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#JobSearch : Top 5 Stay At Home Jobs For Moms Or Dads. Question: Would you Like to Work at Home?

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Working from home is a great way to improve your work-life balance because it allows you to spend more time with your family. The average remote worker has an estimated extra five hours per week to do the things they enjoy. Those hours are recouped from commuting. According to Zippia, it takes the average American 27.6 minutes to travel to work. That makes a total of 55.2 minutes per day traveling to and from work.

While a lot of companies currently allow their employees to work from home part-time, you can acquire full-time remote work. Here are the top five stay at home jobs for moms and dads.

1. Call Center Agent

A call center agent answers calls, responds to emails, and deals with customer enquiries over webchat. Depending on the company, you will either deal with inbound calls only, or inbound and outbound calls. Employees who take both calls are referred to as, ‘blended agents.’

Median Pay: $35,389 per year

Qualifications: Typically, a high school diploma is enough to secure a call center position. But if you want to earn more money, you will need additional qualifications. However, you will receive on-the-job training.

 

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2. Virtual Assistant

As a virtual assistant, you are responsible for providing remote assistance to an organization, or an individual. Their duties include interacting with clients or customers, organizing data, conducting research, sorting documents, and updating calendars.

Qualifications: Virtual assistants do not need any qualifications. But, you will need to have excellent computer skills because your employer will require you to use specific programs to complete your tasks.

3. Online Tutoring

Students looking for additional help to pass their exams or get them through the school year will hire an online tutor. Online tutors work with one student at a time. What you teach them in is dependent upon your area of expertise.

Median Pay: $51,058 per year

Qualifications: The qualifications required for an online tutoring job will depend on your area of expertise and what you plan on teaching. However, you will need a GED to work on most tutoring platforms. To teach English, you will need a Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certification.

4. Remote Software Developer

A remote software developer designs and creates systems and software programs for their employer. They also test and maintain existing programs and websites.

Median Pay: $111,000 per year

Qualifications: You don’t need a degree to become a software developer; however, you will need to know how to use programs like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. If you are not familiar with these programs, there are courses available to teach you how to use them.

5. Data Entry Clerk

A data entry clerk is responsible for inputting, maintaining, and updating accurate information into computer systems and databases. They may also correct errors, verify data, and organize files to ensure data integrity.

Median Pay: $40,000 per year

Data Entry Clerk: You will need a high school diploma to become a data entry clerk.

How Do You Land A Great Remote Job?

The job application process for a remote job is no different than it is for an office job. Make sure your resume is up to date and start sending them out to companies who offer remote work. You will find vacancies posted on jobsites, but you can also ask friends and family if they know of any remote working opportunities.

While working from home seems ideal, it is important to understand that it is a very different dynamic to an office. You will need to create an office space, structure your day, and organize your time. Additionally, you will need an extra dose of self-discipline because there are so many distractions at home. You won’t have a manager overshadowing you, all of which make it very easy to slack off. However, if you know you can handle being self-motivated and self-reliant, working from home is extremely rewarding.

Forbes.com | February 7, 2024 | Goldie Chan

 

#YourCareer : They’re Talking Behind My Back- Remote Workers Feel Unsupported. Thoughts/Comments??

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Working from home may not be the Shangri-La it’s cracked up to be. In fact, remote workers are more likely than on-site workers to believe their associates don’t treat them equally, a new study shows.

Employees who work from home or another remote location struggle harder than on-site workers to handle issues such as getting co-workers to fight for their priorities, according to a survey of 1,153 workers by VitalSmarts, a corporate-training firm. Roughly half of those who responded primarily worked remotely.

The findings of the survey, conducted in September and October, highlight “the importance of organizations figuring out how to manage remote employees,’’ said David Maxfield, vice president of research at VitalSmarts and the study’s co-author.

Most U.S. employers let staffers telecommute sometimes, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Companies say remote work improves employee satisfaction and retention while helping recruitment.

But the practice also creates challenges. According to the VitalSmarts survey, remote workers are significantly more likely than their on-site colleagues to report seeing colleagues change projects without warning and to believe co-workers say bad things behind their backs and lobby against them with others.

