Ways to avoid burnout when you work remotely

Although we still firmly believe that working remotely can be great for companies and employees alike, people can have a tendency to work more while doing so.

When your home is your office, it can be hard to separate your work and personal life. Here are some ways to help avoid burnout and keep living the dream…

Maintain a routine

Whatever your working hours, make sure that you keep to the routine as if you were working in an office. This will make it easier to distinguish between work and non-work time and help to prevent you from doing too many hours.

Treat your working day as you would if you didn’t work remotely

It can be easy to slip into bad habits when you work from home, the aforementioned routine will help with this but seemingly little things like getting dressed for work, making a pot of tea or coffee and not just opening your laptop in bed and starting work as soon as you wake up, will make a real difference. Bear in mind that there is no-one to tell you to stop working, you need to decide when to stop.

Create boundaries

Relish the freedom that remote working allows but be proactive about setting boundaries and sticking to your priorities. Find the hours that work for you and make sure that your colleagues are aware of what they are. Working remotely doesn’t mean that you need to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it offers flexibility which you can enjoy if you have a few things in place.

Take breaks

We don’t just mean a lunch break, though that is important too. Throughout the working day in an office, think about how many times you get up from your desk to get a drink or visit a colleague, have a meeting etc. The good thing about working remotely or being at home is that you have the opportunity to make so much more of these breaks. Take a walk, do a spot of yoga, get ahead of the laundry, basically do whatever works for you.

Schedule some human interaction

As much as rowdy colleagues can be off-putting, it is nice to have some human interaction in your day. Whether it’s for a spot of gossip in the tea room or to discuss weekend plans, these small interactions do provide moral boosts throughout the day. This is one of the main contributors to burnout and can be easily avoided with a bit of social interaction. Nowbridge can help with this, you can see who is there and if they’re free, send chat messages and more.

One of the main ways to avoid burnout is to be aware of it. Practice self-care and make sure that you’re able to enjoy the perks of working remotely. Having a healthy work-life balance doesn’t purely come from working remotely, it comes from being in control of your working life and making sure that it works for you.

 

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Handy tools for remote workers

There has been a huge rise in the past couple of years of new software and apps to increase productivity, streamline connectivity and all in all, make it easier for both in-house and remote workers to improve the efficiency of their working days.

For productivity and project management there are the usual suspects, Trello, Asana, Jira and Axosoft, which crop up a lot in reviews and articles about remote working. Also Slack, which is technically more of a messaging app for teams, but you can do a fair bit more than that, including file sharing and prioritizing conversations into topics and themes.

Another clever tool for remote teams split across different time zones is EveryTimeZone, which shows you how the time zones of your coworkers overlap with yours so you can coordinate efforts more easily.

Google Cloud Print eliminates the need to print huge documents at home and allows you to send the documents to a printer at the office or, any printer in the world really! Speaking of clouds, Dropbox and WeTransfer are great for sharing large documents with your colleagues – you don’t need an account for the latter and can transfer up to 2GB a time as often as you need.

Need to drown out some background noise but find the radio or television too distracting? Try Noisli, a white noise app. You can pick and choose the high quality ambient sounds and see what works for you!

A new contender that we’re quite excited about is Moleskine’s Smart Writing Set, which lets you hand write your notes and see them transferred to an app on your phone, so they are instantly digitized. Eliminating the need to write up your notes or scan in diagrams or drawings to send to colleagues, this will save you time and reduce the risk of losing the work. We can’t wait to give this one a try!

Nowbridge is our offering; a remote working software that allows you to stay part of the team by sharing live still images every few seconds with your colleagues so you can see who is available and who isn’t. You can send instant chat messages, leave voice messages and even call someone on Skype from within the desktop app. There are a number of different photo filters available and the images are only shared with people who you allow to see you. It gives you a clear boundary between when you’re at work and when you’ve finished for the day and helps you stay part of the team, wherever you are in the world.

Are there any other great apps or software we should be aware of? Let us know!

 

Nowbridge in action!

Are you part of a remote team? Have you tried Nowbridge yet?

If not, why not?

We all know the benefits of working remotely, but it can be lonely. We created Nowbridge so that all of your colleagues, wherever they are in the world, can stay a part of the team.

Our software unobtrusively sits on your desktop in the background while you work, but it’s there when you want to check whether a colleague is at their desk, or you need to quickly send a message that it’s not worth sending an email about. You can use it to call them on Skype or leave a voice message, which they can hear when they’re back at their desks.

The rest of the time, you might not even realise that it’s there, until you need it. There are lots of handy filters that you can apply to your live still images too, which gives you another level of control. It also gives you a clear way of switching off at the end of your day as your remote colleagues can see when you turn it off, your box goes white. This helps distinguish between your work time and your home time.

Why not introduce it to your remote teams and see how you get on?

The shift towards remote working

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. Remote working is on the up and up, and we can’t be happier. Being ‘self employed’ or ‘freelance’ no longer implies being between jobs or out of work. Instead, it’s becoming a sort of, badge of honor nowadays, with lots of people seeing the move as brave.

