Did you ever think you’d need a stockpile of toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and digital resources to survive everyday life?
It’s a new norm for almost everyone these days. Going to work at your own house is a huge change of pace when you’ve been used to getting up and going to the office. With the COVID-19 pandemic situation and the “social distancing” measures that are being implemented, getting used to balancing working from home with our normal home life can be a DRASTIC adjustment. Some of us need the structure and separation of an office environment, while some can adapt more quickly.
For those of us that work in a distributed environment, the change didn’t have much impact on us because we are used to having team members spread out all over the place. But if you haven’t had to deal with that, it can be quite the adjustment. We took a little time and put together digital resources that we find useful. We will also provide links to other articles that have done the same.
At Orion, we use the following digital resources.
Planning:
Trello – This simple to use project management tool allows our team to see progress on projects without having the need to have constant meetings or calls. It’s easy to communicate on and assign responsibilities and move projects along.
Communication:
Microsoft Teams – We just migrated to Microsoft from Google for Business and we love Teams. This gives us the ability to instantly message our teammates, as well as have video or audio calls when needed. One other thing we love about Teams is the ability to quickly share a screen with someone. They have made that really simple to do. For years we used Slack, which is another great tool. In fact, some of our distributed developers use Slack, and so we are running parallel for a period of time.
Document Sharing:
OneDrive – Since we migrated to Microsoft, we moved away from Google Drive to OneDrive. It actually gives us more storage space, and we love the ability to jointly edit a document in realtime. Collaborating on a document while talking on Teams helps move things along quickly.
Digital Resources Articles:
There are so many great articles right now about working from home and using digital resources. We found a few to share with you:
Need some help with planning? Here’s one that keeps it simple on using Trello.
What are other people using? This article spends a lot of time asking their team members how they are coping and what digital resources they are using during this time.
Again, digital resources are specific to certain teams. Personally, we prefer LastPass over Dashlane for password storage. The point is, there are options. This article shows you 9 tools for online collaboration.
Turn On the Tunes
Oh, and we highly recommend music. Get Spotify, Prime, Apple Music, Pandora, iHeart, or whatever your choice is and get it going. We also love both the Bose noise cancelling headphones or the Airpod Pros that shut out the rest of the world and let you focus.
Move Around
And…stretch your dang legs every once in a while. Get up from your chair, do a jig, reach for the sky, do some high kicks, or just look at stupid videos and laugh. Then get back at it.
We can all do this and we will be stronger on the other side.
Eat your veggies and drink your water. I’m totally kidding, get more Pop Tarts.