How I Manage and Plan Tasks as a Remote Worker 🤓✔📅
I know being a remote worker and working from home can be a challenge, especially when it comes to managing and planning your tasks and to-dos. Since I started at Microsoft, I became a remote worker working from my home office, and I needed to figure out what the best way for me is to get things done. In this blog, I want to share my experience on how to manage and plan tasks as a remote worker working from home and be more productive. Check out my blog here: https://www.thomasmaurer.ch/2020/04/how-i-manage-and-plan-tasks-as-a-remote-worker/How to host Tech Workshops and Trainings online
I just got asked by one of my blog readers, who is a consultant and trainer, about what tools I use to give online tech workshops and trainings. I thought this would make a good blog post; that’s why I want to share with you how you can provide tech workshops and trainings online. This can obviously also be used in day to day collaboration and meetings. You can read more here: https://www.thomasmaurer.ch/2020/03/how-to-host-tech-training-online/From WFH WTF? to WFH FTW!
Wow, challenging times for us! I would love to use this conversation to share with you how I feel about WFH. I strongly encourage you to reply, ask questions, participate and contribute 🙌 I think there is a huge difference between "working from home" and "sometimes working from home". So if you almost always wfh, no matter if there is a virus or not, you will probably have a professional set up for your working gear and surround yourself with items, that make your work easy and your day delightful. In our branch of Tech, very likely, you have some geek stuff / Lego / Certificates in your homeoffice. You will have established your routines. When you start and finish your work, how you incorporate family duties into your working day, how you feel about your own work -life balance. If you only work sometimes from home or just need to work impromtu from home, you are most probably not that equipped (tools) and prepared (your routines). I am one of those persons, who just Sometimes works from home. About 70 % of my working days, I work on-Site at customers, doing workshops or just work with them on concepts. The rest of my working time i spend at home. Here is what I learned. These are just my individual learnings, not an objective thruth that needs to apply to everyone or is valid recommendation for every single person on the world. So when our WFH season started, there were a lot of blog posts about "I wfh since 10 years, here is my advice", but they didn't resonate to me. So I wanted to follow all these advices, just because they looked productive and energetic and like as if the authors really had their **bleep** together. But somehow, it just felt wrong to copy/paste someone else's routine into my life. Advice no1: start your working day early! Wow, this really sounds like one of those #MondayMotivation Insta posts! But although I tried, it felt wrong. I am just not that person! It is easy for me to wake up very early if I have an appointment and need to be on time SOMEWHERE. So I get up, make myself ready, sometimes even go running in the morning, have healthy breakfast and be on the road. I even manage to document this for insta/twitter 🙂 But when I am at home, I love to extend my resting time by having a lazy morning. Stay in my PJs till lunch (which is most of a time a salad I buy in the grocery store next corner and I really don't dare to go shopping in my PJs), sort my stuff, get an overview what I shall do and do something else instead. I am at least partially a professional procrastinator. If I force myself to stick to super productive eat-that-frog habits at home, i get seriously grumpy, don't enjoy what I do, become easily frustrated and would probably start to blame my customers for that. Uncool. Very, very, uncool. Conclusion: Do what feels good for you. Respect your mood, this will lead to good manners. You are a night owl? Fine! You are an early bird? Fine as well. Make sure, you find the right time to work, because you need to make your work work, not follow a schedule. Advice no2: commute to your work! I was very impressed by that one! And I tried. I tried to go outside and perhaps it was not the right time and situation (it was too cold, too rainy, too Monday, too no coffee yet) but I felt stupid going out just to start with work after that. What worked: Going running, as this became my habit WAY before wfh. So I ran, although it was cold and rainy and dark and Monday and although there was a huge, not so say massive and enormous lack of coffee! Conclusion: trying to establish new habits in a new situation can be hard. Better modify /adjust your existing habits so they fit into the new situation Advice no3: dress up/ don't stay in your PJs! Again. I love my PJs. I do not feel more productive in a nice dress, I just feel prettier. And being more pretty doesn’t make me a better consultant, very unfortunately. So if you like your PJs, just wear OTHER PJS for work than at night. I will take a break here and let you think about that. What's in your mind? What works? What doesn't work at all?
