Twitter won’t open most of its offices until September at the earliest. It’s one of the most generous work-from-home policies put forward by a major tech company....
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told employees in an email last week that they could keep working from home indefinitely, even after COVID-19 lockdowns end.
Twitter won’t open most of its offices until September at the earliest. It’s one of the most generous work-from-home policies put forward by a major tech company in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Other tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook have told employees that they can keep working from home through this fall.
Physical presence doesn’t always equate to mental presence. You could be sitting at your desk but more preoccupied about a home repair than the assignment at hand, or you could be at the kitchen table thinking more about the proposal you have to finish than the people eating dinner with you. That’s why transitions from work mode to personal mode are so essential. When working from home, it’s all too easy to blur the lines between work time and personal time, to the point that it’s unclear when work ends at all. Protecting your essential personal time comes down to managing your transitions.
One way to do this? Set up work start and end rituals. Such tasks can be as simple as making yourself coffee or going out for a walk. But they are essential signals that mark the start and finish of your work day.
To increase your productivity and clarity both for work and life outside of work, have a plan for the day. That includes knowing the time of your meetings, deciding what projects you will work on, and being clear on when you will do tasks like answering email. You’ll also want to have some plan for your evenings in terms of what you would like to get done or simply do to relax.
Last but not the least, it’s understandable that you may need to have some personal communication during work hours and some professional communication after hours. But prioritize your communication based on context.
In business and beyond, many of us try to avoid sounding uncertain. But research from the University of Cambridge suggests that being upfront to others about what we don’t know doesn’t diminish their trust in us or our institutions. Not only can we handle the truth, we need the truth. The findings are particularly meaningful amid the coronavirus pandemic, when government officials and business leaders must respond to and communicate about a crisis that is changing with each passing day. One thing to keep in mind: if you’re going to convey your uncertainty, it’s best to give quantitative estimates (number ranges, percentages) versus qualitative estimates.
