The dream of working from home—no commute! No one heating up fish in the microwave!—has given way to a reality of early logins, evening sign offs, and frequent weekend hours.
At Honest London, we’ve always put wellbeing of staff before anything.
We don’t believe anyone can realistically work for a solid 8 hours, we have working hours for our team of 10am-4pm… Big shock everything gets done ahead of time because our team isn’t tired, wasting time at a desk, scrolling Reddit and pretending to be busy for 8 hours.
We are incredibly encouraging of staff who want to work from home when it suits them, we truly believe being open and working with our team and their needs is the secret ingredient to great work results and happy people. We hate Teams and how it has a traffic light of colours next to your name so management can micro-check up to see if you’re green, amber or red… What is this? Trust your staff!
We believe you can reframe remote working as an opportunity to strategically shorten your work days further.
Here are the smartest techniques for finishing up early we’ve discovered working from home
Embrace your inner morning person or night owl. Because you’re no longer so dependent on the in-person workflows of your team, ask yourself, when do I work best? 9 a.m.? 9 p.m.? Bang out your work when you’re freshest or most able to focus. “I get all mission-critical stuff done within the first three hours of walking into my office, and then I can call it an early day if needed,” says Shane Dutka, a blogging business expert.
Avoid individual chores. Longtime work-from-homers know this hazard well. “Nothing chews up a day like a couple errands,” says career adviser Joanne Cleaver, author of The Career Lattice: Combat Brain Drain, Improve Company Culture, and Attract Top Talent, who’s worked at home for almost 40 years. “Clump errands into one chunk of time, especially time-consuming ones.”
Condense your communication channels. Stop relinquishing 30 to 60 minutes a day to the extra online communication that comes with remote work. “On Slack alone, you can spend half your day perusing through all the channels,” says Kieran McGoldrick, senior sales executive at contract management software company Outlaw. “To clock out at 5 p.m. with peace of mind, pick one platform as your single source.” For example, you might choose email as your primary channel and set Slack to email you notifications. Keep all other channels closed; if needed, check them two to three times a day for five to 10 minutes total.
Organise leisure activities. “The social pressure of not letting people down is effective,” says Everett Harper, chief executive officer of software engineering firm Truss, who suggests socially distanced bike rides, runs, or a virtual exercise class. You could also try a call with a friend or cooking dinner with someone.
Ban tech outside the home office/dining table…Bed. “I have designated all the other areas in my house tech-free,” says Reuben Yonatan, CEO of IT company GetVoIP. “No more quick calls or emails at 9 p.m.” Other remote workers take less drastic measures, such as removing work email from phones. ”My wife and I put a box in the kitchen called Phone Jail, and we put our phones in it every day from 5 p.m. until 10 p.m.,” says Jayson DeMers, CEO of email visualization tool company EmailAnalytics. “Physical separation from tech is what we need to truly disconnect.”
