Three Priorities For Your Productive Home Office



Working at your home desk/dining table can be uncomfortable and difficult to stay focussed. Here are our experts’ five top tips for making your home working less painful and more productive:

15+ Best Home Office Essentials for a Productive Work Day. Work-from-home gadgets, office organization ideas, and more. 8 Best Printers of 2020 for Your Dream Home Office. 2 PLUS 60 Minute. Thinking about the ones who aren’t used to work outside the office, we have listed some important tips for maintaining focus and productivity. Check out: 1 – Follow your everyday routine: Being at home can be a little bit confusing at first, that’s why it is important to respect your schedule as if you were on an ordinary workday.

1. Chair ergonomics

The item which is going to have the most significant impact on your physical comfort is your chair. If your back starts to hurt, you are less likely to continue working.

Unfortunately, not everyone has access to a decent ergonomic desk chair at home (If you do have one, make sure it is optimally adjusted at How to Set Up a Desk Chair). If you have to choose from your other chairs, find one which, when your bottom is pushed to the back of the chair, allows you to rest your feet flat on the floor and supports most of your upper leg.

Good chairs provide ergonomic support for your lower back. In the absence of lumbar support, roll up a towel and put it behind your lower back so it fits into the curve of the small of your back.

If you buy a desk chair for home we (unsurprisingly) recommend a remanufactured chair. This will enable you to afford good ergonomic support and keep your home office sustainable.

2. Screen height

Hunching over a laptop all day will tighten your neck, shoulders and upper back – eventually leading to headaches. To avoid this, the top of your screen should be at eye level. This is best done with an external monitor, although if you are tall you may need to put it on a pile of books to achieve the correct height.

If you can’t access a screen but have an external keyboard, put your laptop on a stack of books so that the top lines up with your eye level and plug in the keyboard.

You can buy high quality remanufactured monitors, monitor stands/arms and keyboards from electronics remanufacturer RECONOME.

3. Glare

Three priorities for your productive home office phone number

Light is surprisingly important for office comfort. Offices are designed to provide lighting suitable for working, but homes are designed for maximum natural light.

Where you set up your desk makes a difference for your visual comfort. It is wonderful to set up a desk in front of a large window overlooking a view or your garden, but strong natural light around your screen can create what is called veiling glare – visual discomfort from light around your screen.

Conversely, direct sunlight on your screen makes it difficult to see and strains your eyes. A little bit of thought and desk readjustment can quickly resolve such issues

Lockdowns and home responsibilities make exercise difficult, but you can still punctuate your work day with exercise breaks to act as a reward and unlock the many benefits of exercise, which include:

  • relieving stress
  • improving memory
  • helping you sleep better
  • mood improvement
  • enhancing the prioritising functions of the brain

If you can’t leave the house but want to get some exercise there is a range of options. Our Rype Office resident fitness expert (and international Brazilian Jiu Jitsu champion) Romas recommends taking a look at Joe Wicks daily PE lessons and Down Dog, a fantastic free yoga app.

5. Work deeply, not all the time

Working from home removes the demarcation between our personal and professional lives. For example, you do not have time on a train journey to mentally prepare for the day or decompress on the way home. Establishing rules about when you start, take breaks and finish help to switch on and off and enable you to more meaningfully engage with your family and friends.

A routine is recommended to help with concentration and focus. As a first step, experiment by scheduling every minute of your work day, allocating time to your key priorities (and not the latest message in your inbox). You can even turn off your email for half a day. It’s fine to revise the structure and content of your schedule but keep refining it to yield significant productivity returns.

For useful reading on work productivity check out writers like Cal Newport. His blog on scheduling is here. A link to an illuminating podcast synthesising some of the key points of his book Deep Work is here.

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A Warm Welcome from MITrix🖐 🖐 🖐

It might be scary to some of the peers hearing about the status quo of the coronavirus, but please stay inside, take care of yourself and also study hard!

