Title: Pro Tips For Working From Home
Guests: Emily Caddell, Chris Goldman, Marcel Colon
Peter: Today, we’ve got a timely topic, working from home. How do we do it? We’re going talk about tips and tricks from our own team at Biz Marketing. We have Emily Caudel, we have Marcel Colon, and we have Chris Goldman. Let’s start with, Emily, your situation.
How long have you been working from home? Kinda go into your tips and tricks.
Emily: I am Emily Caddell. I’m the marketing director here. So I’ve been working from home for about four and a half years ever since I gave birth to my firstborn. So I work from home with my four year old usually home and soon to be new baby at home. Both my husband and I work from home from our apartment.
So we kind of switch off using the desk versus taking care of the kids, etcetera. So kind of a unique situation, but we make it work.
Peter: What sorts of tips do you have for folks that are working from home? I know, you know, a lot of people are doing it. So it’s probably, it’s not necessarily a novel concept anymore, but what have you found specifically that works for you?
Emily: First one is just being flexible. Obviously, like not everyone has flexible work hours, but just trying to be like accommodating of people and knowing that people have to take their kids to school, adjust their work hours, etc. But hand in hand with being flexible is also setting boundaries. This really is like, does this thing need to happen at 9PM? Working from home can really lead to having this feeling of being always on.
My messaging, my tickets, everything comes through on my phone as well as my computer. So it can lead to me being like, Oh, I should take care of this thing. And it’s like, it’s 9PM my time. I don’t need to take care of this. I can take care of it in the morning.
So just being flexible about your work, but also setting boundaries to make sure that your home is also your home even though it’s your office as well.
Peter: So would that mean like blocking out specific times?
Emily: Definitely. Yeah. So for me, it’s especially okay. This is my time. I am kind of blocking this time that I’m gonna take any meetings.
I’m gonna just focus on work as much as I possibly can, knowing that some things might come through when I’m not in that set time. Maybe I have the capacity to take care of it right then, maybe I don’t. Just being aware that working from home is a little different than working in an office and you’re not going to have as restrictive times that you can work, but just being able to set those boundaries for yourself and making your team aware of those boundaries as well.
Peter: One wrinkle that I’ll add is that Emily is located on the East Coast, and the majority of our team is located on the West Coast. So we do have the three hour time differential. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that.
Emily: Yeah. I mean, I can really, it’s good that our team has kind of set boundaries of, like, I don’t typically get stuff from our team, at least late in the evening. For me, I try to be good about not really messaging people until 9AM or so Pacific time, keeping those boundaries as well because I’m not the only one who needs more boundaries.
Peter: Yeah. That’s really helpful. Marcel. Marcel is our designer, by the way. How long have you been working from home?
What sort of tips do you have for us?
Marcel: Well, yes. I’m Marcel. I’m the graphic designer for risk marketing. I’ve been working from home since early twenty twenty. My situation currently is back to normal with kids back to school, but during that period of time, also the kids were at home, I had to adjust in terms of creating my own space.
I did have my little office corner, but with the kids at home and everything, you have to find other areas where you can find that quiet or more private setting where you can focus on the work and making that work. Then later down the line, investing in proper equipment, improving your office space and whatnot in terms of computer, laptops, and whatever helps you feel more comfortable. You are home, but obviously you have to kind of have that corner where you can kind of just focus. And schedule wise, just kinda, like Emily mentioned, be flexible, but at the same time, to create those windows. Okay.
This window, I’m gonna focus on doing this this task, this project, making it, finishing it up, and then being at home allows you to kinda take a little more breaks, you don’t wanna pull too much for that, but, you know, find those spaces where you can move around and be a little more mobile and something that can keep you kinda, like, resetting your brains in in terms of getting that focus back and the work at hand.
Peter: You’re designer, so you do a lot of creative work. So are there any things in particular you do to enhance that work you do?
Marcel: Well, absolutely. I like having music in the background. I’m not a big fan of having very quiet spaces because it just I feel like the music allows my, you know, my brain to stay open and a little more free, and my creativity it kind of feeds my creativity a little better. And so I have always kinda have some nice mellow music, some acoustic guitar music, or some nice jazz in the background going, and that kinda keeps me in a nice flow. And then I invested in a good laptop, so that allows me that, okay, I need to move from the I am currently finding a better space where I can feel more creative, I can be more productive.
So usually I kind of either move to the backyard if it’s a nice day, I sit in the backyard, or sometime in the living room here next to the window. That ability to be mobile really helps a lot in my creativity, so that definitely helps.
Peter: That’s great. Chris, how long have you been doing working from home or hybrid? Or what is your situation there?
Chris: When we began COVID, it forced me into looking at how am I going to work from home. And so like a lot of people, I had to just really take a look at this from the outset. And for me, the most important thing was finding that reserved space and creating boundaries around both my space, but also my time. Because one thing a lot of people don’t realize about working from home is it actually is prone to have people working all the time rather than working less of the time. So I figured out some things really quick.