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Remote employees perceive greater workplace harm from these problems than on-site employees,including wasted time, more stress, lower productivity and lower morale, the survey found.

Mr. Maxfield believes individuals working remotely have trouble solving work difficulties because they rarely meet face-to-face with their supervisors. “Out of sight, out of mind,’’ he said.

Nearly half of everyone canvassed by VitalSmarts said the most successful managers check in frequently and regularly with remote staffers.

Companies use different approaches to help remote workers. Belay Inc., a startup with an all-remote workforce, takes a strict stance on the gossip issue cited in the VitalSmarts study. The firm’s 71 corporate employees and 540 contract workers provide such services as virtual assistants.

At Dell Technologies Inc., about 15% of employees have formally signed up to work wherever they prefer, but 58% work remotely at least one day a week.

The tech giant says it encourages leaders to check in regularly with subordinates regardless of whether their staffers work in the same building, from home or a distant office. Feeling isolated “is not something unique to remote work,’’ noted Mohammed Chahdi, Dell’s director of global human resources services.

Many employers, however, “have let remote work happen rather than make it happen. They haven’t done the (management) training,’’ said Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, a consultancy.

That is why National Equity Fund Inc. trained managers before the nonprofit real-estate syndicator and builder of low-income homes offered remote work in 2013 throughout the company.

During the training, bosses learned to trust employees working from home, said Gaylene Domer, vice president of facilities management. “A lot of our managers who were so dead set against it are now working from home’’ she said.

More than half of National Equity’s 176 employees now primarily work from home, though they still must come to the office at least two days a week.

WSJ.com | November 1, 2017 | Joann S. Lublin

#Leadership : I’ve Worked Remotely For 5 Years, And It’s Stressing Me Out…One #TechWorker reflects on all the #Stress Factors–some More Obvious than others–that made #RemoteWork Difficult in the Long Run.

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In software engineering, remote working makes a lot of sense since, most of the time, you only need a computer and an internet connection to perform your duties. There are fewer reasons to force people to sit in an office every day. As a result, it’s become an important feature of a lot of IT jobs, even here in Belgium–which in my experience isn’t always the most forward-looking job market–where remote work is common for at least a couple days a week.

I’ve been working remotely for a little more than five years now, and it doesn’t come without stress. I think it’s taken a toll on me over the last couple years in particular, especially when I went almost fully remote for a year, from June 2016 to June 2017. In that period I’ve sometimes felt like I existed in a “remote-developer black box”:

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Here are some of the biggest downsides to that experience.

Related: My 400-Person Company Has A Great Work Culture–And We All Work Remotely

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IT’S HARD TO COMMUNICATE

Communication tends to stick to structured channels when you work remotely: the chats, daily standups, maybe a few global meetings every other week, Jira for the tasks and bug reports, and lots and lots of emails.

This works well to accomplish structured tasks, but it’s easy to feel disconnected sometimes. The fact that most of this communication happens in written form or in front of groups makes them unsuitable for small talk or more informal information sharing. And it can hamper your work, as just chatting about the general atmosphere at work can deliver important information about the smooth progress of projects. Worse, it can prevent you from feeling like part of a community.

In addition, written exchanges are more prone to misinterpretation, even with people you know very well. Plus, if you already spend your day typing on a keyboard to accomplish your technical tasks, it’s annoying to have to communicate in written form, too; you end up feeling like a text-processing machine. I began to miss the coffee chats that I’d previously thought to be unproductive wastes of time. I felt detached from the team, especially when the teams I worked with were made of people working in the same place (and seemed to be having fun).

Related: The Remote Worker’s Guide To Going Back To The Office

IT CAUSES INTERRUPTIONS AND MULTITASKING

When working remotely as a developer, chat platforms (usually Slack or HipChat) quickly become your lifeline; that’s the way most people contact you. And to me, being responsive on chat accomplishes the same as being on time at work in an office: it creates an image of reliability. If you don’t want to give the impression that you’re taking a lot of breaks, you might find yourself checking your notifications during lunch, for example. Whereas had people seen you working the whole morning, or had you just talked face-to-face with your coworkers by then, you wouldn’t feel the need to be so responsive. I’ve noticed other remote colleagues get criticized for not answering quickly by chat.

