5 Mistakes To Avoid When You Work From Home
I'm going to talk about five big mistakes that I made when I first started working remotely over five years ago and how I fixed them.
So stay tuned if you're someone who is just starting to work remotely or you've been working remotely and you want to optimize your effectiveness to become a more productive, happy, engaged employee.
When I first started working remotely, it was actually due to a snow day. I remember it very vividly.
I awoke one winter morning almost 7 years ago to an email that felt like a message sent from God.
I wiped the crust out of my eyes, read it slowly, then did a double-take:
"Snowed in. Work from home today."
I re-set my alarm, rolled over, and quietly rejoiced.
It certainly beat bundling up in 4 layers, trudging downstairs, and unenthusiastically scraping ice off my windshield before a 1.5-hour commute.
Boston winter was the coldest and snowiest it had been in a decade, and many work-from-home days followed.
However, at the time I didn't realize that working remotely could also be the "noose that hung me."
Sometimes I'd sleep in longer, waking up just before calls, even choosing Netflix instead of emails.
My natural reaction was to choose activities of less resistance, ultimately becoming a lower version of myself.
I'm not proud of it. But it taught me:
You don't just flip a switch, and all of a sudden work from home productively if you haven't before.
There's a learning curve.
Here are the 5 mistakes I made in my early days of remote working, but in time I fixed each of them.
1. Not Creating a consistent Schedule
So when you're working alone and you're remote, you're isolated. You don't really have someone keeping you completely accountable for everything you're doing. It's really easy to keep a lot of open space on your calendar if you're not expected to really be anywhere.
That space can be too much freedom. What I realized was the more space that I had on my calendar that I hadn't allocated, the more space that I found reasons to do other things that were not productive.
The way that I fixed that was by using time blocking on my calendar and different days of the week. I would do different types of things and I would try to batch my work with as much of one thing as I could.
So if I knew that I had to do admin work at different times of the week, I would scope out one big portion of the day would be admin work. Trying to get your brain in a place where it's not switching to different types of activities is super helpful.
When you have work to do, schedule it on your calendar and respect those time blocks, especially when you're working remotely and no one is checking. If you're doing those things, you have to really keep yourself accountable.
2. Not Optimizing My Environment
The second biggest mistake I made was not optimizing my environment for my work. When I think about the environment that I had when I first started working remotely, I had a desk in my room. But I would often opt to work from bed and I would wake up a little bit later in the day, like basically before my first call.
If you're working from the bed, it's just so easy to have the call that you need to be on and then take a nap or go back to sleep. I think really optimizing your environment starts with being out of you're room. You're not working in the same place that is your bedroom.
Some people advocate getting out of their house or their apartment completely, which I think is totally valid. For me, I just needed to at least get out of my room and find a different environment that would allow my brain to differentiate where I’m working from where I'm living, sleeping, and eating.
3. Under-Communicating
When I think about communication and the natural low bandwidth of communication that happens when you're working remotely, a lot of the time it's through text, through email. So people are not able to discern tonality and body language that's so present when we're we're talking in person.
In the beginning, I would under-communicate. I either would not tell people ahead of time that “I was going to go and be gone for the next hour” or “I really need this by a certain date, can you get that to me?” I would wait until I actually needed it to ask them. I think that caused a lot of problems in my team's communication.
There are a few ways for you to overcome this problem. One of them is just find more high bandwidth ways to communicate. If you can call someone and explain to them in a minute or two something that would take a really long email. Send a quick snapshot video using Loom, for instance, to kind of map out a screen share of what it is you're talking about.
Or you could send a voice note. WhatsApp Imessage, they all have voice capability. If you can find different ways to increase the bandwidth of communication, to make it something where people can hear your tonality or they can understand where you're coming from a little bit more, that's going to help you tremendously.
4. Too Many Distractions
When I first started working remotely, I did not implement deep work. Now, deep work is the concept that you eliminate all distractions and your only focus really on one thing. That's something that I do now.
Back then, I would keep my phone on and I would be available at all times. So if someone were to ping me, I'd immediately switch directions on whatever it was that I was focusing on and start worrying about that.
One of my biggest recommendations is to put your phone on airplane mode. I use the Pomodoro technique, a technique that uses time blocking to only focus on one task.
It's really important that you find ways to eliminate all distractions. To close out all the tabs on your computer that you're not working on, and find that ability to really go into deep work mode.
5. Not Being Honest With Myself
During the early times of my working remotely, I lied to myself that I was working harder than I was. There would be times when I would convince myself I had done enough work for the day, but I knew that I hadn’t.
Now it's actually the opposite for me. I work way too much and I try to convince myself that I spend enough time away from the computer. I think being really centered in self-awareness around what it is that you need. Listen to your emotions and have some sort of self-reflection.
Once I started journaling many years ago, it allowed me to figure out which things in my life are really important and how can I make the way that I think about myself more honest.
(Bonus): Not Investing In My Growth
I did not use the time that I got back from my commute to person, and that was a huge mistake.
The snow day I mentioned earlier was the first time that I experienced remote work. The small team I was part of negotiated with our manager to work remotely on Fridays. That cut out about three hours of my commute time every day. I didn't use that time to better myself.
The way that I started using this time years later was really to invest time in myself. Going to the gym, reading, listening to audiobooks, podcasts, filling myself with creative activities where I'm writing, where I'm doing videos, where I'm doing things that actually make me feel good. If you do have a long commute and now you're transitioning to remote work, how are you going to use the time you’re getting back?
By ensuring that you don't make these mistakes and that you use some of the solutions outlined today you're going to be a happier remote worker, professional employee, or business owner.
Is there something that you do that you find helps you be productive, fulfilled, engaged as a remote worker or professional? Let me know in the comments.
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