Working From Home? 7 Tips To Stay Productive and Sane

These are strange times.

I’m writing this from home. Nothing too unusual there.

But, I’m also working from home while on Day 6 of a 14-day isolation during the Covid-19 crisis. My youngest daughter just returned from Myanmar and we are taking all the prescribed precautions.

In my neighborhood I see more people walking, smiling and talking (at a distance).

Families are connecting (I hosted a family call on zoom yesterday and 29 of us showed up for a very noisy reunion).

We are at home more and more people are making phone calls, reading blogs and interacting online.

This is also an opportunity.

Like all cycles, we will get through this and there will be “the other side.” And like all cycles, some will be prepared and ready and some will take much longer to find their feet.

This happened during the devastating influenza pandemic of 1918, the great depression in the 1930’s, all the recessions in the 80’s and 90’s, the sub-prime slaughter of 2007/2008 and now during Covid 19.

I’m not making light of the horrible consequences that come with massive health risks or the impact on families who have lost loved ones. I’m talking about the millions of us who will, at worst, lose some income for a few months and have to get our groceries delivered to our door.

We can spend our days watching news updates, or we can take advantage of these times.

Whether you are a seasoned pro at working from home, or this is all new for you, there are things you can do right now to be productive and stay sane.

Here are 7 things you can be doing now if you are stuck at home:

Write more. People have more time to spend online, to read and to discover new solutions to old problems (some Internet sites are experiencing double their normal volume of traffic). Set aside time every morning to write and, if you have a blog, publish more often. Here’s the template I use for every blog.

Use a template to quickly move your mind dump of ideas into an organized flow

Share your thoughts. Maybe this is the time to share your thoughts and experiences with this crisis. It might be a departure from your normal topics but it could also be well received by your followers and fans. Start with thought-provoking articles about coronavirus on medium.com.

Connect more. Follow-up to emails, thank people for commenting and respond to social media followers. Your response might come at the perfect time to make a big difference in someone’s life.

Move your body. Long hours watching Netflix is not a recipe for good health. You have fewer excuses and a whole lot more time to get out for a walk, jump on your bike or bliss out with a guided meditationguided meditation. Make it a morning routine and your mind will thank you.

Learn how to host online meetings. If you haven’t dived into the world of online meetings maybe now is the time to learn. I use zoom.us daily while working from home for meetings with staff, customers, and webinars (and now family). It’s surprisingly easy and robust. You might even have a client willing to move a planned event to online.

Read more. Now is a great time to dig into the pile of unread books by your bed, and expand your thinking (and get off Netflix). I’m deep into The Choice by Edith Eger a breathtakingly beautiful work about “our capacity to transcend even the greatest of horrors and to use that suffering for the benefit of others” (Desmond Tutu), Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant, and Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

Look ahead. I’ve been taking time every day to work on my planning. As I’ve shifted the focus for most of my working hours to BlogWorks I’ve realized a number of areas where I need outside help. Maybe you need to be looking at outsourcing some routines, like your blog, your marketing, your website updates or graphic design. graphic design.

We’re all in this together and we’ll all get through it together. And when this is all over we will certainly need to recover – the fallout is incalculable.

In the meantime, if you are stuck at home, this could be an opportunity.