As more and more companies embrace remote working, there is more work available for people who decide to move away from the office. So really, it’s no wonder that with the increase in public transport costs and the stress of commuting, the pull to work remotely is getting stronger.

We created our software because as great as remote working can be, for productivity, for your stress levels and for the environment, it sure can be lonely sometimes. When you’re working in an office, you have ongoing micro-interactions with people without often even realising it. Even if you can just see the top of someone’s head from your desk or hear them answer the phone, you know that they’re there. Whereas when you’re working remotely, you really don’t have any way of knowing whether someone is available. Yes, you can login to Skype or Gmail chat, if your company use those, but those green “online” dots aren’t always accurate.

Nowbridge bridges the gap between staff working remotely and in the office. Live still images updating every few seconds all day long create the illusion of being together. You control who you connect with and when. You can only be seen by the people you can see. Use it throughout the day to send chat messages to colleagues or even quickly call them on Skype when you can see they’re at their desks. At the end of your working day, press pause or close Nowbridge down and it’s clear to everyone in your team that you have finished for the day.

Also, it’s free to download and easy to use! Have you tried it yet?

Improve your communication and productivity

Although a lot of companies strive to improve communication and productivity, a lot of the time, this can fall by the wayside when urgent projects and deadlines take priority. Add in staffing/recruitment issues and budget cuts and it’s understandable that focusing on the needs of your current staff can slip. But communication and productivity aren’t just important for the managers, directors, executives, CEOs, they are crucial for the rest of the staff too.

What you might not realise is that communication doesn’t necessarily improve by being in the same office as someone. In fact, often the communication quality improves dramatically when one or both parties work remotely. For one thing, you make time to speak to each other. Often in offices, there’s the temptation to give someone a quick call or pop over to their desks. Convenient yes, but it’s likely that the other person is working on something else and isn’t entirely focused on your particular query. Therefore, you might be able to speak to them quickly but how likely is it that you’ve got 100% of their attention and understanding?

The increase in productivity that comes from working remotely or having remote workers is the subject of many an article, blog post and tweet. But the facts are hard to deny. With the loss of office noise, interruptions, necessary or seemingly-unnecessary meetings, remote workers can focus more on their work and also work during their most productive hours – that is, if the company allow flexible working. We mentioned in an earlier blog that by hiring remote workers, you increase your talent pool. If, for example you are on a different timezone to your employees, this can also mean that while you sleep, they might also be working on the project and can advance it significantly before you even start your next working day.

There are obviously other ways to improve communication and productivity in companies than by having a remote working policy but with all the benefits to both employee and employer that come from remote working, it shouldn’t be ignored.

Don’t forget to try Nowbridge, it’s free, easy and can make remote workers feel like they’re still a part of the team. Try it today!

Work to live or live to work?

There has been a noticeable shift in the past few years with more people wanting a better work/life balance and subsequently opting for digitally-focused careers, which allow them more flexibility with how much they work and also, where they work.

“Any businessman, any executive, could live almost anywhere on Earth and still do his business through a device like this.” – Arthur C. Clarke

As predicted by infamous science fiction author and futurist, Arthur C. Clarke, we are now able to work from anywhere. Technology really is incredible. In fact, here’s another quote from Arthur C. Clarke which seems pretty apt.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

Obviously there are some industries that can’t utilize remote working, but for those who can, it opens up a whole world full of talented potential employees. Rather than being limited to hiring from within a location-based pool of candidates, if your company is pro-remote working, you could hire the best people from around the world rather than the best people in your immediate location.

There seem to be endless articles about the rise of the digital nomad and this all links into the quest for the perfect balance. More and more people are drawn to the nomadic lifestyle, travelling the globe and working as and when they need to. We spend around a third of our lives working. A third! Even if you aren’t travelling the world while working freelance, by working remotely you can take back some control of your working life. Although the stability of working 9-5 works for some people, others might find that they work more productively in the afternoons and cannot focus properly for much of the day.

What do you do, live to work or work to live? Are you tempted to move to remote working?

Work from home – help save the planet

In an earlier post we mentioned that:

“…an employee who works just two days a week from home can save up to 390kgs of carbon emissions annually”

With Earth Day coming up on the 22 April, we thought we’d do a bit more research.

According to various sources including NASA, global temperatures will continue to rise for decades to come. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a temperature rise of 2.5-10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century! Climate change will affect agriculture, built environment, transport, health, business and finance, water resources, flooding and more, so it is something that we all need to take more seriously.

80% of people living in urban areas that monitor air pollution are exposed to air quality levels that exceed WHO limits. This is worrying because “As urban air quality declines, the risk of stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, and chronic and acute respiratory diseases, including asthma, increases for the people who live in them.”

The emissions reduction we mentioned for one employee would be amplified if entire work forces started telecommuting.

Even if you can’t work remotely, by using public transport, walking or cycling instead of driving to work, you can make a huge difference. Reducing commuter traffic cuts back on air pollution, water pollution and oil consumption.

We already knew that remote working could help to save the planet but it seems that it can also help save us.