Since people don’t see you physically, they can’t really judge if it’s a good moment to interrupt you. So you get interrupted a lot, and if you’re like me, you feel forced to answer quickly. So you interrupt your own work a lot (programmers in particular tend to loathe this, since it saps their productivity and breaks their focus).

The other problem with remote chat is that people don’t know whether you’re already speaking with somebody else. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been juggling three different conversations at the same time, which to me can become stressful, especially when I have tasks to finish by the end of the day.

There are often “leisure” chats as well, about non-work stuff (usually a lot of memes), which can become very, very chatty. To keep my sanity, I mute these chats most of the time, but when you come back, catching up on everything that was said can be a daunting task, even though it may be my only opportunity to take part in the “office spirit” I’m missing by being a remote worker.

Related: Hiring Remote Workers Made My Whole Team More Productive

IT ENCOURAGES OVERWORK

Most jobs come with at least two types of obligation:

  1. Obligations of results, where you commit to give a certain result by a given date. Typically for a developer that means completing a sprint with a given set of bugs/features to develop by a certain deadline.
  2. Obligations of means, where you mainly commit to spending some of your time every day on your work, and you just deliver the results you’ve managed to produce within that time.

I’m not naïve, and I know that in the end (especially in software engineering), most jobs are really about results–you’ll get fired if you produce nothing–and not means. But since people can’t see you work remotely, you might feel more obliged to show results every day, even if it forces you to work way past eight hours a day. I can’t count the number of times a configuration problem or a customer call took a few hours of my day, but I still felt forced to finish the task I’d committed to that day, just so nobody could assume I was slacking off instead of working. Had my coworkers seen me in front of my computer all day, I probably would’ve felt relaxed enough to finish it that task later.

This instinct has led to two things for me: being really appreciated for the reliability of my output, and being seriously overworked. According to Basecamp CEO Jason Fried, this is “the true challenge of managing remote workers: People who work too hard.” In the end, it comes down to the question of trust: My employer trusted me a lot, allowing me to work on my own terms, and in exchange I’ve always felt compelled to work a lot more than if I were in an office.

Related: Stress Is Making You Micromanage, Which Is Making Everything Worse

IT’S CHALLENGING BEING A STAY-AT-HOME DAD

When you spend a good part of your time at home, your family sees you as more available than they sometimes should. Even if you have places dedicated to work that should be off-limits to your kids, it’s still tempting for them to come ask you “just a little something.” It’s hard to expect children to compartmentalize their home–actually, it’s hard for me, too.

 

I also know some people have problems resisting the need to perform home duties, like cleaning the kitchen. This has never been too much of an issue for me, but it’s created tension with my wife from time to time, since it was difficult for her to understand how I could’ve left a dirty dish on the dining room table all day while I was actually at home. (Answer: I was working and avoiding interruptions . . . )

IT CAN FEEL LONELY

Working at home can mean a lot of loneliness. I do enjoy being alone quite a lot, but even for me, after two weeks of only seeing colleagues through my screen, and then my family at night, I end up feeling quite sad. I miss feeling integrated in a community of pairs.

Interacting on social networks might help you fight that loneliness a little, but the experience isn’t different enough from working on your computer. Plus, it’s also well-known that spending a lot of time on social networks tends to make you less happy than the opposite. Eventually, I really started to hate being alone; it began to impact my mental health and my mood (another well-documented phenomenon).

WORKING OUTSIDE YOUR HOME HAS DRAWBACKS

One of the most common ways to fight this is to work in coworking spaces. But I find them a mixed bag; they cost real money (which your employer might agree to pay, or not) and often ask for time commitments (usually at least a month). They can create social environments and work opportunities, but at the risk of feeling a bit too much like a vacation camp, with activities every day (cooking, massages, meet-ups) designed to force people to socialize. I actually found myself going to coworking spaces only when those events weren’t scheduled–and gave up going altogether rather quickly, since it seemed pointless to use a coworking space to avoid loneliness only to not talk to anybody.

