Amazing 20 tips and best practices for effective Work From Home

Working from home is great on such many levels. It saves your time and money and can really make you more joyful. Plenty of free tools make it easier to check in with office colleagues. Also, if you want to work in sweats or nightwear, you can.

However, there are some challenges too. How would you keep from getting distracted with domestic duties? How would you handle an employee who stops his work without announcing? How would you get everything done seamlessly being at home?

Let’s dig into the tips and best practices for working from home.

20 Tips and best practices for Work From Home-

Work From Home Tips

1. Keep a Dedicated Office Space-

The initial step to your “work from home” journey is to assign an area of your home, explicitly for getting work done. This could be an empty room or space that you convert to a home office. If you are squeezed for space, you can set up a desk for your computer and office supplies. Instead of space or location, set up an area of your home where you will work, and focus on working at that space every day. Ensure that your workspace is peaceful so that you can concentrate on the task at hand.

2. Maintain Regular Hours-

Set your daily schedule, and stick to it. Having clear guidelines for when to work and when to call it a day helps many remote workers to maintain work-life balance. Working a swing shift is awful for you, and that applies to remote workers, also. All things considered, working remotely sometimes implies extending your day or starting early to accommodate another person’s time zone. When you do so, be sure to wrap up earlier than usual or sleep in a bit the next morning. Installing an automatic time-tracking application, for example, RescueTime, lets you monitor whether you’re sticking to your timetable.

3. Update Your To-Do List Every Mornings-

When working from home and you don’t have a boss breathing down your neck, it tends to be challenging to keep track of what you have to do throughout your workday. It’s easy to lose sight of priorities, tasks, and deadlines. Start your day by checking priorities for the day. When you make your task list, stick to it. It’s tempting to simply jump into your email, however with some additional focus, you can move the needle while working from home. Set goals and time limits for each task. After you complete each task, check it off the list. This simple technique is both effective and fulfilling.

4. Get well dressed-

Why do most people love to work from home? The best reason is- they can enjoy working with comfortable clothes. “Dress for success” isn’t just a corporate phrase; it truly matters when you work from home. Beyond psychologically getting you in the correct attitude for work, you’ll be ready to handle any kind of video chat or check-in with a teammate. You’ll be prepared to complete work, and you will be mentally and physically prepared for the day.

5. Avoid Work Creep-

A profession that lets you work from home can be invasive in your personal life. This is because if you are constantly at home and close to your work, at that point your work creeps into your home life. Truly, the risk is real, but only if you let it. This goes back to setting work hours. By setting specific work hours and adhering to them, you will surely improve performance and build up a healthy work routine.

6. Discover Your High Productivity Periods-

Each individual is most productive at various times of the day. For instance, a few people are morning people, and they are more productive and focused during the morning hours. For others, their most productive time in the workday is the evening. Hence analyze your high productive time and schedule most important tasks accordingly. In this way, you can complete your task more effectively. 

7. Stick to one Project Management App-

If you aren’t a “write-it-down” to-do list or planner person, don’t stress—there are a lot of modern project management apps available that can assist you. These are great  if you are WFH.

Top project management apps include:

• Asana
• Basecamp
• Trello
• Freedcamp

Most of these applications offer both web-based and mobile versions so that you can use them on your phone. Some can even be integrated with other applications, for example, Slack, for team collaboration. Also, the best part is most of these applications offer free versions.

You can also know- Top 10 tools you’ll need to work from home.

8. Schedule Breaks-

Read more at- https://solaceinfotech.com/blog/amazing-20-tips-and-best-practices-for-effective-work-from-home/

6 Best Project Management Tools For Small Businesses

What is Project Management Tools?

Project management is the mechanism of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria at the specified time. Tools used for Project Management are known as Project Management Tools.

Why Project Management Tools are necessary?

Problems in projects such as complications from unclear objectives, miscommunication and unrealistic project deadlines can result in uncompleted tasks, late project deliveries, uninformed colleagues, and profit decline. Mostly it leads to project delays or worse, cancellations which results in a big loss of a company. So to overcome these losses and complications here is a solution which is project management tools. The main goal of project management tools is to help managers to plan, execute and control all facets of the project management process. Organizations depends on key tools for managing a project to certify that each task is completed within estimated time and to balance staff workload for best time management. Project management tools increases resource efficiency and ensure project scope. Therefore such tools are more important for project managers having large, complex projects.

