Paper Peviews

The top reason people fail to adapt to working remotely is they don’t see the criticality of having first rate organisation and robust self management.

I have been operating remotely for over seven years since I first unearthed Quickbooks online an ‘on demand’ small business accounting software online system and was blown away by the fact that if you can do accounting online then why shouldn’t it be workable to do other important types of work remotely?

Whilst working remotely has many benefits there are numerous mistakes that people make which lead to problems that result in reduced work output and reduced morale. The most significant reason for low effectiveness in remote workers is interruption and it is a proven and well publicised fact that it can take a professional up to 20 mins to establish their original productivity level after experiencing a disruption.

Research also shows that men and women who are consistently subjected to disturbances are more likely to suffer from reduced memory capability and are prone to developing mental health trouble in later life. We exist in an over communicated time and it is critical that you are aware of the issues this causes before you decide to work remotely. When working remotely you must do everything possible to eradicate the threat of being distracted.

Here are my most important tips:

1, Get a routine, make sure that everybody knows it and obsessively maintain it!

Good examples are a regular time of day when you review or send electronic mail and make or will accept phone calls. Before I began working remotely I used to get in the region of hundreds of e-mails every 24 hours. Now I think I am unfortunate if I get more than 5. To start over with my electronic mail experience I modified my e-mail address and obsessively took precautions to guard the details being made available to anyone. I then educated every party who I gave my e-mail address to, to use it prudently. I also created an automatic response that swiftly informed anyone sending me mail my routine for attending to mail and if an item must have my urgent consideration to mark it as ‘Urgent’.

2. Get rid of alerts.

Turn off every feature that can send you a interruption. This includes portable and
ordinary phones and forms of alerts from electronic mail such as visual alerts, beeps, screen changes to your inbox folder and of course facing a window. Get a door on your work room and put up a ‘do not disturb’ sign on it.

In ‘Remote Working Part 3 – ‘Tools of the trade’’ I will reveal my favourite tools and software.