Tips for Working From Home
Working from home full-time is a different experience than we are used to. You make or break things, there’s no one asking about your progress and there are no deadlines. It’s all up to you.
My productivity has varied a lot during this time and I was wondering how to make more days productive than they are as of now.
So I polled some of my friends who also work out of a home-office on how they they maintain productivity / motivation / focus, and I got some interesting replies:
Manish Jethani says:
- Make a separate “office room” in your home. You could convert your old study room into your office. You go into this room only for work — fully dressed for work (not in pyjamas!). When you get out of this room, you leave your work behind. In other words, you have a proper office located inside your home.
- Cut out the distractions. Make your family know that this is your office. No visitors, no phone calls (except work-related), etc.
- Follow proper timings. Work fixed hours.
- To stay motivated while working out of your home, I think you basically have to enjoy what you do.
- Self-discipline is the key.
- The concept of an office, as we know it, is relatively new in our history. Throughout the ages humans have worked out of their homes. Think about it. It’s the more natural way of things. Thanks to the internet, working from home is likely to become the norm in the 21st century (also because commuting might become prohibitively expensive).
Always remember Carpe Diem
One of the hard lessons that I have learned this year is “Always remember Carpe Diem“. The corollary is that “If you don’t execute on your idea quick, someone else definitely will.”
For example, long back Vikram had this idea that there should be a company which takes care of odd chores such as electrical maintenance or plumbing, basically handyman work. Yesterday, I saw www.handiman.in on the back of an auto rickshaw. I came home and checked it out and it does exactly that. It’s a very useful service and seems reasonably affordable, at least for IT people. I’m sure lot of people in Bangalore will go for it.
Today, Mrinal pointed to www.indimeme.com, a TechMeme for the Indian blogosphere.
I started kicking myself.
I’ve had this idea for months but I couldn’t really move on it because I don’t have the knowledge yet, for example, about clustering algorithms. However, I did brainstorm it with a couple of friends and thought we’ll work it out. But a single person beat us to it.
There is a range of reasons why such a website is a good idea, probably the same reasons why TechMeme is indispensable too:
- Allows people to see what are the latest topics that Indian bloggers are talking about.
- Allows people to see the discussions across blogs, not just one blog
and its comments.
- Encourages the above type of discussion.
- The portal can become the gateway of the Indian blogosphere.
- For the website creator’s point of view, it can bring in a lot of visitors. And subsequently, advertisers.
- An indispensable website means the creator of the website is indispensable too. Just like Gabe Rivera is everything behind the scenes of TechMeme. (Let’s face it, we’re all replaceable in our workplaces.)
And so on.
Anyway, the only downside I’ve noticed about IndiMeme.com is that the clustering results aren’t good yet, but the thing is it is already out there. It has been executed. It needs refinement. And I’m sure it’ll get there.
I don’t know whether I should add this idea to my already-long personal ‘deadpool’. Sigh.
When I started thinking about this idea, I came across one paper called Mining blog stories using community-based and temporal clustering which explained how this is a special type of clustering that takes time into account. They call it:
“[the] Content-Community-Time model that can leverage the content of entries, their timestamps, and the community structure of the blogs, to automatically discover stories. Doing so also allows us to discover hot stories.”
I was thinking whether the same idea can be applied to an RSS aggregator and then I found that was done too as well.
I guess there are simply no low-hanging fruit left in this accelerated world.
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
– Leonardo da Vinci
How to handle information overload
Philipp Lenssen recently had a good post on tips on information overload by various people. It got me thinking about the various tips and tricks I’ve imbibed in the recent past and which work reasonably well for me. So I tried to collate them into one place:
- Always bring the inbox down to zero regularly. ‘Regularly’ is defined by you.
- Never allow anything to be in your inbox > 2-3 days
- If you’re not going to reply in that time frame, you never will. So simply archive it or reply with a one-liner saying you can’t look into it now.
- If you don’t have anything to add, don’t reply.
- Make sure you are clear on what is the action you are expecting from the recipient.
- Reply in bullet points. Because everybody skims.
- Once you’re done with the email (replying, taking action or reading), archive it.
- If it is not actionable, archive it. Don’t let it remain in your inbox.
- Use keyboard shortcuts.
