How to organize remote work in the most efficient way, including how to work from home in quarantine while remaining focused.

By Slava Chernysh, CEO OneLogicSoft

“We serve our clients for years and always remotely. IT services we provide are also complex engineering work with often multi national teams, many online meetings, different roles that have to be well-coordinated.

I’m glad to share our experience today, when the world is facing difficult times. And hope it will help people to be productive and to organize efficient remote work.”

CEO OneLogicSoft, Slava Chernysh

Recommendations of the manager with years of management experience of managing IT remote teams on how to organize his/her work:

1. The working place. The most important thing for remote work. Set up a separate place specifically for work. It shouldn’t be a bed or a couch where you usually watch TV. This place is for work and nothing else. A place where you can immerse yourself in the working atmosphere, nothing should distract you.
2. The working schedule. It is equally important to establish and adhere to a working schedule. Your remote schedule must not differ from your normal schedule. Wash, have breakfast, and get dressed in the morning. Take a break for lunch. If you’re constantly distracted by small things, use the 15-minute intervals technique — the time management technique that Francesco Chirillo proposed in the late 1980s.
3. The mood. If it is difficult to concentrate, or if you are being drawn to social media or entertainment sites instead of work, you should take a short break — do some exercise, open the window, breathe some fresh air and enjoy the morning scenery, or take a walk. Make it a rule that when you sit down behind a computer — you will just work.
4. The environment. Communicate more often, call your colleagues. Advances in communication are ongoing, and there are now many types of software and applications that allow you to have a video conference and see your remote colleagues in real-time as if they were all in the same office. Even without the video, just during the audio session you can feel the atmosphere in the office and focus on your work.

How to organize remote work

5. Having rest. One of the most important rules is to have rest. If you work all the time, including in the evening and at night, you’ll burn out very quickly and get depressed. It is necessary to sort tasks into urgent and routine tasks. You can use the KANBAN board. If you work from different time zones, set up rules of communicating on urgent tasks, working schedule, so that the team members always know when they can reach you. It is necessary to separate the communication channels for urgent and regular tasks — for example, communicate all routine tasks via Trello, urgent tasks by a messenger, and super urgent tasks by SMS or voice calls.

6. The deadlines. Try to estimate the amount of work and how many days you would need to complete it. Write down this estimation and try to observe it. If you were unable to observe it, analyze why. Use any time tracker. Make it a rule: set the timer and start doing your task as you sit down to accomplish it. Pause it if you have to take a break. This is the kind of a habit that would make a good opinion of you on your team and you would be in demand on any project.

In conclusion, working remotely, without constant supervision by the superiors, requires great self-discipline, self-control and self-motivation. It seems to us that these resources are unlimited, but in fact this is not so.

These six simple rules will help you to properly distribute your efforts for remote work, not to burn out in the process, and probably even improve your performance.

Slava Chernysh has a proven executive management track record and over 15 years of experience managing teams including remote employees in the technology industry. Combination of a technical master’s degree and a degree in economics as well as personal qualities: good communication and interpersonal skills, diplomacy, tact, and the ability to work well with people allow Slava to be a leader, motivate and encourage people to meet new challenges.