Is working from home hindering your productivity? At Omnifique, we are masters at managing tasks, getting things done, and making magic happen. We love goal-setting, crossing off finished projects from our to-do lists, and sharing our success with the rest of the team. It’s what keeps us disruptive, innovative, and helps us make your reality even better than your dreams. So, to help you out during lockdown, we are happy to share some of our expertise with you. Read on to discover 3 productivity hacks that help us achieve our goals:
Writing the Perfect To-Do List
You’ve probably already heard about the importance of writing down your goals and your (monthly, weekly, daily) to-dos. Use whatever you prefer: a notebook, an app, post-its on your wall. But… How do you craft the perfect to-do list? Well, we’ve learned some tricks along the way that may help you maximize your efficiency.
Procrastinating is super tempting, especially when you’re working from home. Why work when you could paint your nails, organize that drawer, or play with the kids? Well, you HAVE to get work done. So, first things first: write down a list of all your to-dos. Follow the SMART criteria: your tasks should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. A project, for example, should be split up into different to-dos.
Now, mark the pending tasks that are making you feel anxious or uncomfortable. You want to tackle these tasks first. Ask yourself: will accomplish these make me satisfied with my day? If so, go back to your notebook or your notes app and, taking into account deadlines and schedules, re-organize your list. On the top, you should find those tasks that, upon completion, will give you a sense of accomplishment.
Next comes the tricky part: the actual work. Let’s see how we at Omnifique make it easier to actually finish those to-dos.
Tracking Time with the Pomodoro Technique
In the early 1990s, Italian developer Francesco Cirillo designed the Pomodoro Technique, a method to track time and work smarter. Pomodoro means tomato and Italian. Cirillo decided to work on his to-dos for blocks of 25 minutes, which he named Pomodoros. So, how do you apply this technique to your work life?
First, take your to-do list and estimate how many Pomodoros, how many blocks of 25 minutes it will take you to finish each task. Then, turn off all distractions: cellphones, browser notifications, annoying music, and whatever may lead you to procrastinate instead of getting things done. This may also mean letting people around you know that you will be unavailable for some time. Make sure you have everything you need by your side: water, tea, snacks, the necessary tools to get things done.
Then, start working. Set the timer for 25 minutes and go. When you’re done with each Pomodoro, you can take a 5-minute break. Unless you want to go with the flow and continue working. When you’re done with 5 Pomodoros, you can take a 30-minute break. Also, make sure you write down how many Pomodoros it actually took you to complete each task.
The Pomodoro Technique works because it allows you to take necessary breaks, and it helps you focus on one task at a time. It’s only 25 minutes, right?
This method also helps draw a clear line between work and personal life. Working from home may mean you need to set these boundaries. Also, tracking time allows you to analyze which tasks are more time-consuming than you thought, and which others can be completed faster.
Being Accountable Through Scrum
Have you heard of Agile software development? This way of working is essential to foster dynamic work teams and helps develop projects in an agile, flexible, fast, and always collaborative way.
Through this methodology, projects are divided into a rigorous structure, with various steps to follow, evaluations, and tools which allow team members to organize, experiment, test, track and return to the beginning of the process as they need to.
One of the tools implemented in Agile software development is the daily Scrum. This means having a daily meeting to track progress, discuss if anything is impeding the team from moving forward, and giving visibility to that day’s to-dos. This should be short and to the point, without worrying about solving each problem right there. The point of the daily Scrum is to improve communications and make everyone’s work transparent.
As some of Omnifique’s team members work remotely, we use each team’s Slack channels to write a daily Scrum. Every day we list what we worked on the day before, our to-dos for that day, and if there’s anything impeding our progress. This last point may even include tagging someone, not to call them out, but as a friendly reminder.
By letting everyone know what’ we’re working on, how we’re doing, and what is stopping us from achieving greatness, we have to spend time crafting our to-do list, we get to visualize progress, and we nurture commitment.
Other Quick Productivity Hacks
If you need even more inspiration, here are some extra tricks to foster insane productivity while working from home:
-Wake up at least one hour before you have to be in front of the computer. We recommend getting out of your PJs for extra motivation.
-Work in long blocks of hours, not 25 minutes here and there. Get in the flow.
-Make sure you have a space to work that feels right – whatever that means to you. Feng Shui, perhaps?
-Be social with your teammates – even online! For us, that means creating an exclusive Slack channel dedicated to it.
We hope this article about productivity hacks helps you make your work life at home a little bit easier.