- Mailing lists go into folders. I simulate them in Gmail using “Apply label, Skip Inbox” in the filters. The reason is that mails not directly addressed to me are not urgent, so I can process them whenever I have the inclination. Whatever is in my inbox is what deserves immediate attention.
- Minimize the number of times you need to check email. The minimum that is required for you to stop worrying about it. The beauty of email is that you can reply at your pace. Make use of that feature. If you end up constantly checking email, you’re better off resorting to phone calls or instant messenger.
- [new tip] Before you send the next email, go through the checklist.
Feeds
- Use your feed reader once in a few days. The world won’t stop without you.
- Use a desktop feed reader because it is faster to use.
- Have a ‘Try Before You Buy’ folder where you add feeds. If it doesn’t turn out to be useful, delete it.
- Have a number in mind, say 100 feeds. If you add a new feed, delete an old feed that is no longer interesting.
- If you end up doing a ‘Mark all as read’ on a feed 2-3 times in a row, delete it.
- Separate them into categories and/or priorities.
- Most importantly, read interesting things. Do not aim for reading 500+ blog posts a day. Optimize, don’t maximize.
- Remember that the goal is to derive some value out of this reading and that value is usually knowledge. If it is not helping you towards that goal, delete it. Don’t think twice, just delete it.
- While working, if you feel the need to distract yourself once in a while or read something interesting, don’t use your feed reader but use good filters like TechMeme or programming.reddit or a good link-blogger on your subjects of interest. Have a separate dedicated time for reading feeds.
- Take
notes.
Over time, you’ll judge if a feed is useful or not depending on
whether you’re taking (any) notes or not.
- You can also use a mental version of the “McDowell Grid”.
Inlets
- Cut down on the types of inlets - Email, Feeds, Twitter, IRC, Messenger, Phone, etc. (this one is particularly hard for me)
- Spend at least 50% of your time at the computer with all these inlets shut down.
Focus
- Personally I find productivity inversely proportional to information overload. The days when I’m productive and “in the zone” turns out to be the days when I’m less affected by information overload. The vice-versa is true as well. So if you focus on the right things, the information overload problem will get solved by itself.
- Maintain focus by having a todo list. Have a big todo list and then pick random tasks from that list depending on your energy levels and get things done.
- Never indulge in tasks outside of your todo list. If you’re not in the mood for any of them, don’t indulge in wilfing. Go out instead - whether for a walk, or call up a friend or even read a paper book. If you’re not being productive, just get out of the chair.
- Don’t use fancy software for writing lists. Use a good plain text editor (like Vim).
- Use GTD.
- Use an auto-pilot schedule (I’m still learning this).
P.S. Many of these ideas have been borrowed from elsewhere. It’s been a long time since I imbibed all these, so I don’t remember all the sources from which I gleaned them.
A productive homepage
I recently started using my own home page in Firefox as a start-point for all the important links that I should visit from time to time. It’s been a good boost for productivity since it keeps the main thing the main thing:
This was just a simple ‘idealet’ inspired by Opera’s Speed Dial feature.
The advantages to using this are:
- Quick access to things you need to access like your website management page or your bank website, instead of hunting around in the bookmarks menu.
- Avoids the need for a bookmarks toolbar. I feel a toolbar takes too much screen real-estate compared to its usefulness.
- When you’re bored, you open your homepage and visit some of the vast websites where you can learn stuff, like the ones under the ‘Grey Matter’ section.
- It jogs your memory to visit some of the websites that you should visit from time to time, like any forums that you want to be updated on (instead of letting them flood your inbox).
- Having a simple local HTML page as the homepage is much faster than an online start-page.
- Backing up/restoring/editing a HTML file is simpler than a bookmarks database.
The only thing missing is that when I open a new tab, it should
automatically open with the home page instead of a blank page. This can
be done using the Tabbrowser Preferences add-on.
Update: Or you can simply use the many Speed Dial addons to Firefox out there…
It’s all in the mind
(Warning : I just started typing this post because the title popped into my head, so what follows might seem like a lot of rambling.)
No matter how much we talk about talent, opportunities, and other things we can blame on, making things happen basically boils down to one thing - it’s all in the mind. And of course, you need to put in some effort too, but that again is derived from your mindset.
