Disclaimer: Most of these tips are applicable to anyone working from home.

The beginning of 2020 brought about a major change with respect to people’s lifestyles. They were now learning to navigate the intricacies of working from home and adjusting to a new norm of working. As people gradually return to working from office, a hybrid work culture will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. This means you need to be able to focus on maximizing the time you have to spend on working efficiently while thriving in the work you do. Here are some things you should keep in mind to be more productive when working from home:

• Optimize your workspace
• Be Mindful of your time
• Have a healthy body and mind

Optimize your workspace

1. Ergonomic furniture

Making a minor change in your workspace and how you position your body as you work throughout the day can make a big difference in working comfortably for a prolonged period of time. We need to be more mindful about our posture e.g. having a straight back when sitting at the desk, and making it a part of our daily habits. Keeping your keyboard, mouse or trackpad at an arm’s reach so that you spend less time reaching for those things and not be stretched out at the end of your work day really helps.

Sitting at your desk in the same position all day can lead you to unknowingly strain a part of your body. Having an ergonomic chair will provide support to your back, and a hybrid (stand/sit) desk allows you to adjust the height of the desk and reposition yourself throughout the day. Changing your posture in your daily routine can greatly reduce lower back pain.

2. Reduce clutter

Reducing the visual clutter you have around you, both on your desk as well as on your computer, such as to-do lists, makes it easier for you to begin a new task.

• You can go through all your unread e-mails reducing them down to zero.
• As designers, we need to be able to find our files, which are our biggest assets, quickly and easily on our computers that we’re using to design on. Maintain file hygiene to find specific files within an appropriate folder structure on your computer easily and using simple naming conventions can save a lot of time in the long run.
• Ensure there is enough available storage to avoid files getting corrupted due to storage shortage. On Figma, in the event that a file memory gets full, users can recover older versions via the file version history.

Be Mindful of your time

3. Schedule your time effectively

When working in a team remotely, having a shared calendar and having visibility into each others’ ongoing projects and planning is a great way of practicing time management. The design tool Figma has a widget for tracking work items by calling out the status e.g. ‘pending’. Breaking a project down into smaller bites makes the whole process more palatable and a lot easier for you to accomplish a much larger task when you break it up into smaller pieces. We need to plan accordingly for meeting our goals within a given timespan given we can only dedicate a certain amount of time each day to avoid getting overwhelmed.

4. When do you work best?

You may find that there is a specific time in the day when you are generally more productive and creative or gravitate towards certain tasks, and you can plan your day accordingly. For example, addressing emails and getting that out of the way before jumping into focused design work may work well for some people to produce the best type of work. But since we don’t always have the luxury of being able to choose due to deadlines or urgent tasks, we would still be aware of how to shape our day and schedule our time better.

5. Don’t forget to take breaks

Stretching or stepping away from your desk now and then helps you avoid settling into a bad posture and having body pains at the end of the day. Practicing activities that ensure that you to step away for 2–3 minutes and get refreshed such as keeping a water bottle on the desk which you’d regularly need to refill throughout the day to keep hydrated or setting an alarm as a reminder to take a break helps reset the body position. Short breaks can also help get rid of creative blocks.

Healthy body and mind

6. Reduce eye fatigue

Another important thing to keep in mind is the distance you must maintain between your eyes and the screen, which should be approximately 2 feet or the length between your elbow and your fingertips. Typically your screen should not be higher than your line of sight, and if necessary can be adjusted by placing a book below the screen. Staring at our screens for a long time can cause eye strain and can affect your sleep. Blue light filtering glasses help reduce eye fatigue and eye tiredness throughout the day. Using a Dark mode or Night shift when reading a document or doing an activity that doesn’t require perfect colors also contributes to reducing blue light.

Practicing the 20–20–20 eye rule can go a long way in preventing eye strain. For every 20 minutes spent looking at a screen, you should try to look away at something that is approximately 20 feet away from you for a total of 20 seconds. This could be an object that seems far away when you look out a window like a tree or a building across the street.

7. Maintain a healthy work life balance

Last but not the least is the importance of maintaining a healthy work life balance, which means planning to work efficiently and having time in the day for yourself. A big part of not getting burned out is taking appropriate time off when required. Going on a short vacation to relax and refresh, being inspired and taking the time to deal with personal things can make a big difference to producing better quality work. This includes maintaining the quality of your work and the amount of time it takes you to complete a task.

Even though you are working from home, remember to meet your team in person or plan a team outing so that all of you can be in touch in-person rather than just through video calls!

Stay tuned for more here.