Problems of remote work at home and their solutions
I have to mention somewhere that I work at home, and in response, one often hears enviously playful remarks in the spirit of “good for you, sitting at home, doing nothing and receiving money”. Depending on the mood and the interlocutor, you have to either laugh it off, or explain for the hundredth time that I work no less than office colleagues and that there are enough problems in remote work. In this article, I would like to touch on those of them that I happened to encounter in my practice and share ways to solve them.
Some of the points listed below may seem obvious and trite, some work for me, but will not work for others, but I still hope that my experience will be useful to someone. Especially, of course, novice freelancers and people who think of becoming such.
There are not directly addressed "business issues": how to find customers, work with them, pricing, and the like. The emphasis is on how to organize your work at home, overcome laziness and not lose physical and mental health.
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Laziness is the main enemy that lurches you in the path of the free spearman. It is worth relaxing, gape, as she already hugs you with her soft paws, whispers in your ear, “do not hurry, you still have time to do everything, go read the review of the new HTC iPhone ZX 8 and discuss vkontakte how you are cool last weekend” .
If you have an iron will and years of self-discipline in the background, then perhaps you will avoid this problem. Others wishing to work and earn at home will have to either cultivate the necessary qualities in themselves, or abandon freelancing.
Each has his own way to victory, but the following helped me.
Work day . There are no “when I get up, then I will start”, “I’ll finish early today, tomorrow - later.” Experimentally determine approximately 8 hours a day, in which you are most effective as an employee, get up for an alarm clock and work every day at this particular time. For me, for example, this is the interval from 8 to 15-16 hours. Then you can communicate with colleagues, discuss something, do routine work, but the brain is already working much worse.
News and contact - on schedule . A radical way - special programs that block access to certain sites at a certain time, or a complete shutdown of the Internet on a working machine. Of course, this is not always possible, and indeed it looks somehow too harsh. Instead, try setting yourself a certain time to read something interesting on the net and stick to it strictly. For example, read your favorite sites for half an hour before work, half an hour after lunch and for as long as you like - after work. When you exit the schedule - beat your hands with a ruler, preferably iron.
Cause time, fun - ... the rest of the time . There are no “oh, a new series of The Theory of Big House” - I’ll see and then work. ” You start the day with entertainment - it’s all about entertainment.
Browser . If you need a browser for work, do not use your “war horse” for this with a full set of notifications, bookmarks, extensions and other tinsel, where every 5 minutes something new appears and asks “open me, look, spend two hours ". For example, Chrome is set up for surfing and entertainment, but during the working day I try not to launch it, doing the main work in Firefox with a pair of exclusively working plugins.
Messengers . Skype, ICQ and others like them are often needed to communicate with clients and colleagues (and the more often you are available, the better), so you can hardly get rid of them completely. However, try to minimize non-working communication to the maximum. Constantly hanging status “retired” or “busy”, as practice shows, saves from a significant part of anecdotes and funny pictures, but does not interfere with communicating with the right people.
Revision Carefully review your RSS feeds, friendlists, list of forums where you like to argue about everything and nothing. Think about it, do you really need to read about what Bruce Willis ate for breakfast every day, watch photos of cats, read funny jokes, do not sleep at night, because “someone is wrong again on the Internet”? Leave what is really interesting to you.
* philosophy on * There is generally not enough time in life to waste it on nonsense * philosophy off *.
To-do list . If your work is associated with many small orders from different people - be sure to write them down. Though in the banal Google Tasks, at least where. The first and obvious plus is that it saves from situations like “Oh, Ivan Ivanovich, and I forgot that I had to send you a file a week ago.” The second, less obvious is the pleasure and motivation of what you do to remove the work done from the to-do list, see the progress, reduce the number of worries hanging over the soul. Buzz, really try.
Small steps . What to do when you really can’t force yourself to work at all? As one politician said, “the most important thing is to start.” Try to persuade yourself to write the simplest function, to impose a small block, to do something completely elementary, which takes 5 minutes. Then - something else like that. With a high degree of probability, after the first or second such “well, I will do it,” you will be drawn into the process and work will go fine.
