Working from home tips: Boost your work and yourself with this remote work toolkit

Our series ‘Working from home tips’ is all about useful hacks for working from home. We will give you tips from how to find your workflow when working from home to how to create the perfect home office.

Working from home comes with its unique set of challenges. To help you overcome some of those difficulties, we have put together a remote work toolkit with tools to give you the boost you need.

Stay on top of your work

E-mails alone will no longer be enough to communicate with your team and plan your monthly goals. Here are the tools from the remote toolkit to help you be as effective as possible when working from home.

Slack

Slack makes it easy to communicate across the company and with your teammates when working remotely. The channel-based messaging platform, let’s you create channels for one-on-one chats with your colleagues, have dedicated channels for your teams, as well as have company wide channels.

Slack keeps your conversations organized and you have the opportunity to save your chat history, so you can search anything when needed. It's ideal for synchronous and asynchronous communication with the whole company. To make communication even easier, Slack’s Whereby integration makes it easy to jump on a video meeting straight from your browser.

Whereby

Whereby gives you easy online video meetings straight from your browser. With Whereby you get your own online meeting room that has the same custom URL every time you use it. That’s all you need to meet up with colleagues or clients with just one click.

If you use Slack as your main communication tool, our Slack integration makes it even easier to jump on a video meeting. You can generate a link to your Whereby room with either your Room Name or from a list of rooms from the dropdown menu from any Slack channel. Having Whereby in your remote work toolkit makes video meetings fast and easy.

Asana

When you work from home, you still have task after task to take care of. Being able to manage them all is vital. That is why this task management tool is in your remote work toolkit. Asana helps teams organize, track, and manage their work online. Asana can also help improve your remote collaborations and stay in sync about your progress. Asana is for instance great for marketing teams and other teams with many projects at once.

Zapier

Zapier is an online automation tool that helps you save time and become more efficient. With Zapier, you can create zaps - automated workflows that connect your apps and services. A zap is triggered when something specific happens and leads to one or more actions that you have decided. For instance, when you add a new row in a google sheet. The zap then opens Slack for you to directly message the teammate you’re working with on that google sheet. This kind of automation can help you become more efficient and help you remember your different tasks.

Stay connected

There’s no meeting up by the water cooler and have a quick chat with your colleague when you work from home. Staying connected with your colleagues takes some planning, but it can still be just as fun when you’re working remotely.

Donut

Donut introduces colleagues who don't know each other very well via direct messages through Slack for example. It encourages them to have a chat and get to know one another. Having coffee breaks with Donut is a great way to stay connected with your colleagues. At Whereby, we have created a Slack channel just for the Donut program. Every two weeks we get randomly matched with two of our Whereby colleagues for a chat.

Conversationstarters.com

Not feeling inspired for conversation starters? Conversationstarters.com is a great tool to give you some ideas on what to talk about on your next Donut chat. There are plenty of topic generators out there, so it won’t be difficult for you to be fully ready for your next virtual meet-up.

Werewolf

This game involves plenty of thinking, strategy, and even a little deception. You might have heard of a variant of this game called Mafia. As part of your remote work toolkit, we have handpicked this fun social game that you can play through the game’s app with your colleagues.

In the game, players are assigned roles secretly. Some are villagers, while others are werewolves. The villagers try to figure out who the werewolves are during the day, and the werewolves ‘eat’ the villagers at night. This is a great way to spend time together as a team and get a good laugh. Let the games begin.

Take care of yourself

It’s important to feel good and keep spirits high when you work from home. For some, having plants around them helps, while others prefer scented candles. The last tools in your remote work toolkit are here to help you feel good throughout the day.

Take a break, please

Are you one of those people who easily forgets to take breaks during the day when you work from home? Having breaks helps you stay focused and be more productive – not to mention that you’ll also feel better after a short break. The app Take A Break, Please, reminds you to take a break (you decide the duration and frequency of the breaks in the settings).

The app darkens your screen and shows a timer for how long you have left of your break. If you really want to continue working, it is possible to brighten the screen to the max, and terminate the app. But please, take a break.

Spotify

Listening to music is a good way to keep spirits high when sitting at home working all day. Spotify has millions of playlists for you to choose from, as well as music that helps you stay concentrated. One of our favourites is the Whereby playlist created by Smalltown Supersound.

Brain.fm

If you, however, want to be sure the music you listen to helps you concentrate, Brain.fm can be your go-to music provider. The music on the platform has been scientifically proven to impact your brain differently than other music. There is music both for when you work, relax, and sleep.

The 10 tools in this remote work toolkit are a selection of programs and apps that can help you when you work from home. With so many options on the market, you can use this toolkit as your starting point and figure out exactly which tools work best for you.