Coronavirus lockdown:Tips to help you grow as you work from home

Coronavirus lockdown:Tips to help you grow as you work from home

As the country is under Coronavirus lockdown, you can use this opportunity to learn some important skills and accelerate your career growth.

spend a lot of time at home in the coming days through lockdown and extended Work-From-Home (WFH) while the virus battle rages. Use this opportunity to invest in life-changing skills to forever accelerate growth. Here are skills to invest in two each from learning, execution, communication and mental leverage.

1.Learning speed

Learning to learn is the foremost skill. It accelerates growth in your career, wealth, health, personality and time efficiency. To learn fast, leverage the working of your brain use chunking or breaking down information into small pieces, which can be retained by your short-term memory. To chunk, organise information into subjects, modules and sub-topics. Spend no more than 30 minutes in focused, undisturbed learning at a time. This makes it manageable and gives your mind rest thereafter, thus improving retention. Finally, shift learning from short-term memory to long-term recall by summarizing what you learnt, asking yourself questions on the topic and practicing problem solving.

2. Speed reading

Novice reading has a speed of about 200 words per minute while a master averages 2,000 words. Speed-reading is a skill you can learn and dramatically reduce the time you spend on reading emails, work material and learning topics.

The three main concepts are pointing, jumping and chunking. Firstly, sweep your finger across a line as you read by focusing on the tip of your finger increases speed over pages even though comprehension may be low initially. Pointing focuses attention and prevents back tracking.

Secondly, move your eyes from one 4 to 8-word block to another, training your eyes to read in jumps. Finally, move your finger down the centre of a page slowly, capturing each line as one chunk of information, increasing your peripheral vision. You can use a speed-reading app.

3.Action skill

While the first two skills dealt with absorbing information, they are useless unless you apply your learning. To overcome procrastination, put down an execution plan with deadlines in your calendar. Planning and goal setting increase mental engagement with the learning. Noting and executing as per your calendar ensures action without having to remember commitments.

4.Behaviour change

To make all round progress, act on multiple skills simultaneously. This will be exhausting when you expend some willpower to execute each task in a day. To avoid taxing your willpower, incorporate these activities as habits into your daily routine. So, if you go for a jog every day at the same time, it is no more a decision to be taken.

Now to convert an activity into a routine, use the motivation from the power of accountability. Thus, involve another person for going jogging together. Since you are accountable, you will soon slip into the routine of a daily run.

5.Speaking

WFH is the best time to improve a key professional skill—verbal communication. With online meetings becoming the default mode, most of your on-to-one discussions are now being done in the presence of the entire team either on call or video. Recognise it as a public speaking opportunity and target how you can improve this skill.

First, pre-plan your communication—what you want to convey, in how much time and how you will say it for quick acceptance. Second, watch your tone, the reactions you get and experiment with words for greater impact.

6.Writing

The other equally important professional skill is written communication. WFH has also increased the flow of emails. To improve writing and the art of written storytelling, start by publishing 250-500 words per day in a blog or a forum. You will struggle initially to find a subject or topic. As you continue for 3-4 weeks you will discover new structures, language and a style of your own. Thereafter with feedback from readers, you will develop a strong story-telling technique which will serve you well.

7.Meditation or focus power

Don’t dismiss meditation as a spiritual gimmick. It is a powerful mental tool that increases your focus and output in tasks, enhances quality of decision making and increases productivity through efficient task switching. Start by as low as 10 minutes a day and move up to 30 minutes but do it daily to see results in 2-3 weeks.You can use any meditation app or simply close your eyes and focus on the tip of your nose, mentally observing each breath going in and coming out. The biggest short-term impact is a drop in stress levels.

8.Reducing ANT

ANT or Automatic Negative Thoughts are random negative thoughts about yourself that cross your mind multiple times a day. These contribute to stress, social anxiety and even depression, thus reducing happiness and effectiveness. Avoidance and confrontation are two techniques you can practice right away.Being fully occupied in the current moment or mindfulness practice leaves no space for ANT. In the opposite technique, pause whenever you have a negative thought, question it and reframe it positively to break its flow and to reclaim your life.

Enjoying lockdown more than I thought I would. I get up early, go for a very long walk with the dog, do a one-hour home workout later in the day, plus lots of writing, lots of reading, lots of music, a bit of telly. And I am lucky to be confined with a partner whose company I actually enjoy.

So I am not currently depressed, although I know from experience that this can change quickly. But I hope that my experience of depression, and how I have learned to deal with it, can be of use to others who are in lockdown. In much way, this sense of universal anxiety has been a great leveler, in that millions of people who have no personal experience of mental ill health are getting an insight into what it might feel like.

Here are a few tips and thoughts that have been of help to me, both in guarding against depression and dealing with it when it comes.

1 Look after key relationships. Your partner, your children, parents and grandparents, siblings, closest friends. Really try to look out for them.

2 Stay active. The temptation to do nothing is strong. Try to resist it.

3 Exercises. It is vital to physical and mental wellbeing.

4 Watch your diet. For many people, boredom = eating, dislocation = eating, loneliness = eating. It is important to be aware of it. Try to eat healthily.

5 Keep an eye on the booze. Someone tweeted recently: “This is like Christmas without the fun!” I think we all know what they mean.

6 Sleep. I have been struggling with this one. But an early night is a good night.

7 Read books. Don’t be a 24/7 news junkie. Books that have nothing to do with the current crisis, fiction or nonfiction, can be such a wonderful release.

8 Cut down on social media. Endlessly scrolling through Twitter and Instagram is not healthy.

9 Listen to music regularly.

10 Even better – make music. I play bagpipes and they are out every day.

11 Write down your thoughts. Keep a diary. Make lists.

12 Keep in touch with the people you would normally be in contact with.

13 Get in touch with someone you have lost contact with.

14 Do something good for someone else every day.

15 Do the easy things if you are finding it hard to do the difficult things.

16 Stay curious. Try new things.

17 Remember that all crises end eventually. By the time this one is over, there will have been a lot of death, a lot of grief, a lot of suffering. But it will end, and most of the world will still be here. So …

18 Keep things in perspective. Don’t panic. And finally …