The fifth wave of COVID-19 hit Hong Kong hard. Although we’re already a quarter of the way into 2022, the mood in Hong Kong feels like 2020 all over again. With mass testing and a potential lockdown in sight, many employees are returning to “work from home” arrangements.
Assuming you are able to work from home, it’s obvious that there are many benefits. No need to wake up early for commutes, you can be as dishevelled looking as you like (provided you don’t have to attend online meetings), no supervisor skulking around and spying on your workstation… It all sounds wonderful, but these benefits can quickly become a double-edged sword. Slacking, power napping and spending a bit too much time online can seriously impact our productivity.
If you’re suffering from WFH-fuelled blahs, consider a few tips to get you back up and running - and crossing items off your to-do list!
List-making 101
When we have more than one thing to take care of, making a to-do list is a common first step. Often ordered from least-to-most important (or vice versa) these lists help us to prioritise tasks and keep our minds focused… or so we think.
To-do lists are most effective when they contain only a few items. Once you go beyond the number of fingers on your hands, it can feel overwhelming to even look at the list. Furthermore, prioritising tasks is harder than it sounds! When you are working from home, the lines between housework and work-work often get blurred, creating confusing situations where you just can’t seem to juggle both.
To address list fatigue, Kirstin O’Donovan (a professional life coach and contributor to Lifehack.com) recommends these “four golden rules” of list making:
1. Categorisation
Different batches of tasks should be placed on separate lists. Instead of having a lengthy list of 12 different tasks, dividing your tasks helps to make your lists less intimidating and more aesthetically pleasing. “It might work well for you to have a ‘project’ list, a ‘follow-up list’, and a ‘don’t forget list’,” writes O’Donovan.
2. Estimation
When you are at home all day, time management can quickly spiral out of control. To-do lists without allocated time estimates can lead you to believe that you have more time than you actually have! Knowing how long a task will take is key to managing your schedule efficiently.
Under each listed item in your list, include how much time you think each task will take to be finished. It’s okay if you aren’t accurate the first few times – once you start timing your work and comparing the actual time taken to your estimates, you’ll be able to develop a better feel for it.
3. Prioritisation
How do you distinguish which tasks to do first? O’Donovan suggests adding four filters to your categorisation:
· Important and urgent
· Not urgent, but important
· Not important, but urgent
· Neither important nor urgent
For example, if you had a deadline for a project proposal tomorrow, you’d definitely classify that under the first category. On the other hand, you also need to swing by the store to pick up milk for breakfast tomorrow and to renew your magazine subscription that expires in two weeks. Breakfast is important, but if it’s only 12:00pm now, you have some time before breakfast tomorrow (not urgent, but important). Conversely, since the magazine subscription is still valid for two weeks, you can renew your subscription anytime this week (neither important nor urgent).
4. Review
“To make this list work effectively for you, it needs to become a daily tool that you use to manage your time and you review it regularly,” O’Donovan explains. “At the end of every week, review the list and use it to plan the week ahead. Select what you want to work on taking into consideration priority, time and sequence, and then schedule these items into your calendar.”
Do give yourself some flexibility in your schedule. O’Donovan believes it’s a bad idea to start your day with more than 75 percent of it already scheduled. Over-scheduling can quickly tire you out – and if a task unexpectedly takes more time to complete and/or an ad hoc assignment comes up… what then?
In addition to a to-do list, consider making a don’t-do list to stave off bad habits. Place your biggest slacking and work sins on this list and tape it above your work station – be it going on YouTube or obsessively checking your emails. Should you relapse and attempt to commit the sin, the list hanging over you should guilt you against doing it. Once you finish an important task and give yourself a break, it’ll make that YouTube video much more rewarding!
Creative downtime
Even when working at the office, it’s important to allocate time for breaks. According to research on the brain, our minds have two modes: focused and diffuse. When we are actively working or learning, our brain is focused. However, studies show that remaining focused for long periods can negatively impact our creativity, which results in increasingly poor and redundant ideas. If you’ve ever been stuck in a gruelling and lengthy brainstorming session, you’ve probably experienced this before!
As we take our minds off of work – whether by taking a walk, having a coffee or even daydreaming – our brains enter the diffuse mode. As you allow your mind to wander, more sections of the brain become active. Ever get annoyed by a problem, then a solution randomly hits you while doing something else? This happens because the brain continues working behind the scenes as you stew on the problem unconsciously.
According to cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, “mind wandering serves multiple adaptive functions, such as future planning, sorting out current concerns, cycling through different information streams, distributed learning (versus cramming), and creativity.” Who knew taking (controlled) breaks could help to enhance productivity!
When it comes to controlled breaks, the Pomodoro Technique (PT) developed by Francesco Cirillo comes to mind. By setting up a kitchen timer for 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of break time, he believed that this schedule worked best for raising focus and minimising procrastination.
Unfortunately, PT isn’t without its flaws. When you’re in the zone while writing, you feel like words flow from your fingertips like a flood upon a barren field. Imagine if the timer came up and demanded that you take a break while you were at your creative peak. By breaking stride, you risk losing your pace once you return from the break. Furthermore, PT isn’t always compatible with every task – how do you take breaks from childcare or attending a conference call?
In short, you can’t – so we need to be selective with how to use PT. If you’re in the zone while writing, we recommend ditching the timer until your tempo slows. That way, you’ll have more to think about during diffusion and the break will allow for a more potent recharge!
Working around unproductiveness
Contrary to what employers expect of you, and as explained earlier, it’s unproductive to think that you are able to work at 100 percent across the day. Especially when working from home, you’ll soon find that there are parts of the day where you just can’t seem to get anything done – contrarily, there are also periods when we are able to remain unusually focused.
For this writer, work productivity is cripplingly low after lunch, whereas I’m at my best in the late afternoon. Now if I were to just sit at my computer all day and try to work, being productive only in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon is not a very good look.
However, now that we have a categorised to-do list, we are able to allocate work more efficiently. Since I am mentally incapacitated after lunch, it would be the opportune time for chores that don’t require too much thought – for example, uploading content for a blog, washing the dishes, walking the dog and so on. The beauty of working from home is that we (theoretically) have more leeway over our daily routine, which allows us to handle our to-do list with more flexibility.
Of course, this might be a different story if there was an important assignment to submit by the evening… in which case, we’ll need to shift our priorities. If it was assigned over 24 hours ago and you know it’ll take some time to hash things out, try waking up earlier on the day of submission to maximise the amount of time you have to work on it.
Alternatively, if it was a rush job that was given without notice and you only had a few hours to do it, try rearranging your schedule to fit it within the “urgent and important” to-do list. In most cases, your supervisor wouldn’t mind if you delayed other less important tasks to focus on urgent ones.
If, however, all your assignments fell within this urgent and important list… it’s even more important to have that chat with your supervisor. You’re only human and it is illogical to expect you to be able to do two things at once. While it may mean working overtime, being able to establish which assignment carries more weight is crucial in prioritising your work.
When working from home, we’re not bound to the constraints of office hours, meaning we could quite literally make the entire day a workday if deadlines weren’t an issue. By being more meticulous with our schedules and breaks, we can ensure that our work productivity doesn’t end up in the gutter – well, most of the time anyway.