Stay focused and work will be a breeze. Yet, working from home is a challenge in its own right.
Let’s be honest, working from home is uniquely challenging. That’s because most people stash all sorts of fun things at home. Think home entertainment, from Netflix to video games. Gym equipment, kids, pets, deliveries, random visitors. There are countless opportunities for distractions.
Team collaboration is what makes a team. Without it, you don’t have a team. Instead, you have a bunch of people working at the same time. However, true teams do more. They use collaboration to synergize.
Be that as it may, collaboration is not an intrinsic human need or priority. In fact, we learn to collaborate. And it’s a difficult process. This process has helped us achieve a lot. Most modern achievements are the result of collaboration.
Sure, you can cultivate greatness without collaboration. While writing poetry as a team might be fun, this is a one-person job. Also, a lot of other activities are not team activities. And that’s fine.
Team collaboration can be a metric on which you benchmark productivity. Yet, we should not confuse regular productivity with synergized productivity. In synergized productivity, the overall result is greater than the sum of inputs. Work has a final result of a value superior to the elements of work. For example, a Tesla S is greater than the sum of its parts. Yet, people could be very productive producing the parts. In this case, there is no added value, no synergy.
My coworkers and I rely on instant communication apps to give and receive feedback, keep ourselves up to date with the projects we’re working on, and talk to friends and family. As useful as IM apps are, they can be overwhelming sometimes. Over time, we learned a few tricks on how to avoid distractions when using IM apps so I thought we’d share them here, on our blog.