Many managers are suddenly working from home. Along with handling their duties, they also have to guide their permanent employees, temporary workers from staffing firms in Cleveland, Ohio, and anyone else who’s part of their team. Since the paradigm is dramatically different from reporting to the workplace, figuring out how to plan your day effectively may seem like a challenge.
Luckily, it is possible to take control and establish a flow. If you want to know how you can keep your days on target when working from home, here’s what you need to do.
Designate Time for Communication First
When everyone is physically separated, communication becomes even more critical. Make sure you block out time to check in with each of your team members on a daily basis. For example, you might want to put a brief 10-minute phone call on your calendar each morning along with a lengthier video conference appointment each Friday.
The goal is to make sure you don’t overlook communication. By actively adding it to your calendar before anything else, you are keeping it a priority.
Identify Your High-Priority Tasks
Many managers have a lot on their plates, but not everything is equally critical. Since working from home may make handling certain tasks more complex, you must identify your highest priority activities.
Once you do, you can make these critical assignments for the day. That usually means ensuring that you work on the highest priority responsibility above all else. Then, once it’s complete, you can move on to the next.
This approach ensures you move forward logically. You focus entirely on the task at hand and concentrate on activities that need to be handled above all others. That way, if you run into issues due to the new work paradigm, everything that’s genuinely vital is more likely to get completed.
Leave Space for the Unexpected
While you might be tempted to schedule every minute of your day, don’t. You need to leave room for the unexpected. For instance, you might experience a technical issue or have an employee that needs help reach out. If you’re overscheduled, these events can completely derail your day.
Ideally, you want to have a buffer ready. That way, if you can’t move forward as quickly as you’d hope, you can potentially still hit your daily goal. Then, if it turns out, everything went smoothly, you can take advantage of that extra time to get ahead. That can be incredibly good for morale and may help you stay motivated during these strange times.
Build-in Your Breaks
When you work from home, you might not get the same cues that it’s time for a break. You don’t see your colleagues heading to lunch, for example, so it’s easy for time to get away from you.
But taking breaks is essential to productivity, so you want to make sure they are part of your schedule. Add them to your calendar and set notifications. You’ll get an alert when it’s time to step away for a moment, and that’s important.
Do You Need to Add to Your Team?
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