I always considered myself someone who was really good at working from home. During my years in ecommerce, I was on-call at all hours of the day and would frequently get calls at 3am when errors would be found around 6am eastern time by customers or midnight when we pushed our code live. In a profession whose job can be entirely completed online, I only really valued the in-person setting of work because it allowed me to see my colleagues and discuss and plan our next steps. In a post-COVID world, I am definitely beginning to doubt these assumptions and realize that to compensate I have found I need to implement my own structure to be successful.

One of the initial challenges I found with WFH has stemmed from time management. Full disclosure: I am on the job hunt as my primary task as I graduated from school in February right when the pandemic was taking off. Before the pandemic, I was commuting to a WeWork space daily and working with a few colleagues from my graduating class in software engineering. There was structure here and, importantly, there was variety in how I could pursue my work. I could dedicate an entire day working on a collaborative project or I could complete a grab bag of tasks related to my career search. Now that work is entirely remote however, if I focus on just one task during a day, I find myself seeing the day run together.

https://gph.is/2jccsAD

The options on what I can do each day are already limited and the best way to combat this in my humble opinion is to make a schedule. My favorite has been to schedule in 2-2.5 hour increments and generally looks like a variation of the following:

-7:30-8:30 Its time to run with the dogs
-8:30-11 I will code or refactor some of my side-projects
-11-1 will be dedicated to look for jobs I fit and apply to them
-1-1:30 Lunch
-1:30-4 Complete algorithms on LeetCode
-4-5 Watch instructional videos

Another scheduling task that helps me be successful is actually scheduling my non-work goals. I hate feeling like I don't know what day of the week it is, so my wife and I put up a whiteboard in the kitchen with our daily work goals and non-work tasks. For instance, I have dedicated this week to using the old bricks that came with our house and completing a pathway through our garden. Just having another physical project ever day after work helps me be more productive during the day.

Finally, I make sure I have a hard scheduled stop. I end every day at 5 o'clock and make sure I don't put it work after this point and also do not pursue non-work tasks when it is the middle of the work day. I have a dedicated work room so I change my mindset when I get inside and I know that the only thing I can do in there is work.