• Agile Coach

Does working from home cost more energy than you thought? Here’s what you can do

Since becoming self-employed, I work from home more often than ever. There was no virus for that. I was getting a fair amount of work out of my hands, but since our whole family is at home, it became a lot more complicated. I was forced to take my working from home to the next level. In this article, I share my insights.

There were five things that cost me a lot of energy: constant interruptions, constantly changing times and appointments, little concentration, many things on my mind and no time to do anything about it. Recognizable? Then read on for ideas on how to avoid these energy guzzlers. Your roommates are probably just different from mine, so you will have to apply these tips with creativity.

Clear time boxes bring structure to working from home

Normally I can work from home undisturbed when the kids are at school. These days it’s a battlefield. I rarely got as many in-between things as I did last week. I realized after a while that being interrupted all the time was costing me a lot of energy: energy guzzler number one. By the way, it’s not just people who bother me. It’s also often my own worries and thoughts. The solution I used is the so-called time box.

Time box: you agree with yourself and your team what you are going to focus on within a certain time frame. So you don’t make a result agreement, but you make an effort commitment.

What do I mean by team in the above definition? Since the pandemic, your family is also a team, because you are in a room with them more than with your colleagues. It is a new team that is much closer than those virtual teams at your work. So it will take time and attention to get it on track. Take that time, too.

When I coach professionally, I always advise against working in more than one team at a time. If there really is no other way – like now – then I recommend compartmentalizing. Time boxes are a good way to do that. As long as you can get to the office, you get compartmentalization for free through your travel there and back. If you can no longer travel, then making clear arrangements is the only thing left to do.

The benefits of time boxes:

• The time boxes provide clarity for you and your teams.
• They lead to fewer disappointments. People don’t interrupt you when you look available but still don’t have time.
• They lead to greater self-reliance. People who don’t have a turn now know when it will be their turn. So you help others, too.

It takes some energy to make those appointments the first time, but you will benefit greatly after that. The next step is to try to repeat the appointments as little as possible. That brings us to the next point: rhythm.

A new rhythm for your entire home

Our family rhythm was completely disrupted and we had to find a new rhythm. We have collective jet lag. This is the second energy guzzler. It’s a vicious energy eater because you don’t realize it’s there very quickly. The opposite may be easier to imagine: a nice rhythm brings energy. I have felt it myself with a band and at work. It just feels good when you find your rhythm, automatically come together at the same times and together turn one and one into three.

In every team there is much more to do than you ever get done in a day. That’s a fact of life – there’s little you can do about it. So when your time box for one team has expired, you can quietly start work on the next team. Setting goals for day is good, but the time box is more important. Keep it as tight and regular as possible to get the groove going. You may feel at first that this is not as productive, but as you get into the groove, productivity will come naturally.

Finding a new groove with my family these days feels like trying a new song in a band. It takes some searching before it starts running smoothly. In band, we accept that and take time for it.

Bring focus with your state of mind

You may have felt: sometimes you feel like cleaning up, sometimes you just want to see people, sometimes you feel like working really hard and sometimes you just want to do nothing. Your brain can be in different states . If you start doing something that doesn’t fit the state of your brain, it’s annoying to downright pointless. Doing something without the right state of mind, is the third energy guzzler I run into a lot when I work from home.

The good news is that you can influence the state of your brain. Technically, there are certain triggers that cause it. To make that a little less abstract, here are a few examples:

• When I get dressed neatly in the morning, I tell my brain that I am working with other people. Even when I’m at home, I keep doing that because it helps me focus on my work. Plus, it looks much better in a video call.
• I once started listening to “Elastic Band” by Joshua Redman in my noise-canceling headphones while working. Music helps push the ambient noise even further away. By now I know the album front to back and I’ve come to associate it with work. As soon as the first notes of Molten Soul sound, I am focused.
• The rhythm described above is also a trigger. My internal biological clock knows what time lunch time is. So the clock can also learn what time is work time. Rhythm helps.

And finally: finding a new rhythm in a totally different world is exhausting, more exhausting than you think. So sleeping a lot now is also a good idea. You stay younger, you can concentrate better and you are less prone to viruses when you are rested.

Plan & Do: Alternate enough between planning and doing

The better you get into the rhythm, the better you can realistically estimate how much work you can do in a day. Why is estimating important? For feeling satisfied! For me, scheduling too much in a day is the third energy guzzler of working from home. That terrible feeling of not getting enough done takes a lot of energy out of me. It also doesn’t help to really pay attention to the rest of it given.

I prefer to use Trello to keep track of what I can and want to do. I have roughly three lists:

1. Inbox: Things that people ask me in between or come to mind
2. Long-term: Important, bigger things I am responsible for
3. Today: Activities I will do today

Planning consists of emptying the inbox as quickly as possible. To do that, I have three options: either I’m going to do it quickly, or I reject it, or I schedule it in. Scheduling can be today or another day.

Then I supplement my list ‘today’ with things from list ‘long term’. I limit the length of list ‘today’ to about 5 items. Much more than 5 is cluttered. Two or three is also fine. When list ‘today’ is processed, I can really relax and enjoy the evening.

Limit ‘Work in Progress’ even when working from home

On my “long-term” list are many things that I can only take care of by phone. If the person I want to call doesn’t have time or doesn’t answer, it leaves me feeling unfulfilled. That phone call keeps gnawing at me and it takes energy. It is, in Lean or Agile terms, “Work in Progress. When that accumulates, I sometimes feel like it gets exponentially worse.

My solution to this is to include a call attempt as a to-do. Even if the attempt fails, I did do it. It can go to “done. I then create a new to-do with the next call attempt. I also give the attempts an incremental number. Then, if I haven’t been able to reach anyone, at the end of the day I can still look back with satisfaction on a lot of attempts.

I apply the same grip to writing. I rarely put those as one block on my to-do list. There is almost always a draft, a drafted version, and a posted and edited version. That way I limit “Work in Progress” and phone calls and texts don’t endlessly linger on my list.

Check & Adapt: improve your practices together all the time

The next energy guzzler I ran into was the rest of the family coming to ask for things several times in the middle of a call. To my mind, these were things that could be solved without me, and that takes energy, too.

These interruptions are often the result of a double fault of my own:

1. I had not made it clear when and how long I would be busy.
2. I had also neglected to familiarize myself in advance of my video conference with what everyone else was going to do. This would have allowed me to catch the questions in advance.

We are a team with the whole family. I try to invest in self-direction of the children. That saves a lot of unwanted interruptions or moments of disappointment when homework is not done. The kids sometimes come up with great ideas about how we can have it better as a family. And sometimes they are clumsy ideas, but then I seriously want to try them anyway. Because from trying you can learn. And afterwards you can laugh about it.

Conclusion

So my tips for working from home are:

• Compartmentalize your work with time boxes. Make clear agreements about them.
• Find a rhythm that works nicely for all your teams. That will give you energy!
• Focus your focus with the right State of Mind. And don’t forget to relax and sleep, too.
• Alternate doing and planning enough.
• You are not solely responsible for atmosphere and productivity. Involve everyone from all your teams in the improvement process!

Reading this article back afterwards, I see that it almost literally follows the goals Agile Coaching. Have I become such a nerd? Maybe. But this just works well for our family. Every little bit helps in these stressful times. If you want to know how to make your work team work better in addition to your home team, I have set up an online training course on Remote Agile Coaching with my colleagues at Scrum Academy. How do you guys do it at home? I look forward to hearing your tips or questions. Send an app to 06-10654168 or an email to anton@scrumacademy.nl.