Everything you need to know about remote working
Introduction
In 1999, Peter Drucker wrote:
“The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is … to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers.”
Drucker was mostly right. He just needed to replace the word “knowledge” with “remote”.
In 2020, the largest workplace experiment in history began when COVID-19 restrictions forced millions of office workers around the world to work from home.
Organisations adjusted quickly by implementing new technologies. ‘Zoom me’ became the phrase du jour. Downloads of the video-conferencing app increased 1270% in just one month.
Over the last decade, digital tools and platforms have enabled workers to be productive from anywhere. But even with the tools to make it work, remote working stayed in the realm of a nice-to-have, rather than a fundamental of doing business.
Now that even remote-averse managers have been forced to take the leap, chances are high that increased rates of work flexibility are here to stay. Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, was among a swath of corporate leaders to announce that his employees can work from home. Forever.
When implemented correctly, remote workers report higher motivation, productivity, and independence – not to mention turbo-charging happiness with the disappearance of the dreaded commute.
The trouble is that this transition to remote work has been extreme, immediate and unpredicted. Not the best environment to make good, measured decisions. Reactive policies and tech solutions cobbled together overnight will provide a shaky foundation to build remote work practices upon.
To make matters worse, productive remote work is trickier than we think. It requires a skillset that doesn't come naturally, and putting those skills to use requires people to implement processes that combat our innate desire to forage for distractions. It’s not your fault, you’re wired for distractions. In The Distracted Mind, Gazzaley and Rosen point out:
“Molecular and physiological mechanisms that originally developed in our brains to support food foraging for survival have now evolved in primates to include information foraging.”
And without the physical accountability of colleagues' prying eyes, many managers worry that we’re more susceptible to play with our toys or go down unproductive rabbit holes.
In practice, information foraging means that even when our motivation is high, a constant stream of distractions fracture our focus, whether we’re in the office or not. We crave distractions so much that even when we’re away from our mobile phone we still feel phantom vibrations in our pocket (Drouin et al. 2012). Tim Wu, the author of The Attention Merchants, contends:
“The capture and resale of human attention has grown into the defining industry of our time.”
So your chances of being productive when working remotely appear bleak. But fear not, with a few tweaks you’ll be all set.
In this article, we'll provide an all-encompassing guide to working remotely that’s backed by research. We'll go over the key areas to consider when getting serious about your remote productivity. You'll learn about managing your time; staying focussed without a supervisor; designing your workspace; dealing with distractions at home; and disconnecting from work, all within the context of working remotely.
After reading this article, you'll come away with everything you need to know about the best practices of working from home, as well as some handy resources if you'd like to dive deeper.
Getting into work mode
When your home becomes your office, the line between work and life can disappear altogether. After all, if you weren't productive in the morning, why not do a bit more work after dinner?
The risk is that you end up with the worst of both worlds — you're unproductive and you're always working. But there is another way. In this section, we'll cover the four essential concepts you need to make your remote workday productive and discrete.
Routines matter
Let’s start with creating a daily routine — and sticking to it. Routines are crucial to remote work. They provide structure and predictability to a workday that would otherwise be formless and reactive.
This is less of an issue when you are working within the constraints of the office where most of your routine is designed for you. At home, you need to create structure for yourself.
Remote working routines are vital because they strip away trivial decisions, which take up more bandwidth than you think. The more choices you make, the more difficult each subsequent choice becomes. In one study, researchers mapped the decision-making of courtroom judges throughout the day — with sometimes disastrous consequences for defendants appearing later in the day.
It’s also why Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Mark Zuckerberg wore the same thing everyday. Barack Obama is also a dull-dressing convert. As he put it:
“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”
The lesson for those of us working remotely is to strip our choices back to the ones that matter. Don't tax your brain deciding when to do what. Make that decision once and stick to it.
Disconnecting from work
The final part of your remote work routine must always be switching off. Effective switching between work and life is so important because you need rest to perform at your best.
Your brain can't perform if it’s always occupied with work worries. They'll get in the way of regular sleep, leisure, and the things that you work for, like spending time with your family and hobbies (remember them?).
So how do you do it?
If you've designed your workspace properly (we’ll talk about this more below), you'll have a designated space in your home for work. When you leave that space, you'll signal to yourself and to everyone else that you are no longer working, giving yourself permission to disconnect mentally.