You got to have good audio video equipment if you’re going to work from home because you’re going to have to be engaging a lot of people online. Secondly, I needed to buy an actual chair. I had been using a hand me deaf for my office chair for a long time. It was like a $30 Amazon chair that had been passed from person to person. And I realized I was uncomfortable.
So I went ahead and made an investment of some equipment, good audio video equipment, good desk that worked with me. Also at my work, I need to have dual monitors. And I realized investing in a good dual monitor system at home really paid dividends. And then the other thing is figuring out your communications. We use a lot of different communication systems, but the two that I really depend on are they allow me to schedule communications.
And this is really important if you have teams that are spread out around the globe. So for example, if I’m working with somebody on the East Coast with a three hour time differential, being able to schedule an email or schedule a text message to them is critical so that in their evening or their nighttime, I’m not calling them from family time back into work inadvertently. And so I use two that help me with that. One is Spark for email, and the other is Telegram for what we might think of text communications. The other thing is, I realized pretty quickly that just like you in a typical office have a break area, a break room, I needed to find space in my home where I took breaks.
That wasn’t looping me into TV or looping me into something that was a full distraction, but a place and a time that I could go and have that structure because so much of work from home can devolve into unstructured work, I found the need to actually structure my day, say, here’s where I’m going to start, here’s when I’m going to end. And in between, here’s where I’m going to take breaks. And maybe the last thing that I would say is this first base that I set up simply didn’t work. And being able to admit that quickly, and say, okay, what I was trying to do isn’t going to work for me was a big win as far as that goes. That’s kind of what was important for me.
Peter: One of the things that I would add is that, Chris, you have two office spaces, you do have a office. So you’re kind of a hybrid, sort of a nomad in some respects, right? You split between a couple offices. You can work from your home office or there is a work office available as well. So are there any tricks or tips that you found helpful in that scenario in particular?
Chris: Absolutely. When it became an option to go back to the regular office, the more structured office, I had figured out that I’m a very social person. I knew that all along, but I didn’t realize how much of my day gets eaten up with synergistic relationship and team synergy is critical. One of
Peter: the
Chris: things that teams who aren’t in person are lacking a lot of the time is that synergy of just being together human to human and bouncing ideas off because we all get Zoom fatigue as we think about it. The other side of that is I discovered that working out of my home office two days on a regular basis actually helped not just me, but helped my whole team. Because I thrive on that extraversion. And by pulling me home out of that, it forced me to be more succinct with my communications, more formal with the rest of my team. So I kind of take the best of both worlds.
Two days a week, I’m with them in person, where we have those casual relationships, two days a week, I’m away where I’m just focused on doing the part of my job that I need to do in a solo environment. And then when I have to connect, we do it online when possible. And I will say this, two of our meetings that typically were lasting about two and a half to three and a half hours that were board meetings. One thing that’s happened is we are staying online for those meetings. And they are much more sixty to ninety minutes max.
And everybody has said that’s been a big win.
Peter: That’s great. So my situation is I’ve actually been working from home on and off for fifteen years or more. I started working from home originally in 2004, and then have worked in various situations on and off working for companies where the office that I’m going to is actually out of state. In one situation, was commuting to Michigan and another situation down to the, Bay Area in California. So I quickly learned that I needed to have a good working space available while I was working, remote from the team.
Couple things just recently that I’ve added to the mix is, one one like, a game changer is this light that I got on Amazon. We’ll put a link in the notes. That is a desk lamp that is an LED desk lamp with a light bar on it that’s probably about eight inches long, and it sits up just below my eye level, the lamp does, and I can change the warmth of the light and I can change the brightness of the light. And my desktop is this white desktop. It’s a IKEA sit stand desk.
What I found is that when I just turn on the regular lights in my office, it doesn’t really provide enough intense light on my desk like I’m used to being in an office environment where you have overhead fluorescence or something like that, which I’m certainly not going to put in my home office. But it creates a really nice, intense light on my desk that really just wakes up my brain and makes it easy to look at the screen and it creates a contrast between my screen. And so there’s this other source of light kind of in the space. So I found it to be really helpful. I got this about six months ago and I am shocked that I’d never seen this before.
Again, we’ll put a link in the show notes for it. It’s about 70 or $80 on Amazon. Then the other thing that I have found to be very helpful is, I have a timer. It’s like a kitchen timer. We’ll put a link to it as well.
It’s a sixty minute countdown timer that I can rotate and it’s got a really big analog face on it. And it’s got this red plastic where you can see how much time you have left. So you turn it clockwise and then it counts back down counterclockwise. What I’ll do is if I’ve got a task that I have to get done, sometimes I just find I’m getting very distracted. So I will turn this on for thirty minutes, for example, and say, okay, in the next thirty minutes, I have to get this one project done.
