A Guide to Working From Home

Staying at home with your family members takes some freedom away from you. You can’t stay focused the whole day, and sometimes you feel more comfortable working at 7:00 in morning than at 4:00 in the afternoon. While you are at home, you can continue work at your convenience as long as you attend daily meetings and complete your weekly assignments on time. To make the best out of your experience, we have some helpful tips in this article.

Prepare your Workspace

Working from home does not mean working from the bed. To give the best of you, set up a workspace in a room where you can work uninterrupted for at least a couple of hours at a time. That means, take care of a few things and it should be as comfortable as your bed. Maybe not, but it’s close enough.

Maintain good airflow.

Pick a quiet room with adequate ventilation and airflow. This helps you concentrate on your work, prevents you from feeling drowsy during the day, and and protects your computer from overheating and being damaged by moist air.

Protect your eyes.

Place the desk such that you can occasionally look outside of the window. This helps you relax your eyes after constantly looking at the screen for a while. Remember, lower brightness is more harmful than higher brightness during daytime. Most people set the screen brightness too low because of a myth that a bright screen damages your eyes. The screen should look as bright as a piece of paper would look. Download and install software like f.lux to add some red light to the screen if you are working in the evening. It helps your eyes to quickly fall asleep after leaving your desk.

Protect your neck and back.

Keep enough space behind your chair to occasionally lean back. Walk around the room for a few minutes at least once every hour. It’s a good idea to keep the water dispenser away from the desk, so you can get up occasionally. Also adjust both your monitors to the same height and place your chair close to the desk so you can sit on the chair with full back support instead of leaning to the front.

Get a high-quality power sockets and fix it on the wall.

Get some good quality power sockets – at least 2500 watts, a fuse, individual switches with indicators and fuse for power-surge protection. A good one costs around Rs. 1500, and manufactured by renowned brands like Logitech. Don’t pick up those you find for Rs. 300 on the footpath. Tightly secure the power sockets on the wall so that it doesn’t fall off while pulling out the cords. Never place the power sockets on the desk or on the floor to prevent electric shock due to spilled water.

Get a separate router for work.

The routers provided by most of the ISPs are only half-decent. The more people connect to the Wi-fi, the more the latency, and the lower the bandwidth. The ONU routers provided by the ISPs don’t allow custom configuration; neither do they support the guest network. We recommend you purchase a TP-LINK TL-WR840N router, place it somewhere close to your workspace and connect it to the LAN1 port from your ISP’s router. Set a strong Wi-fi password and keep it with yourself, and use this network exclusively for work. Connect your work device using a wired connection instead of Wi-fi.

Secure your Workspace

When you are working from home, you must separate a workspace to reduce the risk of misplacement of information and resources. You are required to properly lock and secure your workspace to prevent inappropriate access by other people in the house. You will be personally responsible for any inappropriate use of the company equipment or resources. Follow the best practices described in this guide to protect your device. Apart from that, here are a few tips to save you from running into trouble:

• Adjust your desk and chair in a position that is unlikely to change frequently. Make sure the workspace is not too close to the window; keep some distance to save your desk from damage by rain and theft, both of which are likely if you accidentally kept the window open.
• Use a wired connection instead of Wi-fi to connect to the internet. Anyone who has your Wi-fi password can decrypt the packets and read what’s going on. While HTTPS protects from looking at the packets, other information like DNS queries, our device and network information can be collected by a rogue third party.
• If you must use a Wi-fi connection, do not share your Wi-fi password with anyone else, and frequently change the password. Tell your family to not share passwords with anyone. Or just get a separate router for work, and keep the password secret. Frequently change the Wi-fi password, just in case someone might have discovered it.
• Do not keep written notes like passwords, recovery codes or password hints on your desk.
• Turn on password protection on all your devices.
• Always lock your computer. when you are leaving the desk. Learn the shortcut and make it a habit, or just put the device to sleep before your leave your desk.
• Do not take your work device out of the house. While it might be tempting to work from your favorite coffee shop, it’s not a safe practice.