I think the situation familiar to many IT specialists - in the morning I sat down at work, had a snack in 5 minutes, went out to the toilet a couple of times, in the evening I woke up from work - “where am I?”. The eyes are red, tired, the back aches, all that is below the back is numb, the desire only one thing is to fall and fall asleep. So do not do that.
Try, approximately, every hour to be distracted from work for 10 minutes, and not on Habr or RSS. To measure the intervals, you can use both a special program and your own “biological clock” - the main thing is that they do not fail too much and do not stretch the working hour 5-10 times.
Of course, options are possible, but the following “schedule” for breaks works well for me:
“Physics” can sometimes be replaced with some household chores — wipe the dust in one room, throw the wash in the car, and so on. And distracted, and did a useful thing.
At the end of the working day - a slightly cool shower, the feelings after which differ from “it seemed to be better” to “how was born again”.
Thus, we kill four birds with one stone.
Be sure to have one or two days off a week. Yes, you can work 12-15 hours 7 days a week, and even, at first, produce good results. But after some time, fatigue will still take its toll, you will begin to dream about the code, you will be doing tasks for two hours all day, and your favorite work will become hated. This time depends a lot on your youth, health, energy, natural endurance - someone will be enough for a couple of weeks, someone will otbrub a few months, but the longer this marathon lasts, the more you will need time to regain strength and interest in work. Of course, situations are different and sometimes such a regime is necessary, but in normal, not extreme conditions, it is not necessary.
And, of course, it's better to spend this weekend not at the computer. Friends, relatives, books, cinema, theater, picnic, bowling, billiards, walks ... anything and anywhere, so long as this damned piece of iron is not around you all day and night.
Do you know what is the second most important invention of mankind after the Internet? Horizontal bar. Just kidding, of course, but in every joke - just a fraction of the joke.
A couple of years ago, after a long period of working at a computer without any regimes and routines, I began to understand that my back was gradually simply covered. Whining in the lower back, some sudden pains between the shoulder blades, a “wedging” neck from time to time. And this is not at the age of 80, but at the age of 25. Of course, I didn’t like it much and worried - what then will be by the age of 30? Disability?
It seems that one of my friends advised me to hang a horizontal bar at home - I can not tell you how right he was. For the past few years, every couple of hours, distracting myself from the computer, pulling myself up or just hanging out on it, relaxing, for half a minute and I don’t know any troubles with my back. Generally no.
Find a thousand rubles and a place in the apartment, hang a crossbar and be healthy.
Another fairly serious problem, and the "double-edged." If there is someone other than you at home, then he will surely stop you from working: it is very difficult to explain to your family that you are not just looking at the computer, but working. In theory, they understand and nod, but in practice they do not. On the other hand, if there is no one at home, then it is not long before talking to a cactus.
Unfortunately, there is no and cannot be a universal solution. Everyone decides for himself. Just before becoming a freelancer working at home, think about whether you can firmly explain to your family that during work you cannot be distracted by any means? Can you control yourself so that in the middle of the working day you don’t leave, for example, play with a child? Or with my wife. And if there are no households, can you exist, in many respects, outside of society?
Of course, we are all people (right, everybody?), And it is always impossible to strictly follow the schedule. Somewhere you sit behind the monitor for a couple of hours in a row, somewhere you will give up the slack and hang on the news / reviews / in ICQ in the time not allotted for this. But, if you wish, you can gradually accustom yourself to the regime and achieve a sufficiently high efficiency.
Freelance fellows, maybe share your secrets?
Some of the points listed below may seem obvious and trite, some work for me, but will not work for others, but I still hope that my experience will be useful to someone. Especially, of course, novice freelancers and people who think of becoming such.
There are not directly addressed "business issues": how to find customers, work with them, pricing, and the like. The emphasis is on how to organize your work at home, overcome laziness and not lose physical and mental health.