Be more productive when you work from home

• Make yourself a home office or at least separate off an area for yourself and tell yourself that is where you work from home. If you don’t have any separation, you’ll always feel like you’re trapped in limbo between working and not working. Another way to counter this is by using Nowbridge but we’ll talk more about that later…

• Decide what your hours will be and stick to them (as far as possible). If your company are flexible with the hours you do, work out when you work best in the day. A lot of people find that they work best outside of the 9-5 constraints, i.e. if you’re more productive after lunch, do your hours then. Of course, depending on your job, some companies might prefer you to stick to the normal 9-5 hours. It really depends on the company, the industry and your role.

• Make sure you take a lunch break and get away from your computer during that time. Try to avoid eating lunch at your desk, this blurs the boundaries between work and non-work.

• Take breaks. Remember that if you were in the office, you’d likely be going to get cups of tea or coffee or walking to fetch work from the printer. It’s important to take breaks from the screen and by doing little jobs like hanging your laundry out to dry or emptying the dishwasher, you don’t have to do these things later and can enjoy your home time more.

• Work like you’re at the office. As in, try not to schedule appointments for the middle of the day or take a long lunch with a friend – don’t slack off!

• Schedule time to check in with the office. This can help with any collaborative projects and remind you that you’re part of a team. A lot of companies have taken to using online chat software – again, Nowbridge does this and also has Skype integrated. 

• Get some background noise. We don’t know about you but we find it hard to work in silence. If you like it then – job done! If not, why not try Spotify or the radio?

• Get dressed every day. As tempting as it might be to stay in your pijamas, getting dressed helps you get into the right mindset for the day and again, gives you a small amount of separation between your home time and your working day. NB: This is also a good idea if your company like spontaneous conference/Skype calls.

A little bit about Nowbridge

As we mentioned earlier, Nowbridge can help bridge the gap (see what we did there?) between working from home and the office. Live still images updating every few seconds all day long create the illusion of being together. You control who you connect with and when. You can only be seen by the people you can see. Did we mention it’s free and easy to use?

So you can turn your laptop on, open Nowbridge and see who else is working. When it comes to lunchtime, you can either leave it running while you are away from your desk or press pause – flagging the fact that you’ve stopped working. Use it throughout the day to send chat messages to colleagues or even quickly call them on Skype when you can see they’re at their desks. At the end of your working day, press pause or close Nowbridge down and it’s clear to everyone in your team that you have finished for the day.

Try it today! 

 

The difficulties of working remotely

We all know the benefits of working remotely…but the recent BBC interview with professor Robert Kelly about South Korea (where he was briefly interrupted by his young children rushing into the room – you’ve all seen it!), has brought to light some of the things that inevitably happen when you’re working from home and started some great discussions on social media about remote working.

It can be hard to stay professional when you’re working remotely. Whether it’s because you usually dress more casually when you’re at home, or the seemingly constant interruptions and distractions from pets, family, the doorbell, the neighbours mowing the lawn etc. – but all of that is just an element of working from home.

Back to the aforementioned video, people all around the world were actually rather enamored by the children. There are already parodies on YouTube, some people have pledged to enter every room with the young girl’s “confident swagger” from now on, and others think that he was a bit abrupt with the excited children and could have briefly paused the interview to take them outside.

However, there are theories for why he couldn’t do that…and this is our favourite:

“MY THEORY: BBC interview guy couldn’t move to properly deal with the kids because he was wearing a shirt/tie/jacket but just some pants.” – Marie Le Conte (@youngvulgarian) March 10 2017

I’m sure lots of people can attest to being in similar situations while working remotely but you know what? Life happens. It’s the way you deal with situations like this that are the real test.

 

Has anything like this ever happened while you’ve worked remotely? Let us know in the comments!

Why companies shouldn’t fear remote working

The subject of remote working is being bounded around offices all over the world at the moment. Although many individuals are embracing the movement, some companies may be understandably a bit apprehensive about the concept.

The main opinion going around the internet at the moment is that if you don’t trust your employees to work remotely, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place, which is a good point but doesn’t necessarily help.

Many companies consider the move to open-plan offices to have been a substantial step forward for maximizing space while minimizing costs but as we’re sure many of you will agree, this doesn’t really do anything to improve communication between staff and boost the work culture. In fact some people, like the creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), see it it this:

“The open office plan is a tyrant of interruption, a deep loss of privacy, and the death of productivity.”

Strong words yes,  but who hasn’t been frustrated by so and so’s phone going off constantly while they’re away from their desk, or those colleagues who seem to enjoy loudly discussing their lunch plans from 9am onwards.

Perhaps we’ve now gone full circle back to people wanting their own space, but rather than wanting a physical office, they actually want their own space.

With so much work being done on computers anyway and the increasing costs of public transport, gas and electric, office space rental and more, embracing remote working even for some of the week could be a sensible move.

Nowbridge was developed so that people working remotely could still feel connected to the office and feel a part of the team. It’s free software that creates the illusion of being in the same room together. Try it today and let us know what you think!