Another article by MITrix community of Master In Tech in DHSZ

Setting up an office or work space at your home with right office equipment and some changes can make working at home more enjoyable and also make you look profesional. To ensure the best results, it would be a good idea to take advantage of professional interior design services in Trivandrum. 15+ Best Home Office Essentials for a Productive Work Day. Work-from-home gadgets, office organization ideas, and more. 8 Best Printers of 2020 for Your Dream Home Office. 2 PLUS 60 Minute. Maintaining productivity can be a challenge, especially if an employee is facing many distractions at home. If your home has become your next office (and will be your office for quite a while), you’ll need to take steps to stay productive while keeping your work-life balance in check.

Chief Editor: @Charles Ji

Chief Proofreader: @Steven Chao, @John Zhang

Publisher: @Steven Chao

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A Warm Welcome from MITrix🖐 🖐 🖐

It might be scary to some of the peers hearing about the status quo of the coronavirus, but please stay inside, take care of yourself and also study hard!

Distance learning during this very time of coronavirus must have impacted our learning experiences in various ways. Love it or not, we have to admit both the freedom and inconvenience brought by coronavirus that some people have unwittingly encountered. Study has shown that about 30 percent of American work remotely. Do you feel distant learning/working less productive? Here are 3 tips you can follow to master your study!

Why studying remotely can be unproductive

Distraction

Undoubtably, the learning cultures at home can be completely different as that at school. Anti-productive bombs are constantly detonated by life interferences:

• Messages from teams
• Uncountable emails yet to read
• Barking puppy as if it’s the end of the world
• Your mom asking you to have dinner

It’s human nature to be distracted because that’s a way to be vigilant and have our curiosity satisfied, but as we become more self-aware of ourselves, it’s undesired to face these ‘obligation’. Working means working, but sometimes your environment doesn’t seem to match your ideal place for productivity. Working at home can be detrimental to your productivity. Thinking about people that study with you, it’s not hard to believe how a home office full of distractions can come even close to old-school classrooms or dorms for learning.

Lack of Networking

Have you ever realized you’ve got unhanded homework until the deadline passes? You’re not the only one! A sense of connectivity and networking could be one of the reasons why most people prefer offline school or office to digital ones. Not only because you feel alone and unconnected, but the lack of communication and inability to discuss plays another big role to make people unproductive.

Lack of Self-management

As someone who identifies himself as an early bird than a night owl, I even find working in the morning in adversity at home. During offline working, you could have teachers and classmates to remind you about your assignment deadlines, but it’s not the case now as no one will actively alert you to complete tasks even if you don’t do them at all.

3 tips you can follow to master your study

Study Ritualization

Wikipedia defines a ritual as:

A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place and according to set sequence

The aim to ritualize study is to draw clear demarcation of when you are studying and when you are not. As distractions are everywhere at home, confirming the time when you are at working mode indirectly sets you in a distraction-free environment. Imagine you have Xbox and Switch on your desk when you’re studying, paperworks and used tissues everywhere on your desk. Don’t all of these crank up the possibility to hit up League of Legend and relax?

The word Ritualization simply means to tell yourself when you’re ready for study/work. Here are a few steps you can follow to set up your own work mode:

1. Think about what you really need when you do the task;

2. Get rid of everything else on your desk;

3. If you are working on your PC, switch off apps you don’t need;

4. Tellyourself that you’re ready for work. It may seem inessential but just being respectful towards your study actually works effectively. It’s not necessarily an action of ‘telling yourself’. A small habit like making yourself a cup of tea could stimulate your productivity signals.

Why your current TIMETABLE doesn’t work

Manage your time slots using Calendar App

An Calendar App is the most accepted way to manage time, while it goes fairly ineffective when you take task management seriously. Since calendar directly reflects how your day is spent by visualizing time-specific task blocks, it creates an illusion that your days are spend exactly that way no matter what your actions are.

Manage your time using a Todo List

With these being said, I believe many of you have tried a todo list to organize tasks that don’t fall into specific time blocks, all of which are mostly inspired by David Allen’s famous GTD® methodology:

GETTING THINGS DONE® is a personal productivity methodology that redefines how you approach your life and work.

STEP 1 CAPTURE

Collect what has your attention — Write, record, or gather any and everything that has your attention into a collection tool.

STEP 2 CLARIFY

Process what it means — Is it actionable? If so, decide the next action and project (if more than one action is required). If not, decide if it is trash, reference, or something to put on hold.

STEP 3 ORGANIZE

Put it where it belongs — Park reminders of your categorized content in appropriate places.

STEP 4 REFLECT

Review frequently — Update and review all pertinent system contents to regain control and focus.

STEP 5 ENGAGE

Simply do — Use your trusted system to make action decisions with confidence and clarity.

This methodology clarifies what tasks to do and what tasks you have done and it’s a great start for beginners. However, such a robust system doesn’t address the very basic problem — When you should do your task. Because after all, we judge productivity based on how much you have accomplished.

Use time management to manage your tasks

A quick resolution is to combine your Calendar and Todo List. Here are a few steps I find useful to compensate GTD system with time management:

• Clarify the PRIORITY of your tasks

Almost all the basic todo list apps have an option to specific tasks that you find important, and there are various ways you can choose to do so; no matter it’s flagging, tagging, rating or starring, you can always find your way to prioritize that you feel most comfortable with.

