5 Ways to Stay Focused When You Work From Home as a Developer
Many changes have been incorporated into our daily lives since the start of the global pandemic. To keep up with today’s near-frantic pace of change, most of us have put aside our travel cards and stayed home. However, life doesn’t stand still, and the need for developers to remain agile and productive has never been more critical.
You may have been working from home since the outbreak; perhaps you are just about to start a new role where you are required to, or you’re struggling to stay focused at home, and you have found this article. No matter why you’re here, take in my five ways to stay focused when working from home — derived from my personal experiences.
1. Put your pants on!
When I initially started working from home, I opted for comfy clothes and
even stayed in my Pyjamas on some days!
It’s all about the mindset for the day, do not drag yourself out from the bed straight into the 9am meeting. Get up, take a morning shower and make yourself look good — even if you’re not planning on leaving the house!
2. Leave the house
Go outside during breaks! Take a walk, go to the gym, sit in the garden, grab some snacks or milk. Fresh air has been shown to help digest food more effectively, improve blood pressure, reduce obesity rates and strengthen the immune system, leading to a healthier you. Did you know that 20% of the oxygen you breathe in is used by your brain to function?
I personally found walks very good for my mental health.
When the pandemic first hit, I felt like I was tethered into my work laptop.
At the end of each day, I would replug myself into the TV, often checking in on work items.
Over time I felt horrible about myself and generally unhappy about unimportant things. It’s no wonder when I spent 98% of my days looking at a screen!
Taking regular breaks at work was just half of the puzzle. What I think really helped improve my mental health was the fresh air.
3. Communicate consistently
On a typical office day, conversations will form by themselves in the workspace. It’s also easy to tap your desk neighbour on the shoulder and have them have a quick glance at a bug you are trying to resolve. These interactions are vital in a functioning tech team.
To maintain these interactions in the work-from-home environment, we use Slack, and I personally use it in two ways.
- We like to keep our conversations about the feature/ product in the public domain, so our project work-stream has a dedicated Slack channel.
- If I’m having an issue with some code or need specific assets, I post messages in our developer general channel.
One feature I love on Slack is huddle — when the writing isn’t enough to explain the situation, a quick and easy way to jump into a voice chat is a perfect way to communicate with your fellow developers. And anyone can join once you’re huddled up!
4. Planning
Benjamin Franklin once said:
“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail”
Planning is different from a ‘To Do List’. The point of a plan is to document the tasks required to reach an outcome goal (or several). A ‘To Do List’ is just a set of tasks. See the difference?
To be honest, I’m not a Jedi master at planning, but I recommend outlining clear goals at the start of each day and concluding each day with a review of those goals. In addition to creating these outcome goals (e.g. fix ticket/build feature), I like to set out 5–7 actions that will help me accomplish them.
Top Tip: A great time to list actions is during your morning stand-up!
One last thing to mention about planning is it’s all about work/life balance — I like to mix each day with work and personal outcome goals.
5. Don’t try to remember everything. Write it down!
We absorb a lot of information daily, in the meetings, group huddles, reading up stack-overflow posts, or reviewing pull requests.
There is no way to remember everything said during your 8-hour working day, so I would like to introduce you to the “Mind Backlog.”
Any information that seems interesting, important, or it’s just something you can’t think about right now, simply write it down on a note.
Simple eh?
I have exactly 32 of these notes waiting to be read when I have time.
No, they’re not as important as my daily goals. However, if something was important enough to write down, I’m confident it will have value moving forward. Now I just need to plan some time to review them.
Bonus Points: Organise the notes in priority levels and introduce them into your daily or weekly planning activities.
Conclusion
I hope my take on the world of ‘work from home’ helps your daily life become more productive and enjoyable. We all work differently, so please take my post and adapt it to your life accordingly.
Most importantly, be happy!
P.S. We are hiring for an Android Developer. Know anyone? 👀
