The Taking Care of Yourself guide outlines some of the things we might need to keep ourselves healthy and happy in a remote environment. One of the best ways to help with this is to develop some effective personal routines.
Going to the office every day gives us a solid routine to base our day around. In a remote team, this structure doesn't exist. So we need to spend some time intentionally designing a routine that works for us.
Approaches to Designing Personal Routines
Some people are creatures of habit and are very used to working in rigid routines. If this is you, consider designing a routines with fixed times. For example:
Morning
- 0730 Wake up (after at least 8 hours sleep).
- 0740 Get ready for the day.
- 0800 Walk the dog while listening to an audiobook.
- 0830 Make coffee and have breakfast
- 0900 Handle Slack and Emails (say "good morning" on slack)
- 0930 Plan tasks for the day & turn notifications on
- 0945 Focus time for two hours
- 1145 Break - social call with a friend/colleague
- ...
However, not everybody is good a sticking to rigid routines like this. For those people it can be better to design a set of "micro-routines" triggered by a certain action. For example:
When I wake up I will...
- Get ready for the day
- Walk the dog for 30 minutes.
- Make coffee.
When I sit first sit down at my desk I will...
- Spend 30 minutes handling only slack notifications and emails (say "good morning" on slack)
- Spend 15 minutes planning my tasks for the day & turn notifications on
- Focus on my most important task for two hours, in focus mode.
Whichever approach to routines works best, you might also want to consider creating a set of principles or rules. For example:
- Keep Tuesdays meeting-free.
- Run every Thursday or Friday after work.
- Book one-to-one meetings on Thursday afternoon.
- Have a long lunch with my partner and kids every Tuesday.
- Never work past 5pm local time on a Wednesday.
However you choose to approach this, the most important thing is that it works for you. If you design a super-complex routine and sticking to it is draining you probably need a slightly different approach.
What to consider when designing routines
Focus on the things that are likely to have the greatest impact for you. You should probably consider:
- Sleep
- Eating, cooking (and shopping)
- Socializing and spending time with your family
- Your energy levels at different times during the day.
- Alignment with family/partners/health.
Some other ideas
In addition to the stuff we covered in Taking Care of Yourself , here are a few other ideas...
- Get dressed and put some shoes on. Working in your pyjamas is one of the great things about remote working, but not if you do it all the time.
- Take a short walk before and after work. This is good for your health and helps create a clean break between work and home time. Think of it like a mini circular commute.
- Block out a schedule for your days - start time, lunch, check emails, focus time finish time etc
- Define weekly and daily priorities and tasks in standup - make them actionable, not open-ended.
- Mentally wrap up at the end of the day - take a minute to reflect on the day and "put work to bed".
- Schedule out-of-work appointments at the end of your day - this forces you to get out of the house on time. (Eg. visiting friends/family, going to the gym.)