But that's often not enough. To allow yourself to disconnect, create as many clear differences between your work and leisure time as you can. Whether it’s wearing different slippers, or not using your work computer for personal use, it all helps you to disconnect intellectually and emotionally from work.
To really give your mind permission to move on to other things, create a ritual that you follow at the start and end of every workday. This is your start-up and shut-down routine. It can be as simple as unlocking and locking a filing cabinet, or plugging and unplugging your phone to your work computer. It just needs to signify that you’re switching into or out of work mode, and you need to repeat it daily.
Here’s one shut-down ritual we swear by: completing tomorrow’s to-do list. By completing your to-do list for the next day in your shut-down routine, you’ll reduce your anxiety that anything has slipped through the cracks. Research shows that handwriting your to-do list at the end of the day helps to decrease cognitive arousal, rumination, and worry, helping you to get to sleep quicker.
Staying focussed without supervision
One of the top reasons managers baulk at remote work is the suspicion that people become lazy if they’re not closely supervised. This suspicion often signals deeper culture issues, but bosses are right to recognise the many distractions that surround us at home. Here are a few tweaks to ensure that you’re churning out good work even on days your motivation is low.
Hack your motivation
It's unlikely that you love your job for the individual tasks it requires. Instead, if you're like most people, you're motivated by the big picture or the people. You get excited about what you're building as a team, not about the emails you need to reply to this afternoon. By breaking down that big picture into projects and milestones and tasks, you force your mind to see the relationship between the immediate task and the distant goal.
Still, tackling those emails can be painful even when you know they are necessary. When you're stuck in this position when working remotely, try re-introducing mutual accountability into your workday. One easy way to do that is to work alongside other people however you can. When working from home, try setting up an online work sprint with a friend or colleague. Running an open Zoom call in the background is one easy way to make that happen.
If you don't have a friend or colleague willing it to try it, you can always turn to FocusMate, a platform that connects you with other people on the internet just looking to get some work done. It's virtual co-working with other people who want to be productive.
If mutual accountability doesn't work, try hacking your brain with some positive and negative reinforcement. After you've set some small goals for the day, set yourself some small prizes for meeting them. These rewards are up to you: anything from a coffee to a walk in the park can do the trick. To meet a deadline for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo locked his clothes in a wardrobe and only wore a grey woollen body-stocking to prevent him from leaving the house. He beat his deadline by a few weeks.
If you’re all out of body-stockings, you might want to think about the stick instead of the carrot. Procrastination happens when the immediate gratification of not working outweighs our fear of the distant consequences — negative reinforcement works by adding to the "consequences" side of the scale. The trick is to make the consequences immediate. Take the website Stickk, for example. Put down some money and state your goal — if you fail to reach it, Stickk donates that money to a charity you don't like – for example, if you’re a Liverpool FC fan you can elect your money to go to the Chelsea FC Fan Club.
If sticks and carrots aren’t enough, the threat of public humiliation should do the trick. When you have a big hairy deadline that’s too far off to conjure up a sense of urgency, you need to take matters into your own hands.
Originally, the world “deadline” referred to a line around a prison. If a prisoner crossed it they’d be shot. When deadlines are enforced, they provoke what Tim Urban calls the “Panic Monster”. The Panic Monster gives you just enough adrenaline to overpower your urge for procrastination. But in a work context, deadlines are sometimes a bit too bendy. When that happens, they add to stress but not productivity. Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, put it this way:
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
But as Urban points out, relying on the Panic Monster isn’t a wise approach. More often than not, deadlines are just too far away to conjure up the unconscious stress the Panic Monster feeds on.
In fact, the Yerkes-Dodson Law states that over or under-arousal (read: too much or not enough fear) reduces task performance. That means that we need to consciously monitor and amend our psychological arousal at work. If you can’t maintain a healthy (but not too healthy) dose of the Panic Monster, you need to set yourself achievable deadlines that you’re accountable for.
Set sub-deadlines with your manager or a group of colleagues that you need onside. Weekly check-ins –10 to 15 minutes will suffice – where you present your progress should get momentum toward your larger deadline. Make sure you make the check-ins immovable – no excuses, get it done or lose face.
Power-napping is pretty great
Remote work opens up some interesting work options that were previously tricky. Take sleeping on the job as an example. Previously, taking a nap during work hours was unrealistic for most Westerners while being based at the office. Now we’re based at home, napping to improve focus and productivity is a real option. The good news is that it actually works.
