My TOP-5 tips for being productive and creative, after a full year of leading a digital team from home:
- Have a 15-minute daily meeting with your team every morning. Talk, share and coordinate so you can skip other status meetings for the day.
- Update all work progress with sticky notes or using a virtual board on Jira, Trello or Asana. It will make things transparent and help you spend even less time in meetings.
- Document more and communicate proactively. You will be asked less stupid questions along the way.
- Agree that people don’t have to follow email, Teams and Slack discussions all the time. 2-3 times per day is enough to stay in touch while being focused on other creative work.
- Set up a hotline for very urgent matters. Regular phone call works great with millennials, so does private messaging on Slack. It helps knowing that one is not alone if the worst happens, making it a bit easier to take risks and experiment.
Bottom line:
You don’t have to browse read and respond to chats, emails and online comments all the time to be present.
Focus on creating something and making an impact instead.