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We’ve talked about morning office routines before, but let’s face it — life is different for a lot of us now even if you’re in the office five days a week, to say nothing of the hybrid/work from home folks. So let’s discuss.
- WHERE is your office — home, office, or third place (e.g., coffee shop or coworking spot)?
- What signifies the beginning of the work day for you? Do you have tasks that you try to do before work begins, such as work out? (Put another way: do you always do the same thing first?)
- How many breaks do you take, and are they planned? Do you leave the space where you work for regular breaks, like picking up lunch or going to the gym? If you work from home, do you have a schedule or workday routine for whatever home-related tasks you do, like laundry or dishes?
- Do you talk with your coworkers on a regular basis, such as through a team meeting or morning check in?
- What habits help you stay on task and maximize productivity during the workday? What habits have you had to break or eliminate from your routine?
- What signifies the end of the workday for you?
In the past, we’ve talked about productivity hacks, our favorite books on productivity, scheduling breaks to increase productivity, and how to make the most of your productive times.
My Workday Routines (Working From Home)
I’ve worked from home for years, and my systems are admittedly not great — but then a (loose) part of my job is checking social media and internet shopping, so there’s that!
What signifies the beginning of the work day for me: My workday loosely starts when I check the morning post and check comments, but it truly starts once I sit at my desk and start reviewing the upcoming posts, analytics, and more. I often try to go for a walk and get a small strength training workout in before sitting at my desk, though, and depending on the morning’s schedule I may run some errands after school dropoff.
How many breaks do I take: I try to take a brief walk after the afternoon post goes up, but that may be postponed or delayed if I’m in the middle of something or haven’t had a very productive morning.
Do I talk with my coworkers on a regular basis? My husband also works from home and has frequent Zoom meetings with coworkers, including a standing Monday morning one… but for me, beyond chit chat in our staff Slack channel and a probably too infrequent call with Kate to go over the upcoming schedule, I don’t talk with coworkers. I’m using a new virtual assistant service that I should be paying more attention to, but they have ongoing work (add alt-image tags to all of the old images on Corporette) that doesn’t need a ton of direction.
What habits help me stay on task and maximize productivity? I’ve written about a few of my best productivity hacks before…
My timer cube. I still love using my timer cube (pictured above) to easily limit myself on tasks that can be endless like internet shopping. I also use it to force myself to do unpleasant or nonpreferred tasks, saying, c’mon, just spend 15 minutes on it.
My Post-it notes. Especially when I have a zillion tasks to do, limiting my tasks to what can be written on a Post-it note helps reduce overwhelm and keep my focused on the most important tasks. (I used to do Eisenhower matrices, but comically things never get done. Sometimes I do break things up into “tasks I can do quickly” vs. “important tasks,” though.
Eating the frog. If I have a task that I’ve been putting off for whatever reason, I try to do that one first thing — if you start the day off eating the frog, things can only go up from there.
Using browser extensions for productivity. I’m definitely guilty of Too Many Tabs syndrome, and I love the plugin OneTab to collapse all of my tabs down and “save them” for future perusal. (Sometimes I even go back to peruse them!) Another one I’ve started using again is Morphine, although I think it might not be supported for much longer — if you have any similar plugins that limit your time on specific websites like Facebook, I’d love to hear them.
What signifies my end of the workday: I could probably afford to pick up some good habits around the end of the workday, like going for a walk, cleaning my desk, closing my browser, etc., etc… instead my workday often ends with kid-related requests.
How about you, readers — what are your workday routines? How do they vary from workday routines you’ve had before?