')
Laziness VS Self Control
Laziness is the main enemy that lurches you in the path of the free spearman. It is worth relaxing, gape, as she already hugs you with her soft paws, whispers in your ear, “do not hurry, you still have time to do everything, go read the review of the new HTC iPhone ZX 8 and discuss vkontakte how you are cool last weekend” .
If you have an iron will and years of self-discipline in the background, then perhaps you will avoid this problem. Others wishing to work and earn at home will have to either cultivate the necessary qualities in themselves, or abandon freelancing.
Each has his own way to victory, but the following helped me.
Work day . There are no “when I get up, then I will start”, “I’ll finish early today, tomorrow - later.” Experimentally determine approximately 8 hours a day, in which you are most effective as an employee, get up for an alarm clock and work every day at this particular time. For me, for example, this is the interval from 8 to 15-16 hours. Then you can communicate with colleagues, discuss something, do routine work, but the brain is already working much worse.
News and contact - on schedule . A radical way - special programs that block access to certain sites at a certain time, or a complete shutdown of the Internet on a working machine. Of course, this is not always possible, and indeed it looks somehow too harsh. Instead, try setting yourself a certain time to read something interesting on the net and stick to it strictly. For example, read your favorite sites for half an hour before work, half an hour after lunch and for as long as you like - after work. When you exit the schedule - beat your hands with a ruler, preferably iron.
Cause time, fun - ... the rest of the time . There are no “oh, a new series of The Theory of Big House” - I’ll see and then work. ” You start the day with entertainment - it’s all about entertainment.
Browser . If you need a browser for work, do not use your “war horse” for this with a full set of notifications, bookmarks, extensions and other tinsel, where every 5 minutes something new appears and asks “open me, look, spend two hours ". For example, Chrome is set up for surfing and entertainment, but during the working day I try not to launch it, doing the main work in Firefox with a pair of exclusively working plugins.
Messengers . Skype, ICQ and others like them are often needed to communicate with clients and colleagues (and the more often you are available, the better), so you can hardly get rid of them completely. However, try to minimize non-working communication to the maximum. Constantly hanging status “retired” or “busy”, as practice shows, saves from a significant part of anecdotes and funny pictures, but does not interfere with communicating with the right people.
Revision Carefully review your RSS feeds, friendlists, list of forums where you like to argue about everything and nothing. Think about it, do you really need to read about what Bruce Willis ate for breakfast every day, watch photos of cats, read funny jokes, do not sleep at night, because “someone is wrong again on the Internet”? Leave what is really interesting to you.
* philosophy on * There is generally not enough time in life to waste it on nonsense * philosophy off *.
To-do list . If your work is associated with many small orders from different people - be sure to write them down. Though in the banal Google Tasks, at least where. The first and obvious plus is that it saves from situations like “Oh, Ivan Ivanovich, and I forgot that I had to send you a file a week ago.” The second, less obvious is the pleasure and motivation of what you do to remove the work done from the to-do list, see the progress, reduce the number of worries hanging over the soul. Buzz, really try.
Small steps . What to do when you really can’t force yourself to work at all? As one politician said, “the most important thing is to start.” Try to persuade yourself to write the simplest function, to impose a small block, to do something completely elementary, which takes 5 minutes. Then - something else like that. With a high degree of probability, after the first or second such “well, I will do it,” you will be drawn into the process and work will go fine.
Health
Schedule
I think the situation familiar to many IT specialists - in the morning I sat down at work, had a snack in 5 minutes, went out to the toilet a couple of times, in the evening I woke up from work - “where am I?”. The eyes are red, tired, the back aches, all that is below the back is numb, the desire only one thing is to fall and fall asleep. So do not do that.
Try, approximately, every hour to be distracted from work for 10 minutes, and not on Habr or RSS. To measure the intervals, you can use both a special program and your own “biological clock” - the main thing is that they do not fail too much and do not stretch the working hour 5-10 times.
