How to Work from Home During the Coronavirus Outbreak

As more businesses and organizations are closing up shop to prevent further spread of the coronavirus, many of us are going to be working from home for a while. While working from home every once in a while can provide a much-needed break from the daily office grind, doing it for days or weeks at a time can be tricky for you and your team.

That’s why we pulled together a list of our favorite tools that can help you stay productive while practicing social distancing.

Crush Communication Barriers with Slack

One of the biggest obstacles of working from home is communication. When you are sitting next to your coworkers in an office, it’s easy to ask them questions, flag important notes, or get their feedback on a project. All of that gets a lot harder when you’re no longer in close proximity. 

You don’t always have time to wait for a coworker to check that email you send them about a project with a tight deadline, and with Slack, you don’t have to. Slack is an instant messaging platform that makes it easier to have conversations, share files, and ping coworkers whether you are 10 feet or 100 miles apart. The best part? Slack has integrations with over 1,500 apps and platforms, which can help you seriously streamline your work.

If your team isn’t already using Slack, now is a great time to start.

Stay Collaborative with G Suite 

If you work in an industry where collaboration is necessary, work from home can put a serious strain on you and your team. We love G Suite because it makes real-time collaboration a breeze.

You can make comments, suggest edits, track changes, and tag users in all G Suite products – a necessity for collaborative teams that are working remotely. You can even connect G Suite with Slack so you can get real-time feedback without having to have a million different tabs open on your computer. And since G Suite is a web-based platform, you can access it anywhere that has internet access, including the comfort of your living room couch.

Get Facetime with Coworkers and Clients over Google Hangouts

Let’s face it, if you work from home for more than a day or two and the only person you’ve seen in the last 72 hours is your dog, you are probably starving for regular human interaction. Try turning all of your calls and regularly scheduled meetings into video conferences with Google Hangouts for some much needed face time.

When you don’t have much contact with the outside world (self-quarantining FTW) having face-to-face conversations with coworkers and clients offers you a sense of connectedness that you just can’t get from an email or phone call.

Maintain Peak Productivity with Harvest

Distractions are all around when you work from home. That load of laundry waiting to be washed… the drawer you’ve been dying to organize… that show you turned on during lunch and “forgot” to turn off once you got back to work… the list goes on and on. We end up wasting a ton of time during the day when we work from home, but we don’t always notice how quickly a few 15-minute distractions can add up.

That’s where Harvest comes in.

By tracking the time you spend on projects or tasks for work, you’ll quickly realize exactly how much time you spend NOT working during the day. Seeing those numbers is a great way to hold yourself accountable and maintain your typical productivity when you work from home.

Keep Tasks from Slipping Through the Cracks with Asana

It’s a lot harder to manage projects and keep your team in sync when you are in different buildings, cities, or even time zones. Thankfully, Asana can help you stay on track and keep tasks big and small from slipping through the cracks.

Think of Asana as a work-from-home manager. You can use it to delegate tasks, set deadlines, monitor project status, give feedback, and most gratifyingly, check tasks off your to-do list once they are complete.

Whether you just need a day at home to yourself or if you are self-quarantining to escape the coronavirus, these tools can help you stay productive and make the most out of work from home.