Productivity at Home

Welcome Back! (kind of)

I hope all of you are happy and healthy despite having to spend some time isolated in your respective homes. I’d like to take this opportunity to encourage you to practice healthy social distancing protocols to keep those with compromised immune systems safe. It will be a challenge to move everything into a remote learning space but with a little effort and organization, I believe you will all be incredibly successful. I find that this can be a very educational experience for each of you because you might find yourself in a very similar situation as a freelance designer (minus the pandemic thing). Here are a few key principles that have helped me in the past when approaching a self motivated work pipeline:

Productivity at Home

1. Habits and Hygiene

   1. Wake up and go to bed at relatively the same time.

   2. Get up and get dressed as if you were going somewhere offsite to do your work (I find that the act of maintaining my hair helps too).

   3. Eat your meals at the same time (lunch at lunch time, dinner at dinner time, etc.)

   4. Give yourself a stop time. Give yourself 8 - 10 hours of work/day and try to get everything done in those windows. Try not to tell yourself “just 30 more minutes”.

2. Exercise, movement, and breaks

   1. Plan on exercising at least a little bit everyday. Schedule this in your day to day. Go for a walk to make sure the sun touches your skin (vitamin d is both beneficial and crucial).

   2. Hydrate regularly. Make sure you’re consuming enough water throughout the day.

   3. The 10-10-10 rule: Every 10 minutes, focus your eyes on something 10 meters away for about 10 seconds. If you can, setup your workspace next to a window to make this easier.

3. Separate your spaces for maximum psychological benefit

   1. Your sleep space should be your sleep space.

   2. your eating places should be your eating places.

   3. your work space should be somewhere other than either of those places.

4. The power of externalizing your tasks

   1. Write down the things you need to get done during the day. At the very least, say them out loud to yourself or someone else.

   2. Post-its are a wonderful way of externalizing your tasks and as a way of visually making progress on those tasks.

   3. Construct a Kanban or Scrum board to better organize your tasks (this works well with multiple categories like classes or team mates). There are also digital versions of the Kanban board like Trello (I’m still a fan of the physical old school).