Commuting to a coworking space takes time, and when you’re there, you may work with headphones all day to avoid distractions, barely taking breaks (because you lost time commuting), and feeling awkward for not taking advantage of the community. As an added problem, video calls are more difficult to do in these settings, since there’s not much space to be alone, always a bit of noise, and the risk you’ll annoy people in earshot (or you have things to say that you don’t want them hearing).

Working remotely outside my home–whether in a coworking space or not–sometimes means not knowing where I’ll be working every day, and it’s stressful having to think about which hardware I need to take with me (keyboards, DVI adapters, chargers). Coffee shops are usually a bad idea, at least for full days: there’s too much noise, and I don’t like feeling obligated to buy something to eat or drink periodically to justify my presence.

Obviously, when you work remotely you don’t leave your workplace at night. And if your coworkers are in different time zones, you end up communicating a lot after your workday is over (I did that for months when working with people based in New York or San Francisco). It often makes sense; otherwise you might have few chances to speak with your team, which can really slow down projects, but it means there’s little time free of work-related concerns.

Finally, working at home doesn’t leave time to cool off while coming back home from work. For me, the ideal commuting duration is 15–20 minutes. That gives you some time to walk (which means at least some physical exercise) and change your thoughts a bit. Many evenings, I’d go from a video meeting to a family dinner in 30 seconds, making it hard to offer my kids my full attention.

IT COMES WITH UNFORESEEN COSTS

If you want to gain responsibilities over time, working with limited visibility can be a problem. At one employer I felt that people in the office were preferred for promotions. To be sure, working remotely over the last few years has been a boon to my family while our kids were small. It made it possible for my wife and me to pursue our careers with minimal hassle, since I was more available to take care of the kids when they were sick (which happens a lot in their infancy). And while that meant catching up on work in the evenings and weekends, I appreciated that flexibility.

Remote working also allowed me to join high-quality teams I wouldn’t have found in my local job market. So while I’m still a fan of remote work, it really took a toll on my mental comfort sometimes, which has impacted my family relationships–mainly just through my own irritability. In my experience, remote work can cut you off from the human interactions that make all those work-related tasks feel meaningful. Ultimately, for all its benefits, I don’t like being in the remote-developer black box.

 

FastCompany.com | February 3, 2018 | BY MARTIN DE WULF 9 MINUTE READ

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#Leadership : Hiring Remote Workers Made My Entire #Team More Productive…One CEO Explains How Surprised he was to Find the #RemoteTeams he Hired Reshaping his Company’s In-Office #WorkCulture for the Better.

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“Want to get lunch?”  This is a phrase you’ll rarely hear at our office. It’s not that we don’t eat or spend time together, but it’s physically impossible for our entire team to be in the same place at the same time. Sixty percent of our team works remotely, so for us, grabbing lunch is, “let’s meet on Google Hangout.”

It wasn’t always that way. Originally at Traitify, our entire workforce was based in one Baltimore office. We had a two-floor space and separated teams by department–developers downstairs, business and data upstairs.

Before long we noticed those two teams ended up forming separate cultures; the space literally caused a divide within our company. We tried intermingling the teams, but new floor members took on the same behaviors as those we moved. To cut down this friction we decided to look for a larger space on a single floor. The company was growing–and we didn’t want culture issues to bite us later on.

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Related:  My 400-Person Company Has A Great Work Culture, And We All Work Remotely 

Around this time we were also expanding our development team, and kept finding great talent outside our physical geography. We didn’t want to lose excellent talent based on location, so eventually we decided to give remote workers a shot. It was a risk considering the culture issues we were already dealing with onsite, but it paid off–and then some. Here’s how.

REMOTE WORKERS IMPROVED OUR ONSITE CULTURE AND PRODUCTIVITY

We started slow at first, by hiring our first CTO into a remote role. This led to the hiring of another remote developer, and another. Many of our hires came through referrals, so they had ties to the company already. And to our surprise, integrating them was incredibly easy.