Distance learning during this very time of coronavirus must have impacted our learning experiences in various ways. Love it or not, we have to admit both the freedom and inconvenience brought by coronavirus that some people have unwittingly encountered. Study has shown that about 30 percent of American work remotely. Do you feel distant learning/working less productive? Here are 3 tips you can follow to master your study!

Why studying remotely can be unproductive

Distraction

Undoubtably, the learning cultures at home can be completely different as that at school. Anti-productive bombs are constantly detonated by life interferences:

  • Messages from teams
  • Uncountable emails yet to read
  • Barking puppy as if it’s the end of the world
  • Your mom asking you to have dinner

It’s human nature to be distracted because that’s a way to be vigilant and have our curiosity satisfied, but as we become more self-aware of ourselves, it’s undesired to face these ‘obligation’. Working means working, but sometimes your environment doesn’t seem to match your ideal place for productivity. Working at home can be detrimental to your productivity. Thinking about people that study with you, it’s not hard to believe how a home office full of distractions can come even close to old-school classrooms or dorms for learning.

Lack of Networking

Have you ever realized you’ve got unhanded homework until the deadline passes? You’re not the only one! A sense of connectivity and networking could be one of the reasons why most people prefer offline school or office to digital ones. Not only because you feel alone and unconnected, but the lack of communication and inability to discuss plays another big role to make people unproductive.

Lack of Self-management

As someone who identifies himself as an early bird than a night owl, I even find working in the morning in adversity at home. During offline working, you could have teachers and classmates to remind you about your assignment deadlines, but it’s not the case now as no one will actively alert you to complete tasks even if you don’t do them at all.

3 tips you can follow to master your study

Study Ritualization

Wikipedia defines a ritual as:

A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place and according to set sequence

The aim to ritualize study is to draw clear demarcation of when you are studying and when you are not. As distractions are everywhere at home, confirming the time when you are at working mode indirectly sets you in a distraction-free environment. Imagine you have Xbox and Switch on your desk when you’re studying, paperworks and used tissues everywhere on your desk. Don’t all of these crank up the possibility to hit up League of Legend and relax?

Three Priorities For Your Productive Home Office

The word Ritualization simply means to tell yourself when you’re ready for study/work. Here are a few steps you can follow to set up your own work mode:

1. Think about what you really need when you do the task;

2. Get rid of everything else on your desk;

3. If you are working on your PC, switch off apps you don’t need;

4. Tellyourself that you’re ready for work. It may seem inessential but just being respectful towards your study actually works effectively. It’s not necessarily an action of ‘telling yourself’. A small habit like making yourself a cup of tea could stimulate your productivity signals.

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Why your current TIMETABLE doesn’t work

Manage your time slots using Calendar App

An Calendar App is the most accepted way to manage time, while it goes fairly ineffective when you take task management seriously. Since calendar directly reflects how your day is spent by visualizing time-specific task blocks, it creates an illusion that your days are spend exactly that way no matter what your actions are.

Manage your time using a Todo List

With these being said, I believe many of you have tried a todo list to organize tasks that don’t fall into specific time blocks, all of which are mostly inspired by David Allen’s famous GTD® methodology:

GETTING THINGS DONE® is a personal productivity methodology that redefines how you approach your life and work.

STEP 1 CAPTURE
Three Priorities For Your Productive Home Office

Collect what has your attention — Write, record, or gather any and everything that has your attention into a collection tool.

STEP 2 CLARIFY

Process what it means — Why sustainable sourcing is good for business marketing. Is it actionable? If so, decide the next action and project (if more than one action is required). If not, decide if it is trash, reference, or something to put on hold.

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STEP 3 ORGANIZE

Put it where it belongs — Park reminders of your categorized content in appropriate places.

STEP 4 REFLECT

Review frequently — Update and review all pertinent system contents to regain control and focus.

STEP 5 ENGAGE

Simply do — Use your trusted system to make action decisions with confidence and clarity.