Your help needed to improve Microsoft's IT infrastructure-focused remote worker content
The Empower Remote Workers with Microsoft 365 solution content tells IT professionals like yourselves how to deploy various on-premises and cloud-based apps to support your remote workers. It was published earlier this year in response to the initial reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. We took a step-by-step approach with enumerated results as a roadmap for success. We need your help to review the content and make sure it’s still relevant to today’s organizations. REQUEST: Please take a few minutes to look over this content and tell us what we can do to improve it. Note that you don't need to do a line-by-line read-through (unless you want to). I’m more interested in your overall impressions on its organization, completeness, and utility to IT professionals like yourselves. Please leave your feedback as a reply to this discussion. Thanks so much for your time and help! Joe Davies Senior Technical Writer at MicrosoftBest Applications That Will Make Remote Work During Coronavirus More Comfortable
Things have changed very rapidly for a lot of people. Just a few months ago nobody would’ve imagined they would have to stay at home for a prolonged period of time, and even though warned, preparation for a global scale epidemic was pretty poor. Right now, when the spread of Covid-19 is at its peak, a lot of people have to get used to self-isolation, which means they can’t go to work to offices anymore but have to work remotely. The tendency for remote work was also visible before the virus, but it surely has hastened its implementations. It has its upsides and downsides, but overall, remote work is rated positively. Some companies are reporting an increase in productivity and working hours, decrease in the amount of sick-leaves, and, naturally, the risk of infecting others with a disease of one kind or another has dropped significantly. However, there’s one more thing that everyone has to take into consideration — a comfortable remote work environment. That is, you will have to install new software (if you don’t have it already) for making a group conference video call, use a mass chat platform, and on occasions secure remote access to companies private resources. In this article, I have listed several useful software apps that will help overcome these challenges. Slack Slack is one of the most popular mass chat services out there and is very well-suited to remote work conditions. Slack allows creating channels for every topic as well as sending direct messages to every joined user. It’s a must for every business and to be honest, I think most companies are already using it due to it being very conventional. It has now removed a user cap for three months to all nonprofit organizations. NordVPN Teams NordVPN Teams, launched by the popular NordVPN, is a business solution for small and corporate businesses. It allows users to connect easily with Google or Azure and is supported by all major operating systems. Companies can set up custom gateways and assign specific servers. What is more, NordVPN Teams is now offering an exclusive offer to non-governmental organizations, which is very helpful during the pandemic. Google Hangouts Google is another company to step up its game. It’s one of the most often used apps when it comes to video calls and conferences. The company now made Hangouts Meet free to all customers who have G-Suite or are using it for educational purposes. This means that up to 250 people can have virtual meetings at the same time, which are now more needed than ever. Zoom Zoom is an excellent alternative to Google Hangouts and videoconferencing. Only one person in the team needs to download the software, and that is it — everyone else can use a link. The company also removed a meeting limit to its free plan for students and teachers across America. It is now also removing time limits to countries impacted by the coronavirus. Dropbox Dropbox offers cloud collaboration and storage services, which is much needed when working remotely. I’d say it is one of the most crucial tools that help make file-sharing easy and also have everything in one place. Dropbox Business will be available for free for six months to nonprofit and non-governmental organizations that are battling against the virus. MailChimp A platform that is used to send newsletters and emails. It is one of the best-automated platforms currently offered to marketers — you can put custom tags, check the open rate of your emails and track even more crucial metrics. The company is now giving free accounts to nonprofits, schools and similar organizations, not to mention that free and basic plans can be upgraded with no cost. Adobe Adobe is a huge company that has a variety of tools, mainly related to design and marketing. It’s a wide range of design software like Photoshop, InDesign and others are irreplaceable to most who work with graphics. It currently allows students and teachers to access the Creative Cloud for free via a request. Also, Adobe has made a lot of its learning videos freely available, among other content, so that others can use it to study remotely. There are more to choose from, but I picked the most popular and, in my opinion, most comfortable to use ones. It might seem easy, but every software needs a bit time to get used to, and right now, when everybody is stressed because of the extended quarantine, a comfortable app is more than welcome. Also, all of these developers one way or another, are contributing to making this hard period a bit easier. By some scholars, the idea that societies will shift towards remote work is inevitable, and it might be useful to get used to it sooner than later.
