I really believe remote work is great. It’s not for everyone, but I’m not worried about everyone. Different strokes, different folks.
But it can be easy to get distracted at home. So if you’re one of those people, I wrote this for you.
We decided from the start that OHNO (the company my brother-in-law and I started) would allow remote working, mostly because the last company we founded together many years back (Nazori) encouraged it, and we had good experiences. At OHNO, we call it guilt free remote working because usually companies who offer it ladle on a spoonful of guilt as they dish it out. If you want to work from home, totally fine by us.
Why even consider working outside the office?
Firstly, allowing the hiring of workers anywhere in the world means your talent pool is huge. For me, I wanted to find the right person for the job, not those closest to the job. I look at remote work like a competitive advantage. It lets us tap into a really diverse pool of people, who for whatever reason, might not be able to commute. Family issues, accessibility, whatever. Once you take location off the table as a barrier for employment, your options get wild, and the downsides are all manageable.
But don’t get me wrong. I value human interaction. Sure. Hanging out with teammates is great. I highly encourage it. But is it synonymous with being productive? Not really. It might help in the margins but what matters more is that teams know their priorities, they have the space to get the work done, distraction free, and they have autonomy. Besides, the money you save in office space can often mean you can get teams together for the social bonding stuff regularly, and it’s usually more interesting that way.
In the end I can only speak from experience, and my experience is when you select the right people, remote working beats in the office every time. You want to put the emphasis on hiring the best people. 2 Great people in different cities will outperform a team of mediocre people who happen to sit next to one another.
But remote work is a perk like anything else and office perks can of course be abused by bad actors. But so can free biscuits in the kitchen, so if you hire the kind of people who stuff their bags full of biscuits to sell them on eBay, I can only sympathise.
I’ve worked from offices and remotely on and off for the last 20 years and only in the last year have I made some really good changes in behaviour that have helped me be much more focused. This isn’t some top 10 productivity hacks list about apps that re-wire your brain. And I’m not going to mention meditation or exercise to help you be more productive. In-fact, it’s the opposite. These are small, once-off things you can do in about 2 minutes.
This all came about when Poe (my business partner) and I were coming up with some values for the company that were important to us. For me, a big one was removing distractions. So much of a workplace is distracting. Meetings are mostly wasted time and the endless popups and notifications don’t make things easier. So we started coming up with ways to be less distracted.
1. Your phone is mostly the problem
You don’t need your phone as much as you think. I simply started putting my phone at the other end of the house and not touching it until after work. It’s no longer near my desk and this action alone helped me save hours of time every day.
2. Get focused
I installed a chrome extension called StayFocusd which stops you visiting websites after a certain period of time. A few years back, I installed it to block facebook as I found myself mindlessly scrolling through nonsense for a while then wondering where the time went. I’m happy to say I haven’t actually used facebook in a few years now.
In my StayFocusd list I block things like Linkedin and anything else I find myself mindlessly using throughout the day. I don’t completely block the sites mind you, I just reduce the total time I am allowed to access it for. For me, I find 5 minutes a day is plenty on something like LinkedIn. It’s enough to answer messages or notifications, then get back to work.
3. Do not disturb
My phone is pretty much set to do not disturb full time now. Most things that are important, people will call. I add ‘exception’ lists to my family members so if they call or message they get straight through, but everything else can wait.
And I know I said my phone is at the other end of the house, so these notifications are actually for after hours mostly. When I want to stop working, I don’t want my phone beeping about every little thing.
4. Hidden dock
This is something I found very useful, yet simple. Slack is great, but the little red dots are like crack sometimes. I find by hiding the dock, I’m not checking all these social apps all the time looking for a dopamine fix. After a few minutes, you forget all about it.
5. Way less email
I really enjoy not checking email; it’s become a passion of mine. I even floated the idea that OHNO would be the first tech company to not use email, but sadly we just couldn’t really make it work. What made me try get off using email so much was something I heard Ashton Kutcher say. He said
“Email is other people’s to-do list for you.”
Email is other people asking you to help them out, do something for them. And so today I check email at most once a day. Email isn’t really how customers contact me anyway, all of that is done through intercom which is something I leave open all day, so my need to check email is not high.
For general communications, the team talk mostly on Slack, which again, is something we’ve worked pretty hard to make less distracting.
So those are some small things I found helped me to focus on my work while working from home.
About OHNO.ai
Our mission at OHNO is to reboot the workplace and liberate teams from mediocrity. We think there are too many ceremonies and practices we all know in our hearts to be useless & wasteful, and lots of them don’t serve our customers or help us enjoy what we do. We value outcomes over traditions.
We want to liberate teams from those burdens by helping them get to the heart of what’s slowing them down using a really clever product we built called OHNO. If you liked this article or care about our mission, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me on Twitter here.
And you can always try OHNO for free. Discover what’s holding you back from your goals at http://ohno.ai