Allows me to focus on that particular project and not think of other distractions, notifications, things like that, that may be going on. And of course, I do have all of my notifications silenced on my phone anyway. I keep my phone in silent mode all the time, never turn the sound on my phone, and that helps. So I’ve found those two things to be very helpful in terms of getting things done. One other thing that I found was helpful was just time blocking on my calendar, which is something I’ve probably been doing for about the last two or three years, where each morning I’ll block out an hour of email time, where I’m actually focused on doing email work.
And that time is blocked out of my calendar every single day. So nobody’s going to schedule a meeting over the top of that. So I can just focus on getting some communications done at that particular time. And that seems to be very helpful as well. Now, Chris, you mentioned Telegram.
It’s a tool that we use as a team. I would, I’d like to get everybody’s feedback on it. What’s funny is we picked Telegram maybe three or four years ago because it seemed to be this free messaging platform and nobody else was on it. Since that time, other people have gotten on it. So, what I try to do is avoid having folks if I see somebody that I know that joined it, I delete the chat immediately because I get notifications that so and so your contact joined, and I immediately delete it.
So I think I’ve been able to keep it pretty much just for work communications, but it really is it’s good for a couple of reasons. One thing that I like about it is we avoid using text messaging to each other, and we’re able to just use the platform. Another thing I really enjoy about it is it has stickers, so we can send our favorite stickers to each other. We’ve got a personal favorite. There’s Tuna the dog.
There’s Cookie Monster. There’s some inappropriate stickers too that I deleted. I don’t know. I’d like to hear your guys’ feedback on Telegram as well.
Chris: You know, one of the things about Telegram that I’ve enjoyed is the ability to make subgroups and to mute the conversation for a set amount of time. So you can be part of a group of six people, mute that conversation while you’re on vacation, and stay away from it. When you come back, you can go back and visit all of those messages. And we have to remember when you’re working in an office with real people face to face, side by side, part of that dynamic is funny things that happen. And it’s what it means to be human.
And Telegram is a messaging platform that allows you to have some fun as well, not just work. So that’s what I would say about it. What about you, Emily?
Emily: Yeah, I agree with that. Like, for example, Marcel told me last week that it was the first time actually that Chris and Marcel had met in person and they were wearing the exact same shirt. So he just like, telegrammed me that. It’s like a great little like biz marketing fun, but like not something that you would like send an email about. So it’s a great way to just have like quick, silly communication, but then also like, hey, I need this for this project really quick or whatever.
We try to keep most of our work, like, ticket stuff on our ticketing system just so that we have kind of traces of it, but it’s really good for quick communication. And like you said, subgroups. So we have a group of like me, Peter, and Marcel. We have a group of the four of us. We have our whole team as one group.
So it’s a good way to like, oh, a couple people need to know this, but not everyone or Mhmm. However you wanna split it up is really good. And then, yeah, single communication, really streamlined.
Peter: And I’ve heard folks I’ve heard folks talk about Slack, for example.
Emily: Mhmm.
Peter: And in some respects, Telegram is like Slack because you can do, you know, real time communications and things like that. But I’ve also heard of folks getting Slack fatigue because folks are just using that exclusively for communicating specific details to the team. You know, if people don’t see a notification or something, then they, then they miss it or they just have these notifications going off constantly. The nice thing about Telegram is if I hear that I have a notification on Telegram, I know that it’s one of you guys contacting me about something. Right?
Emily: Yeah. I agree with that. Slack is almost like too much for me. Like, the all the channels, all of that, it’s just kind of overwhelmed when we don’t need that. We need basic quick communication.
Stuff’s not gonna get lost. You can just easily, like, ping someone, and I don’t feel like Slack has the same availability, I guess.
Peter: Think Yeah. And for our client communications
Chris: I think the interface for Yeah. Graham Yeah. Is great on the computer as well as on my phone. Most other tools like Slack are either great on my desktop or great on my phone, but not both. And telegram is flexible both ways.
And again, it’s one of those that allows you to delay or schedule a communication into the future indefinitely, by the way, so that for example, if I want to be just really the person who greets Pete with his birthday, first, I can go and schedule that today for six months from now, and have it kind of there and it’s happening. But I don’t have to be in the moment right then. So that use as an example, obviously sarcastically, but you get the idea, you can schedule something for three weeks from now, so you don’t forget it. And so it’s timely for your coworkers.
Peter: As we wrap up here, are there any other tips you guys would like to add or just anything you’d like to point out with respect to working from home? It seems like it’s working relatively well with us. We do meet together weekly, if not more, but we do have one scheduled weekly meeting as a team on Zoom with an agenda. We’ve talked about that before. That certainly helps us be effective working from home because we’re not worried about whether or not folks are engaged.
We get to see each other’s faces and interact with each other each week, at least on a weekly basis. Thanks everybody. We’ll have some notes to go along with this episode. Like to hear from you. What do you find, helpful for your working from home situation?
What have you found? Is there a gadget you found or a method or something that you found that makes it really work well for you? Let us know. Send me an email podcastbizmktg dot com and let us know, and we will read those next time we cover this topic. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson.
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