Of course, options are possible, but the following “schedule” for breaks works well for me:
- One approach is some kind of physical exercise - pull-ups, push-ups, squats, etc., possible at home. It is not necessary to squeeze the maximum out of yourself, the goal is to disperse the blood, stretch the muscles, crack the joints.
- We approach the window and for 3-5 minutes we survey the surroundings, detaining attention on the most distant objects that we can consider.
- Another exercise approach.
- The remaining few minutes are lying around or slowly walking around the apartment (but not sitting), considering what we will do next in work. By the way, it is better to lie on the floor or something hard.
“Physics” can sometimes be replaced with some household chores — wipe the dust in one room, throw the wash in the car, and so on. And distracted, and did a useful thing.
At the end of the working day - a slightly cool shower, the feelings after which differ from “it seemed to be better” to “how was born again”.
Thus, we kill four birds with one stone.
- Eyes, due to the change of loads (“close-far”), get tired much less, the risk of myopia appears / develops (believe a person who has been undergoing bad vision for 20 years - you don’t need it).
- The body does not stay all day in one position, but moves in various ways, as a result of which it is able to move and does not hurt.
- Though the brain is tired most of all, but thanks to interruptions and soul, it retains the ability to think after a working day.
- Bonus Bunny. You do not pump big muscles, but in a more or less decent form you can support yourself without going to the gym.
Routine of the week
Be sure to have one or two days off a week. Yes, you can work 12-15 hours 7 days a week, and even, at first, produce good results. But after some time, fatigue will still take its toll, you will begin to dream about the code, you will be doing tasks for two hours all day, and your favorite work will become hated. This time depends a lot on your youth, health, energy, natural endurance - someone will be enough for a couple of weeks, someone will otbrub a few months, but the longer this marathon lasts, the more you will need time to regain strength and interest in work. Of course, situations are different and sometimes such a regime is necessary, but in normal, not extreme conditions, it is not necessary.
And, of course, it's better to spend this weekend not at the computer. Friends, relatives, books, cinema, theater, picnic, bowling, billiards, walks ... anything and anywhere, so long as this damned piece of iron is not around you all day and night.
Ode to another piece of iron
Do you know what is the second most important invention of mankind after the Internet? Horizontal bar. Just kidding, of course, but in every joke - just a fraction of the joke.
A couple of years ago, after a long period of working at a computer without any regimes and routines, I began to understand that my back was gradually simply covered. Whining in the lower back, some sudden pains between the shoulder blades, a “wedging” neck from time to time. And this is not at the age of 80, but at the age of 25. Of course, I didn’t like it much and worried - what then will be by the age of 30? Disability?
It seems that one of my friends advised me to hang a horizontal bar at home - I can not tell you how right he was. For the past few years, every couple of hours, distracting myself from the computer, pulling myself up or just hanging out on it, relaxing, for half a minute and I don’t know any troubles with my back. Generally no.
Find a thousand rubles and a place in the apartment, hang a crossbar and be healthy.
People and communication
Another fairly serious problem, and the "double-edged." If there is someone other than you at home, then he will surely stop you from working: it is very difficult to explain to your family that you are not just looking at the computer, but working. In theory, they understand and nod, but in practice they do not. On the other hand, if there is no one at home, then it is not long before talking to a cactus.
Unfortunately, there is no and cannot be a universal solution. Everyone decides for himself. Just before becoming a freelancer working at home, think about whether you can firmly explain to your family that during work you cannot be distracted by any means? Can you control yourself so that in the middle of the working day you don’t leave, for example, play with a child? Or with my wife. And if there are no households, can you exist, in many respects, outside of society?
Instead of conclusion
Of course, we are all people (right, everybody?), And it is always impossible to strictly follow the schedule. Somewhere you sit behind the monitor for a couple of hours in a row, somewhere you will give up the slack and hang on the news / reviews / in ICQ in the time not allotted for this. But, if you wish, you can gradually accustom yourself to the regime and achieve a sufficiently high efficiency.
Freelance fellows, maybe share your secrets?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/156697/
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