In fact, we realized after a few months that hiring remote workers helped lessen our office divide. The remote workers we hired displayed high levels of self-motivation and responsibility, and were generally less antagonistic and better team players. Over time, those traits ended up rubbing off on other team members. (Of course, it doesn’t hurt when you can measure an applicants’ personality before hiring them; we build a product that lets us do exactly that.)

Productivity is a top concern for companies considering remote workers. But we found that they actually made us more productive overall. For starters, we’re forced to use Slack to its maximum potential to make that sure our team members, whether they’re in the office or around the country, feel like they’re sitting next to each other all day.

While Slack can be a distraction, it can lead to fewer interruptions if your whole team uses it properly (i.e. not for every single thing). For instance, we have a policy that if an update requires more than a quick Slack message or email, we get on a video call. Facetime makes it feel similar to being in the same room as your colleagues, but it forces the requestor to think about priority level (Is it urgent? Can it wait until my colleague says she’s free?) and ultimately boosts efficiency.

Related: Why So Many Workers Prefer Their Remote Colleagues To The Ones In Their Office 

There are challenges, too. If you’re not sitting across from someone, you can miss nonverbal communication like body language, facial expressions, eye contact, and posture, all of which build camaraderie and trust. But we’ve worked to mitigate that risk by planning team off-sites, work-away trips, and occasional company-wide gatherings, which we hope to make more frequent over time.

THE BENEFITS OF A HYBRID MODEL

For Traitify, the remote workforce concept has been a swinging pendulum. We’ve learned that while some roles, like developers, can work well remotely, there are certain teams–like sales and customer success–that benefit tremendously from being physically together. Still, we’ve chosen to embrace this arrangement that we’d initially just stumbled across.

Having a physical “hub” creates and reinforces the core element of Traitify’s company culture–a place where customers and investors can see “who” your company is and experience the energy firsthand. However, in order to attract the best talent, we also recognized the need to be open to hiring candidates outside our immediate geography.

Related: The Emotionally Intelligent Manager’s Guide To Leading Remote Teams 

Some founders insist on an all-or-nothing approach, but we don’t believe that’s the only way to make remote work successful. Instead, we’ve set explicit guidelines to reinforce the benefits of both remote and onsite work so our in-office and far-flung teams can work well in tandem with minimal impediments.

All our staff in our physical headquarters now work on the same floor. And when we hire remote workers, we screen their personalities to make sure they’re self-motivated and responsible, then we train them to use collaborative tools in a way that optimizes their productivity.

I believe companies need to embrace remote workers, but they don’t necessarily have to resort to an exclusively remote workforce. It’s a great model to source talent, but the benefits of a physical hub are hard to overstate, especially when it comes to building a work culture. If our experience is any indicator, you really can–and maybe should–have it both ways.

Dan Sines is co-founder & CEO of Traitify, the company behind image-based personality assessments for employers and personal career growth.

FastCompany.com | January 14, 2018 

#Leadership : 14 Habits Of The Most Productive Remote Workers… From Hardware to Soft Skills, Here’s What it Takes to Master the Art of Working Remotely.

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Working from home sounds like an idyllic situation, in theory: You can roll out of bed each morning (or afternoon, even) and get started on your day without having to dress up, brave traffic, or engage in mindless chit-chat around the communal coffee machine.

Free- Coffee with Laptop

 

However, not going into an office every day presents its own set of challenges, like determining how to separate your home life from your work life, and making sure you’re feeling connected to your colleagues and clients, among other things.

To help ensure that you’re on the right track while working remotely, we consulted seasoned work-from-home veterans who shared their top tips for staying productive—and thriving—in their careers.

OUTFITTING YOUR OFFICE

Whether you have a whole room dedicated to a home office or prefer working from the couch in your living room, having the right setup can keep you productive while on the clock.