This methodology clarifies what tasks to do and what tasks you have done and it’s a great start for beginners. However, such a robust system doesn’t address the very basic problem — When you should do your task. Because after all, we judge productivity based on how much you have accomplished.

Use time management to manage your tasks

A quick resolution is to combine your Calendar and Todo List. Here are a few steps I find useful to compensate GTD system with time management:

  • Clarify the PRIORITY of your tasks

Almost all the basic todo list apps have an option to specific tasks that you find important, and there are various ways you can choose to do so; no matter it’s flagging, tagging, rating or starring, you can always find your way to prioritize that you feel most comfortable with.

Effective use of the priority system helps you choosing the right task to engage in by filtering tasks. Modern Todo List apps like OmniFocus or 2Do have complex filtering systems called Perspective or Smart List which takes GTD to a next level.

  • Identity your AVAILABILITY

It’s not surprising to see someone quit the GTD system since they tried to track their every single minute using a calendar. A calendar can be a good way to visualize tasks by timeline but it’s definite NOT a good way to schedule all your tasks:

  • You easily get frustrated every time when you couldn’t complete your task within time slots;
  • A calendar full of schedules is merely idealistic, no guarantee of your availability;
  • It makes you feel you can’t accomplish one basic thing, and end up with giving up.

Instead, what you can do is to give yourself time blocks when you have free time to get thing done. You can keep your fixed-scheduled meetings or classes where they are, but when you have a ton of assignments to finish, you never know how long they are going to last or when is the best time I should start one task.

It is also suggested to tag your available time blocks with your energy level to match priorities of your tasks, all of which give you a general idea of the task to start with.

Optimize communication

I know many of you have ever complained how laggy and irresponsive Microsoft Teams is. Yeah, I know. MS Teams is definitely not the only or the best choice of communication on the market, but either switching to another platform for your project or diving deep into how to enhance your MS Teams experience.

If you have a team for your project that requires not teacher involvement or no real-time feedback, here are a few tools you can try to resolve the dis-connectivity encountered in distant learning.

Trello

As the most famous Kanban tool on the market, Trello has served as a standard of project management for more than 50 million users, which also helps MIT team to organize tasks. But power users aren’t limited to simply visualizing tasks. With strong integration with Slack or MS Teams, you could create tasks, assign to others and mark as complete directly from the communication app you like. If you are serious about project management or even personal task management, you definitely need to check it out.

Three Priorities For Your Productive Home Office Organizing

Slack

Being a powerful communication app, Slack takes management and integration to the next level. You want to keep updated with edits in Notion, collaborate on Trello and start a Zoom meeting from one single app? Slack is the only possible solution you can have. As distant collaboration is becoming a general trend of the future and a necessity right now, Slack becomes more and more popular among projects from small startups to giant tech companies.

Notion

Online documentation collaborations have never been so easy until the MiT switched to Notion. Seamless synchronization and nice interface are not the only reasons why MIT members chose Notion as a place for notes. With powerful database feature and integration of other apps like Slack or MS Teams, Notion really takes productivity to the next level.

With all these powerful apps recommended, it’s needed to be reiterated that app choice is NOT the philosophy of productivity, orientation is. A tool can be helpful for you but not for others; a tool can be suitable for this task but not for another. Sometimes it’s easy to dive too deep into which app to choice and we tend to try them all, but we sometimes forget what our ultimate purposes are; we’re merely being productive to look productive but not being productive to produce. — Anonymous

Disclaimer

Please keep in mind that these apps mentioned are of MIT team own selections and are no way in connection with the school. For technically issues of MS Teams, please email[email protected] instead.

Pictures and screenshot in this article are from various authors. They may in whole, or in part, be subjected to copyright protection. Before sharing them, always try to contact the author first.

Creative Common (CC3 BY) — written by Charles Ji, MIT team with love and passion for technology. Feel free to leave thoughts and suggestion below in the comment box!👇

Three Priorities For Your Productive Home Office Phone Number

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