Now that many of us have now been instructed to work from home, we are challenged on how to be effective and efficient.
There are but a few ways i'm managing my remote work. How are you doing this? What are your experiences with working remotely?
Well, of course, having "flex time" is one of the advantages of working at home, for whatever reason. That's one reason people become consultants instead of working for a company. On the other hand, some people don't like the isolation of it, or the fact that you won't have shared resources, such as the company library, so there are trade-offs. People have been doing this for a long time, and not only when there's an epidemic, so there's lots of information available. When the situation calms down and we're allowed to congregate again, you might check your local public library; you'll find lots of books with titles like "How to become a Consultant", "How to start a Home-based Business" and similar titles, that deal with all aspects of working at home and starting and running a home-based business. There will also be answers to questions you haven't even thought of to ask. You might also check the ACS website, and in general look on-line for similar information. Good luck!
I just read this article Basics of the Six-Meter Commute by former ACS staffer Nancy McGuire. She has some good advice as well.
C&EN hosted a Twitter chat series on #COVIDisruptions last week with Chemjobber, Jen Heemstra, Maria Gallardo-Williams, and Fay Lin. Some good tips came out of the individual chats on impact on employment (Chemjobber), impact on faculty (Jen Heemstra), transitioning to online teaching (Maria Gallardo-Williams), and grad student mental health (Fay Lin). Here are the links to the individual chats:
Grad stress: https://twitter.com/cenmag/status/1243614096987172869
Online teaching: https://twitter.com/cenmag/status/1243251732790095873 Virtual teaching
Impact on faculty: https://twitter.com/cenmag/status/1242889287110144002
Impact on employment: https://twitter.com/cenmag/status/1242526885323714560
You can also search for the hashtag #COVIDisruption. Thanks, Jodi, for the suggestion I share this here!
Linda
I appreciated so much of the advice from these chats last week... Here is one of them:
And another...
And a third... for good measure
When I first started working remotely, other colleagues passed along the tip of being aware of the work style preferences of colleagues... a good tip under any circumstance, but particularly now!