1. They make sure they have the equipment they need.

It’s important to invest in the quality of your workspace by getting equipment that helps you do the best work you can. When I transitioned to an at-home employee, I went out and bought a similar version of the computer I was used to working on so that my productivity levels wouldn’t suffer from an inferior, slower setup.

—Brit Casady, 24, Lehi, UT, graphic designer

 

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2. They invest in ways to stay active at home.

My favorite part of working from home is the fact that I can work on my treadmill desk. I can kill two birds with one stone by exercising while I work. I’ve found that being able to walk helps keep me focused and because of that, I’m able to succumb less to the distractions that come from working at home. On the days I work on the treadmill, I typically spend two to four hours on it—that adds up to about 10 to 15 hours per week. I pretty much do any kind of work on my treadmill, from writing posts to sending emails to creating social media content and so on. At a two mile-per-hour pace, it’s not so fast that certain tasks are difficult to do because I’m walking.

—Brent Hale, 30, Sparks, NV, online entrepreneur and owner of IncomeAddon.com

MANAGING DISTRACTIONS

Let’s face it—distractions run rampant wherever you work, whether it’s in an office with coworkers or in your own kitchen. Keep productivity zappers at bay with these strategies.

3. They get organized with the “three-minute rule.”

I allow three minutes to tend to anything I feel I need to respond to immediately that is not on my to-do list. Give yourself three minutes every hour of your official ‘work hours’ to scan and respond to important emails, put shoes that accumulate around the doorway in the closet, etc.—if it takes no more than three minutes. It puts your mind at ease and reduces at-home work distractions without derailing your day. It also helps you spend less time cleaning the house and dealing with administrative tasks when the workday ends.

—Stephanie Taylor Christensen, 38, Columbus, OH, freelance writer, yoga instructor, and mother to a 6-year-old

4. They don’t let socializing get in the way of working.

Notify friends that you do have work hours, even if you are at home. For the longest time, I had friends popping over at all times of the day whenever they were free! Make sure you are assertive and tell them what your hours of work are and that you stick to a no-visit schedule during these times.

—Laura Fredrick, 28, Marlton, NJ, public relations professional and owner of Laur PR

5. They let their kids visit their home offices occasionally.

With a home office and three kids, it’s not easy. My advice? Get a white board. When the door is closed, do not disturb. But if it’s open—and leave it open as much as possible—my kids can come in and draw on it and leave me little notes. It’s magnetic, so they can put stuff on there for me to display. Everyone is happy.

—Gregory Pavliv, 38, Bloomfield, NJ, music teacher and owner of Music Teaching Guru

6. They minimize online distractions.

One of my favorite productivity hacks comes with the help of an app called StayFocusd. When working from home, Facebook and Twitter can be a major distraction. StayFocusd helps you avoid these distractions by restricting the amount of time you can spend on them. The Google Chrome extension lets you set specific time restrictions on certain websites with a 10-minute default option. Once your time has been used up, the sites you have selected to block can’t be accessed for the remainder of the day.

—Lori Cheek, 43, New York City, founder and CEO of Cheekd.com, an online dating app

7. They time-delay their email responses in order to manage expectations.

I time-delay every single email I send. I have gotten people out of the habit of thinking that they control my workday and that they will get an immediate response. I time-delay up to a full day if I feel it’s necessary. Inbox by Gmail has been critical in helping me maintain my inbox. I love it because I can simply save messages for later, create my own bundles (like per project or sender) and remind myself to do things. It has been tremendously helpful as far as keeping my mailbox from getting out of hand.

—Ashley Sharie, 27, Washington, DC, CEO and founder or Aspire Business, a business consulting firm

[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][Related: Distraction Overload: 7 Ways To Get Back On Track At Work]

CONNECTING WITH CLIENTS

Checking in with colleagues and customers can be challenging when you don’t see them every day. This is why it’s important to put your best foot forward in all of the interactions you do have.

8. They build in prep time for client meetings.

When you work from home, your schedule can be all over the place—workout classes whenever, meetings at different places and different times. Plus, I don’t know about you, but if I don’t need to get dressed in professional clothes, I won’t. My calendar helps me in that regard. Each time I schedule a meeting with someone outside of my home, I set my alert for 30 minutes or an hour before, depending on how long it will take me to get there. Then I set another alert for two hours before. This is my “Go take a shower and make yourself presentable” alarm. Without it, I would show up to many of my meetings looking and feeling frazzled.