Effective use of the priority system helps you choosing the right task to engage in by filtering tasks. Modern Todo List apps like OmniFocus or 2Do have complex filtering systems called Perspective or Smart List which takes GTD to a next level.

• Identity your AVAILABILITY

It’s not surprising to see someone quit the GTD system since they tried to track their every single minute using a calendar. A calendar can be a good way to visualize tasks by timeline but it’s definite NOT a good way to schedule all your tasks:

• You easily get frustrated every time when you couldn’t complete your task within time slots;
• A calendar full of schedules is merely idealistic, no guarantee of your availability;
• It makes you feel you can’t accomplish one basic thing, and end up with giving up.

Instead, what you can do is to give yourself time blocks when you have free time to get thing done. You can keep your fixed-scheduled meetings or classes where they are, but when you have a ton of assignments to finish, you never know how long they are going to last or when is the best time I should start one task.

It is also suggested to tag your available time blocks with your energy level to match priorities of your tasks, all of which give you a general idea of the task to start with.

Optimize communication

I know many of you have ever complained how laggy and irresponsive Microsoft Teams is. Yeah, I know. MS Teams is definitely not the only or the best choice of communication on the market, but either switching to another platform for your project or diving deep into how to enhance your MS Teams experience.

If you have a team for your project that requires not teacher involvement or no real-time feedback, here are a few tools you can try to resolve the dis-connectivity encountered in distant learning.

Trello

As the most famous Kanban tool on the market, Trello has served as a standard of project management for more than 50 million users, which also helps MIT team to organize tasks. But power users aren’t limited to simply visualizing tasks. With strong integration with Slack or MS Teams, you could create tasks, assign to others and mark as complete directly from the communication app you like. If you are serious about project management or even personal task management, you definitely need to check it out.

Slack

Being a powerful communication app, Slack takes management and integration to the next level. You want to keep updated with edits in Notion, collaborate on Trello and start a Zoom meeting from one single app? Slack is the only possible solution you can have. As distant collaboration is becoming a general trend of the future and a necessity right now, Slack becomes more and more popular among projects from small startups to giant tech companies.

Notion

Online documentation collaborations have never been so easy until the MiT switched to Notion. Seamless synchronization and nice interface are not the only reasons why MIT members chose Notion as a place for notes. With powerful database feature and integration of other apps like Slack or MS Teams, Notion really takes productivity to the next level.

With all these powerful apps recommended, it’s needed to be reiterated that app choice is NOT the philosophy of productivity, orientation is. A tool can be helpful for you but not for others; a tool can be suitable for this task but not for another. Sometimes it’s easy to dive too deep into which app to choice and we tend to try them all, but we sometimes forget what our ultimate purposes are; we’re merely being productive to look productive but not being productive to produce. — Anonymous

Disclaimer

Please keep in mind that these apps mentioned are of MIT team own selections and are no way in connection with the school. For technically issues of MS Teams, please email[email protected] instead.

Pictures and screenshot in this article are from various authors. They may in whole, or in part, be subjected to copyright protection. Before sharing them, always try to contact the author first.

Creative Common (CC3 BY) — written by Charles Ji, MIT team with love and passion for technology. Feel free to leave thoughts and suggestion below in the comment box!👇

Reference

Three Priorities For Your Productive Home Office 365

It’s no secret that working from home can make you more productive. In fact, several studies have shown that employees who work remotely are actually 47% more productive on average. Unfortunately, with COVID-19 keeping us isolated at home, working remotely doesn’t have the same appeal anymore. Those who work in the creative sector are especially struggling. After all, how can you create something that connects with others when you’re disconnected from others?

The good news is that there are a few key ways you can make your home office a more productive place to work even with the pandemic trying to take the wind out of your sails.

Make a separation between home and work

If you weren’t working from home prior to the pandemic, you may not actually have a specified home office area. Instead, you might find yourself answering emails on your phone from your bed or working on your couch. While this kind of work might seem convenient and more comfortable compared to sitting at a desk, blending home and work too much can actually make you feel more stressed when you clock out for the day.

Create a designated home office area in your house where you only work and then close the door on your office once you’re done for the day. This will not only help you feel more relaxed at the end of the workday but it will also make you more efficient and productive while you work. If you don’t have a designated office area, consider converting the guest bedroom or the basement into an office suite. A home office not only has an 87% return on investment but a finished basement also has an ROI of 77.6%, so you’ll not only be productive but also raking in that cash later on.

Invest in a desk you actually want to sit at

It’s understandable to make do with what you have when you’re creating a home office on a budget. But making do doesn’t mean you have to be miserable when you set up to work for the day. If your desk makes you depressed just looking at it, consider investing in one that makes you happy and lets you spread out. Consider the equipment you use for work. If you’re working on just a laptop, a chic secretary desk could be just what the work-doctor ordered. If you work in IT and business services, which is the number one market right now, an L-shaped desk might be more your style because it can fit multiple monitors.

Have fun with wall and desk decor

It can be hard to work when your desk is too clinical. Think of interior design. The interior design industry generates $10 billion in revenue every year and there’s a good reason for that. Whether it’s an entire home office or a desk, styling the space to make it your own (and make it fun) can make you want to sit down and get your work done. Let yourself go down a Pinterest hole to get some ideas of how you’d like your desk and home office to look. You don’t need to go over your budget, either. There are plenty of Dollar Store finds and cheap desk accessories you can find in the clearance sections of Target, Marshalls, and TJ Maxx that are definitely chic enough to motivate you.

Three Priorities For Your Productive Home Office Organizing