Napping was Leonardo Da Vinci's go-to; he followed the Uberman sleep cycle: 20-minute naps every four hours. 'Bucky' Fuller, a renowned American neo-futuristic architect, slept for 30 minutes every six hours. Most Westerners stick to one big sleep at night (monophasic). But it's not clear if this is the natural sleep pattern of humans.
In short, power-naps (30 minutes or less) are better for performance than longer naps, no nap, or a coffee. Here are five points you should consider when including a nap into your daily work schedule:
Naps can improve reaction time, logical reasoning, mood and short-term memory even for well-rested people.
Naps offer longer-lasting improvements in motor skills, cognitive performance, and reduced sleepiness than caffeine.
Longer naps (two hours or longer) are associated with longer-lasting performance improvements than short ones (30 minutes or less).
Longer naps are more susceptible to sleep inertia (feeling groggy), which reduces performance immediately after the nap.
The benefits of short naps occur almost immediately and aren't impacted by sleep inertia.
Designing your remote workspace
If you are working remotely, chances are high that a lot of that time you'll be working from home. To be effective in your new work environment, it's crucial that you physically designate space in your home for working.
That will be easier in some living arrangements than others, but the benefits for doing so are clear. Just as going to the office designates a clear period of your day for work, offices also designate a clear space for work. A designated workspace helps your mind turn its attention to work tasks, as opposed to household tasks or leisure or food. Where you are matters. It's the same logic that tells us that keeping work or television out of the bedroom helps with sleep hygiene. The mind learns to associate behaviours with the spaces around it, so you need to be deliberate how you train your brain to work remotely.
Building 20 research showed that respondents with a dedicated remote work space were 25% more likely to strongly agree/agree that they prefer working remotely than at the office (57% to 32%, respectively), their self-reported productivity was also much higher (51% of respondents with a dedicated space said they’re more productive now than compared to before COVID-19 restrictions were implemented, 27% higher than respondents who don’t have a dedicated workspace).
Get your set-up right
If you're going to spend eight hours a day in your workspace, you may as well make it good for your health. That's harder than it sounds. As we now know, sitting isn't just bad for your body — it's bad for your brain. So working from home presents both dangers and opportunities for your health. You're no longer getting up to walk to a meeting, but you have been given a chance to design your workspace the way you want.
First, make sure that your layout is ergonomic. If you can, put your computer screen at eye level so you're not bending your neck to look at it. Use a chair with ample back support, and sit up straight, with your shoulders back.
No matter how ergonomic your seated position, sitting just isn't good for you. If you can, invest in a standing desk. You can get adjustable desks that allow you to alternate throughout the day — going from sitting all day to standing all day is a sharp transition.
Getting a healthy workspace together doesn’t have to be an expensive exercise. Most people already have what they need to create a space they are comfortable and productive working in. Ernest Hemingway had his typewriter on top of a cluttered bookcase and that worked out pretty well for him:
“A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.”
You can resist everything (except temptation)
If you're anything like Oscar Wilde, you have great willpower — except when anything tempts you. In fact, that's true of everyone. Discipline may be a virtue that improves with practice, but it's not something that turns on just because you want it to, and it's never invincible.
Instead, the science tells us that willpower is a finite resource and diminishes as you use it throughout the day. Remember decision fatigue? Willpower works in much the same way, no matter who you are.
When it comes to working from home, that means we need to be active in removing triggers. You might fancy that you have the discipline to work hard with the TV lingering in your peripheral vision or your phone on the table beside you. But the truth is that as the day gets on that willpower will slip further and further away.
When you design your own physical workspace you have the choice to make life easier or harder for yourself. If you like doing things the hard way, fill your space with distractions and triggers and see how much work gets done. Alternatively, recognise that your willpower is limited and do things the smart way: strip your workspace of anything that you don't absolutely need for work.
Don't believe us? Just look at how minimal the space is where Bill Gates has his ‘Think Weeks’.
Conclusion
So there you have it — the complete guide to working remotely. Making these changes in your life takes intentionality, but if you've read this far, you know you want to make a change. With a small amount of effort, these steps will radically change the way you work remotely. You'll find that the work you do is more efficient, more productive, and much less likely to creep into the time you need for yourself.
None of this is easy, but the upsides are huge. And remember, Building 20 is here to help. We specialise in helping teams transition to remote work. Find out more here.