StiltSoft Tips on Remote Working
Today, when remote working is more popular than ever and becomes inevitable due to the circumstances, there are still people who need some support and working from home tips.
Remote working was always an option for the StiltSoft team. So as experienced homebodies, we decided to share some life hacks you can use to maintain your work/life balance while you are working from home.
In this blog post, we will highlight five tips that can help you stay focused and make your workday productive even when you are working out of the office.
We will also share information on the collaborative tools we are using to stay on the same page with each other.
Tip 1 – Talk to your family
Sometimes our relatives don’t take remote work seriously. They call or visit us during working hours just because they know we are at home.
It is crucial to let your family know that you are not just drinking coffee in your pajamas all day long but working. Ask them not to distract you, mock you, or treat you as an emergency contact for anything that happens at home, starting from walking the dog ending with cooking the dinner.
Tip 2 – Stick to your schedule
Not everyone has a plan for a day. It may seem that there is no need to get up early, especially if you are not a morning person.
It’s important to keep yourself to a schedule not to blur the line between your personal and professional lives. Get up early to have some free time for a cup of coffee, along with an episode of your favorite TV show and then get to work. This way you will have enough time for your family and friends in the evening.
Tip 3 – Remember that you are a part of the team
Try to realize the importance of being visible to your colleagues during the day. Being not responsive to their messages when they require your reply is a bit selfish.
Your colleagues need your feedback, review, reply, etc. and they suffer when you ignore their letters and comments. Prioritize collaborative tasks not to become a blocker to your teammates and then proceed to the rest of your tasks.
Don’t forget to check group chats in multiple team messengers and use team calendars to let your team know if you are not available. If they see your schedule and know you are busy, they may assign a task to someone else.
Tip 4 – Encourage a healthy work-life balance
Maintaining a work/life balance can be a super challenging task for some of us. People can procrastinate at work and constantly think about their tasks after work and even during vacations.
One of our teammates shared a nice idea with us: he writes a task list for tomorrow at the end of his working day, and he knows that it’s the last task for today. This simple action helps him turn off the work mode. This way he knows that all pending tasks are on the list, and he can easily get back to them in the morning.
Tip 5 – Take advantage of online collaboration tools
We develop handy apps for Atlassian products to help you work remotely. These are the tools that help us concentrate on our work and set the stage for open communication:
- Knowledge sharing: Confluence is a great solution for team collaboration because it helps us create, update, and share content.
- App development: We develop apps for Atlassian products and Jira helps us plan and track our tasks to ship our products.
- Code management: Our developers collaborate on code in Bitbucket.
- Task management: Trello is an easy-to-use solution that our project teams use to keep track of their tasks.
- Conversations: Our team uses Slack that allows us to organize our conversations taking advantage of different channels.
- Video communication: Zoom lets us stay connected and call each other when we need to discuss our work.
Our team wishes you to stay focused on what needs to be done during the day with little effort. Just remember that any change takes time to get used to.
Stay safe and healthy and everything else will follow!
