Remote Working Part 2 – Things you should know about managing yourself
The main reason men and women fail to succeed at working remotely is they don’t realise the neccesity of excellent organisation and sustainable self discipline.
I have been working remotely for over seven years since I first discovered Quickbooks online an ‘on demand’ small business accounting software service and was motivated by the fact that if you can perform accounting online then why shouldn’t it be feasible to perform other important types of work remotely?
Whilst working remotely has many benefits there are numerous traps that people easily fall into which evolve into issues that cause lower productivity and lower motivation. The key reason for low effectiveness in remote employees is interruption and it is a established and well publicised fact that it can take a worker up to 20 mins to return to their original output level after experiencing a distraction.
Research also shows that persons who are consistently subjected to disruptions are more likely to suffer from reduced memory ability and are prone to developing mental health problems in old age. We live in an over communicated era and it is important that you recognise the problems this causes before you begin working remotely. When operating remotely you must do everything possible to minimise the risk of being disturbed.
Here are my most important tips:
1, Get a consistent schedule, communicate it to absolutely everyone and stick to it!
Good examples are a fixed time of day when you check or compose and reply to e-mail and make or be available for phone conversatiions. Before I began working remotely I used to get up to 200 e-mails every 24 hours. Now I think I am unfortunate if I receive more than 5. To start over with my electronic mail experience I altered my e-mail address and obsessively took precautions to shield the details being made available to anyone. I then educated every individual who I gave my e-mail address to, to use it prudently. I also created an auto-responder that swiftly told anyone sending me mail my schedule for attending to mail and if an e-mail needed my urgent attention to mark it as ‘Urgent’.
2. Get rid of alerts.
Disable every feature that can send you a perceptible alert. This includes mobile and
ordinary phones and forms of alerts from e-mail such as display events, warning sounds, screen changes to your inbox list and of course facing a window. Get a door on your work place and put up a ‘do not disturb’ sign on it.
In ‘Remote Working Part 3 – Best online software’ I will reveal my favourite tools and software.
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