—Alden Wicker, 29, New York City, freelance writer and founder of EcoCult.com

9. They err on the side of over-communication (sometimes).

We’ve found that most workplace tension is caused by inadequate communication—particularly when you are unable to speak with colleagues in person due to remote work situations. When you are unable to speak to clients or colleagues in person, make sure they know you are on the case by always being crystal clear. Frequent communication with your supervisor and co-workers can help reinforce bonds of friendship and trust, making collaboration easier throughout your time at a company.

But when it comes to email, remember that less is more: Try to communicate your message using as few words as possible to save time for your reader. When crafting a written message, it’s easy to get lost in long blocks of text and drift off on tangents—particularly when you need to explain a complicated concept to a coworker. To keep yourself focused and on-message, consider using bulleted lists to help structure and explain your thinking. The natural segmentation of bullets and ability to indent can help you keep your thoughts logical, organized, and succinct.

—Sam McIntire, 26, San Francisco, founder of Deskbright, an online learning platform designed to help people thrive at work

[Related: Power Hack—Send Emails Your Coworkers Will Want To Read]

10. They speak up during conference calls.

In a remote environment, it’s often easier to sit quietly during conference calls. But it’s really important to go into a conference call with at least a few specific talking points to discuss. It not only shows that you’re prepared, but it also helps to move the conversation forward in a productive way, rather than hemming and hawing while you think of something to talk about.

Also, challenge yourself to ask two questions during a meeting. This really forces you to pay attention to what’s being discussed. Even if a topic of discussion isn’t directly related to your job, it’s a nice idea to ask questions, both to learn more about the company and your coworkers and to show that you’re paying attention and engaged.

—Brie Weiler Reynolds, 34, Dallas, director of online content at FlexJobs

STAYING ON A SUCCESS TRACK

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut managing your daily to-dos, but periodically taking a step back to evaluate your overall performance can help make your work-from-home experience a success.

11. They give themselves yearly reviews.

In December or January, I conduct a yearly review. This is partially to reconcile my numbers and partially to see which of the services I offer pay the most on both an hourly and total-dollars basis. In my year-end review I note items such as gross annual income, average hourly rate, average rate per word, average days from invoice to payment, total hours worked (plus average hours per week), total number of words edited or written (this is more for personal curiosity than anything), most lucrative service by total dollars and finally, most lucrative service by hourly rate.

—Anitra Budd, 37, Minneapolis, freelance writer and editor

12. They block off time for professional development.

Leave open space [in your schedule] for planning and networking meetings, as well as time to reflect on what is working and what is not working. Perhaps Friday afternoons or Monday mornings where you block off time in your calendar to set up your week and revisit your goals.

—Cara Maksimow, 43, Chatham, NJ, clinical therapist and owner of Maximize Wellness Counseling and Coaching

13. They keep their schedules flexible.

Know your schedule—your actual schedule, not a clone of the in-office working model. If you know your home or parenting responsibilities will make working in the morning tough but you’ll be uninterrupted at night, you’ll be more productive by planning your day that way rather than attempting to mix home and work. Be realistic about it so you can build boundaries based on efficiency. The end result is an enormous increase in both your productivity and your sanity!

—Monica Reccoppa, 42, Totowa, NJ, financial manager at Cardwell Beach, a creative marketing agency

14. They write a goal list.

I have my personal and professional goals written down and posted at my desk. This allows me to see them every day—it’s easy to get caught up in task-mode and only focus on checking off items from your to-do list. Having written goals displayed openly forces you to remember the larger reason why you are performing these tasks and take a step back to examine whether you’re on track to meeting the goals you set for yourself.

—Casey Bond, 29, Manhattan Beach, CA, editor of StudentLoanHero.com

FastCompany.com|  June 8, 2016 | NATASHA BURTON

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