There are many project management tools available. Any project management task is simpler to achieve when you have the appropriate tools. If you feel threatened by advanced multi-functional software and you don’t have to take special training, the following project management tools will be perfect for you as per your requirement.

1. Asana

• It allows to plan and structure your work in a way that is best for you.
• Asana has templates, and you can use it to add new workflows easily, create lists of tasks for yourself and other team members, create projects where tasks can be posted to share boards, divide larger tasks into small sub-tasks, and also merge small tasks and convert into a project.
• Here you can share details, assign tasks, set priorities and deadlines for tasks all at one place. Team members can comment on tasks, also sign up for email updates on the progress that matter to them.
• Managers can easily check the status of any project without conducting a meeting or contacting team members for project updates.
• If you need simple task management, then Asana will be your best choice.

2. Trello-

• Trello is a project management tool. Those people who are not familiar with Gantt charts or project management vocabulary, Trello will be a best choice for them.
• It is highly visual and perspective, so it is good for non-project managers.
• Trello has a card based design hence it is more familiar.
• Starting with creation of projects called boards. Each board has columns such as Ideas, Doing, Done, Revision, Troubleshooting, etc. You can create cards for each individual task. First of all, each card is moved to an idea column, then this will move from there to Doing when you are doing that task, and then move to Done when task is completed.
• In each card you can add a description, links, images, attach files, create task, chat with team members. You can send an email to make changes to any project when a project is created and an email address is assigned to it.
• Trello is cross platform and integrates via API. It is free. It also has some premium plans.

3. Basecamp-

• If you are managing projects through emails and meetings, but your requirements are exceeding then you should go beyond and think to use Basecamp Project Management Tool.
• Basecamp is a high featured tool to manage your tasks with To-Do Lists. This tool establishes a communication through message boards easily. You can set deadlines for tasks, send messages and can organize important documents, files and assets.
• Rather than sending email chains to update each other on tasks,  team members simply post to a centralized message board.
• It is an excellent Project Management tool for beginners.

4. Wrike-

• Wrike is a Project Management Tool developed to scale your  growing business and is flexible on managing multiple teams and projects in a single tool.
• It will allow you to create blocks for each work. Just like a Google Drive app Wrike let you to create and edit documents in real time. It also creates Gantt charts.
• Here you can create projects, create and assign tasks and deadlines for tasks, track goals of project. In case of a large team Wrike admin controls are very secure and powerful.
• Wrike supports cloud storage and free 2GB Wrike storage for free users. It uses visual representation for better understanding of progress. Also it easily tracks the contribution of individual and project progress.
• Main features of Wrike are Gantt Chart, resource management, inbuilt templates, time tracking, budget tracking, email and calendar synchronization, proofing and approval, and personal dashboard, among others.
• It is a Scalable software that grows with your business. It supports Real-time editing which results in updated teams with the latest information.

5. Zoho Sprints-

• Zoho Sprints is a flexible and scalable project management tool beneficial for both small and medium-sized businesses. It is developed to have a simple  and organized interface so that users can focus on product development effectively.
• This tool has features like backlogs, progress tracking, logging billable and non-billable hours, analytics and dashboard so you can easily oversee the project. It has Drag-and-drop feature for quickly creating new backlogs and sprints.
• Feeds in Zoho Sprints allows social interaction between teams by posting statuses and comments.
• Zoho Sprints is free for some limited access and beyond that it has upgrade plans for 50 projects and 10 users.
• Zoho Sprints is good for small-scale business projects with limited budgets.

6. Quire-

• Quire is a free Project Management Tool and it has no pricing plan. It is popular among project tools.
• It has a well-designed interface and is not easy to navigate instead of this it includes all the tools that you need to effectively manage your projects.
• In Quire, you can create projects, tasks, assign tasks to team members and deadlines for these tasks, and then finally collaborate on these tasks to achieve the objective. Also you can drag-n-drop not only cards but also individual tasks which gives you more flexibility as compared to Trello. You can label tasks to find them easily.
• It has another feature of live chat where you can send messages and communicate to team members.

Conclusion-

The best project management tool for small business is Wrike due to its powerful features and functionalities. It is a highly-scalable system that works appropriate for growing small businesses. It can manage multiple projects and teams from a singular platform.

Need to manage your Project Activities properly? Some best tools are there to help you. Just select the appropriate one according to your requirement and ease up your project management. For any query kindly contact us. We are here to give you the best solution for your project.