The ultimate guide to remote work

Avoid work if you can, paid or unpaid, and enjoy the beautiful things in your life. Get out into nature 🌲, have a dance party with the kids 🕺, get lost in a novel 📖, have a progressive meal with friends 🍽️. This weekly habit will remind you that your worth isn’t based on what you produce, but who you are. We spend a lot of time in our heads and thoughts, thinking through what happened and what needs to be accomplished. For anything that won’t impact you within the next 5 years, try to only give it 5 minutes ✋🏾 of your time ⏳.

  • Managing a remote team is a balancing act since frequent and productive communication is key to the team’s success.
  • So whether you need to trim back on meetings this week or push out some lower-priority projects, you can now understand how much focus time is actually available and what you can feasibly do with it.
  • Find a new route and refresh your mind and body instead of pushing yourself to exercise (or feeling guilty for missing a workout).
  • Also, while alcohol often induces sleep, the quality of sleep will be lower.
  • For example, if you don’t have the bandwidth to take up another project, be transparent and say no.
  • Another important part of focus time is staying flexible within your schedule.

According to Harvard Business Review, we tend to get considerably worse at productivity as the day progresses. Time Doctor’s idle time tracking feature is great for those who want a better idea of their productive hours. Idle time is when there’s no keyboard or mouse activity for a certain working remotely in a different time zone period of time. For instance, Clement keeps hours when he has childcare – and his employees and colleagues know he’s readily available then. At Loomly, CEO Thibaud Clement and his leadership team encourage employees to set clear boundaries for when they’re working and when they’re not.

When are you most (and least) productive?

And as delicious as this was, it wasn’t always great for my productivity or my sense of work-life balance. If your living space and your workspace are the same place, it can feel hard to truly step away from work at the end of the day, even if you’ve closed your laptop and signed off. Sometimes it can feel like there isn’t a reason to log off at a certain time if you’re already working from the home office. When you have the flexibility to work from anywhere, it can sometimes feel like you need to be available and online anytime, too. And if you’re working on a different schedule than the rest of your team, this flexibility can sometimes lend itself to a lack of work-life balance. If employees do not get space to do other personal things like taking breaks often, stretching their muscles, they are likely to be stressed out.

self care working across time zones

To that end, if you’re a remote worker seeking a little more work-life balance, make plans for your after-work hours, and stick to them. Whether the plans include happy hour drinks with a friend or attending a workout class, if you have somewhere to be at the end of your workday, you’ll be more likely to actually sign off and stop working. Work-life balance is a term used to describe how workers distribute their time between professional and personal obligations.

Creating a Culture of Self-Care in the Workplace

A research group has discovered that putting your device out of sight 🙈 while having a conversation enhances your experience 📈. Technology has increased our standard of living, but can at times get in the way of living fully. Try creating a space where your phone “goes to bed 🛏️,” removing it from the table 📵 or keeping it out of your hands 👐 to get the most out of your daily in-person interactions. Take 5 minutes and jot down 3-5 things that went well this week 🎉. It’s sometimes easier to forgive others than to practice self-forgiveness 🤟.

  • It’s normal for experienced remote workers as well to face such challenges over time.
  • Remote working has increasingly become common, with businesses discovering that worldwide teams can be incredibly beneficial for an organization’s culture and ability to hire from a diverse talent pool.
  • Other causes include shift work and some sleeping disorders.

Jet Lag Rooster creates an individual plan suggesting the best times for bright light exposure (e.g., sunlight) and melatonin. People who follow these suggestions report less jet lag (Lieberman, 2003). Shifting your body clock before departing can sometimes prevent jet lag completely (Burgess et al., 2003). Traveling across different time zones and going through daylight and darkness cycles that are different from the rhythms we are used to can cause our body clock to get out of synch. Other causes include shift work and some sleeping disorders.

Define productive work hours

Aim to squeeze all the productivity you can out of working hours. Without scheduled meetings, coffee breaks, and impromptu discussions with coworkers, telecommuting presents fewer distractions than working in an office. Navigating different time zones requires a certain amount of give-and-take from all parties involved.

Take meetings while walking, introduce them to your kids on Zoom (we already know they’re there), or space out meetings so they have some breathing room. Make time during your check-ins to ask about employee well-being. You may have to read between the lines for what’s not being said. Missed deadlines or a lack of responsiveness can indicate overwhelm. If you feel overwhelmed, stuck, or don’t know where to begin to disconnect, working with a professional can be invaluable. A coach or counselor can ask the right questions and help you identify which changes will make the biggest impact and how to get started.

However, you can force conversion with the
template filters described below. When you enable time zone support, Django interprets datetimes entered in
forms in the current time zone and returns
aware datetime objects in cleaned_data. Even if your website is available in only one time zone, it’s still good
practice to store data in UTC in your database. Many countries have a system of DST, where clocks are moved
forward in spring and backward in autumn. If you’re working in local time,
you’re likely to encounter errors twice a year, when the transitions happen.

  • And be vigilant to guard against any incoming guilt 🙅‍♀️ for not doing the other task; you can’t do everything and no choice is perfect.
  • When we play and feel creative, we bring our fresh selves back to work.
  • In this guest post, Jessica Day of Dialpad offers effective strategies for working with teams in different time zones.
  • If you find yourself multitasking, or splitting your focus across two or more tasks at once, it can come at the expense of missing details, deadlines, or a critical task altogether.
  • Using UTC is generally safe; if you’re
    using other time zones, you should review the zoneinfo
    documentation carefully.
  • For instance, if half of your remote team is located in the US and the other half in Europe, you can still have some hours of overlap between the two remote teams.