With team members in hubs across the country and around the world, we here at T!LT have turned remote work into an art form. We were doing it before it was cool, if by “cool” you mean “necessary for the health and safety of everyone involved.”
Now, everybody’s doing it. It’s so passé. It also doesn’t look like it’s going to be changing anytime soon. Not everyone is having an easy time of it, and that’s okay. But we’ve been doing this since long before it was a gleam in the weary, multitasking eyes of all you whippersnappers.
So pull up the same chair you’ve been sitting in for the last six months, make yourself comfortable, and learn from the hard-earned wisdom of Old Man T!LT.
Remote Control, Part 3: A Journey Across Time And Space — Bringing Order To The Remote Workspace
Remember “the world before?” A long time ago — so long ago that you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking you dreamt it — you looked forward to unstructured time. Those days were rare, and they were precious: days when you could do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, and wear whatever you wanted.
Well, that’s every day now. And you’ve probably discovered that it’s not all it was cracked up to be.
Days that were once linear now feel vaguely cubist, like Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase. Separate moments in time now exist simultaneously; things that used to occur in different places now occupy the same physical space. In fact, depending on your living arrangements, your commute to work may now mean literally descending a staircase in the nude. (At least put some pants on, for crying out loud.)
Want to know how to regain some sense of normalcy as you work from home? How to — ahem — T!LT things in the right direction? Then read on, friend.
Time Is A Flat Circle. Give It Some Depth.
Even in the most normal of times, to-do lists can start to feel surreal. Like the heads of a hydra, you lop one item off, and two seem to take its place. On and on it goes, until you have to make lists of all the lists you have to make.
That might have worked for you in the world before. Nowadays, not so much. You need more than a list. You need a schedule.
While you may have scheduled calls and meetings throughout the week, chances are you’re spending a lot of time completing tasks on your own. This may be especially true if you’re working asynchronously in a different time zone than other members of your team. So you’ve got to be a little more precise in how you manage that time.
Need to catch up on emails? Block out an hour where that’s all you do. Putting together a pitch deck? Block out a specific chunk of time for that, too. Don’t try to do both things at once. Assign certain tasks to certain hours of the day, and stick to the schedule you make.
Of course, you may not follow it down to the precise minute. If an important call comes through while you’re writing up a proposal, that’s going to knock you off course a bit. But it’s important to be flexible. Take the call, spend as much time as necessary on it, and then find your way back to your schedule.
Your day will never go exactly as planned. But without a plan, you might find yourself at the end of the day wondering if it went anywhere at all.
A Room Space Of One’s Own
You’ve made the time. Now you’ve gotta make the space. Just as you’ve dedicated discrete blocks of time for each of your tasks, you need to dedicate a space in which to complete them.
If you have a separate room that you can turn into an office, great. Make sure it’s somewhere relatively free from distractions. If you’ve got kids screaming through their headsets as they play Fortnite, you should probably set up shop as far from them as possible
But you may not have a separate room. That’s okay; plenty of us are working with limited space. Your workspace doesn’t need to be anything fancy. It just has to be the place where your mind says, “this is where we work.” A table in the corner of a room will do, as long it’s reserved for work and work alone.
Jack’s A Dull Boy. Don’t Be Like Jack.
Take a look at your calendar.
Go on, really look at it.
Does it look like it’s just one task after another from sunup to sundown?
Then you’re doing it wrong.
Ya gotta eat, friend. You have to spend time with your family and friends, even if that means a quick phone call or FaceTime chat. In other words, you need to take care of yourself, and you’re probably not going to do that unless you consciously make the time for it.
Write meal times into your schedule. Write in snack times, too. And while you’re at it? Block out some time to watch TV, and take a load off. Seriously, it’s okay. If you know you’ve got Lovecraft Country waiting for you from 6:00 to 7:00, you won’t be as tempted by the siren song of TikTok in the middle of the day.
You Say Tomato, I Say Take A Break-o
But you know what? Sometimes a little TikTok is okay, too. You need to take short breaks as you’re grinding out your workday. Say you’ve been sitting at your computer for twenty minutes, but all you can think about is grabbing a string cheese from the fridge. So do it.
Better yet, grab a tomato. Ever heard of the Pomodoro technique? Developed by productivity consultant Francesco Cirillo, it’s so named because of the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used to implement it. Your timer doesn’t have to look like a tomato, by the way. It can look like an onion. Or a dog. Or just a boring old kitchen timer.
It goes a little something like this:
- Select a specific task. (This should be easy with your spiffy new calendar system.)
- Set the timer for somewhere between 20 and 25 minutes.
- Get to work!
- When the timer rings, pencils down! (But then pick up that pencil one more time to put a check mark on a piece of paper.)
-
- If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break of 3–5 minutes, then reset your timer for another work block.
- If you have four checkmarks, bully for you! Give yourself a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes. Then start all over again.
You probably did something like this in the office back in the old days, worried that someone might think you were slacking off. Well, now you don’t have to worry about that. You need to power up that life bar as you go through your day; we all do. It’ll help make those periods of concentrated work much more productive.
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll feel like you’ve restored a sense of order to your corner of the universe.
