to file or access papers, it will add to your stress.
When you label your folders, don’t be too clever. The file name should be the first or second word or phrase you think of when you are doing the work inside that folder. Financial Reports. Sales Reports. John Smith. Production Plan. Don’t overthink this part. You’ll get to the information you need quickly and efficiently.
Just like emptying your inbox each day, having a coherent file system allows you the freedom to ignore information you’re not working on at the moment, because you trust your system. You know that when you do need the information, you’ll find it right away. Fewer dirty dishes. More empowered thinking.
Staying organized is an essential skill when working from home. Maybe it is a new skill for you, or maybe you’re already good at it. If you’re like me, you always need to improve your organizational skills. But now, you must take full ownership of becoming more organized.
Don’t procrastinate. Take these small steps today. Free your mind to bring clear focus to your working from home life. Stop thinking about your dirty dishes and step up your mental game.
Previous: Working from Home – A COVID-19 Guide – Part 3 – Time Management
Next: Working from Home – A COVID-19 Guide – Part 5 – Communication
Be smart. Be safe. Be healthy. Be kind.
Lead well.
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