For example, I have a few problems that I chronically face:
If I have an idea or come across something interesting or even start on a new project at work, I tend to have a lot of enthusiasm at first but soon forget it later in the drudgery of everyday life, and especially so when it comes to personal projects.
I tend to get worked up on deadlines and schedules without actually paying attention to the work.
I am constantly worried about not following up on things and not being organized.
About six months ago, I started following the ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) philosophy and it has helped me improve a lot w.r.t. these problems. This helped me concentrate on actions and not only on problems. As and when you keep showing up and doing things, you’ll see the progress yourself and you’ll be a happier person. That reminds me of this LifeHack article: “All you need is the willingness to take the next most obvious step - then repeat the process again and again, regardless of how you feel. Try it.Happiness comes from seeing the results of your efforts. You don’t need it before you start.“
The gist of GTD is to concentrate only on the next physical action and let other things take care of itself. This helped me deal with the second problem.
When it comes to problem 3, I’m way more organized now, to the point, where I think my actual talent (or the lack of it) and the willingness to put in effort are the barriers. I hope Knuth’s philosophy of being at the bottom of things will help me here.
These three problems are similar in the sense that they tend towards one point - it’s all in the mind. To alleviate it, I applied the GTD approach.
Similarly, if you’re worried about what kind of raise you’re going to get this year, etc., then stop worrying. There is no use of worrying over things that you can’t control. You can’t control the traffic on the road, so if you need to reach a place on time, just leave early and the rest will take care of itself.
If you’ve been sweating it out for the past couple of hours trying to fix a bug and you’re not making any headway, then it is important to switch to a different problem and then come back later. You’ll come back with a fresh perspective, fresh energy and fresh ideas on what to look out for and may be the things you’ve overlooked previously might be the actual problem. This is also important because it helps you to always keep moving forward, one way or another, and you don’t get stuck in one project and don’t move in other projects (and by project, I mean the GTD meaning of ‘project’).
There has been many a time when I’ve gotten frustrated and feel like just banging my head on the keyboard. This is where I take a step back, relax and say to myself ‘CUT to the G’ (yes, that’s a phrase I coined for myself):
- Concentrate
- Understand
- Think
- Get Things Done
Each of these steps is important in its own way, but I personally underestimate the value of the second step. Knowing what you’re exactly doing is a critical nature of a programmer especially because only you would know how the system exactly works and nobody else would look at it, everyone else is just a end user.
Step 4 is eventually what gets you moving, but Steps 2 and 3 are equally important. As Abraham Lincoln once said “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe.” And to get to this stage, you need to do Step 1 which boils down to one thing - It’s all in the mind. That’s why it’s so hard.
Footnotes
Related reading: ‘Leadership - Some Random Thoughts’ by Lawrence Rabiner.
That doesn’t mean to say that you/I can achieve anything and everything, it’s just that you need to get over the mindblocks to do even the simple things that you are capable of achieving.
Motivation
When I look at people around me, I often ponder how they manage to live life just like any other day. They tackle work and fun and go home and watch TV and sleep. Then, get up the next day and the cycle continues. I think of them as analogous to “machines”.
On the other hand, I’m more like a wind-up toy. I need to motivate myself regularly to keep me going. I don’t know if there’s a deficiency in me or it’s just that I’m built that way. I usually resort to many tricks and advice and the worst/best part is that these tricks usually work for me.
Why is it that I find it so hard to get motivated?
I can think of several reasons :
- I have this mental block that “I am not a finisher”. I tend to start things with great enthusiasm but due to past history, I get an uneasy feeling that I won’t be able to complete it, and once you lose confidence and enthusiasm, that’s the end of it. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.”
- It’s easy to “lose sight” of what’s important. The daily bhaag-daud makes you lose sight of the big picture. As Stephen Covey once said, “The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.”
- Don’t follow the herd mentality. Do what is important to you. “To lead a symphony you must occasionally turn your back on the crowd.”
- There’s not enough passion. This violates our Dappers Rule.
- Not enough concentration. One thing at a time. And think while you’re at it. The one thing that I remind myself (and it helps me very effectively) is “You have to think more than you think you should but often less than what you are afraid you have to”.
Looks like I already have 5 points. I guess that part of my “growing up” would be to tackle these issues.
Paper
The simplest solution is always the best solution — Swaroop
Update : It seems this is my subconcious paraphrasing of Occam’s Razor principle.
