Musings of a Relatively New Remote Worker

Working from home has certainly been a shock to the system.

Typically, I spend many a day out of the office, meeting new and existing clients and, if I am not out and about, I am on the phone speaking to customers and suppliers. Being confined to my home office has taken plenty of getting used to. After my first day of remote working, I had clocked up a mere 700 steps on my tracker. Realising how easy it is to sit from 8.30am and not move again until 5.30pm, I knew I needed to make a change. 
First, I started to make my workspace feel more like my ‘work home’ adorning my desk with go-to merchandise, setting up zoom calls for client meetings and arranging live product displays of new merchandise to help inspire them. I grabbed my personalised mug and scheduled coffee breaks for 8:30am, 10am and 3:30pm. Mood Bottle in hand, I was instructed by my boss to take a 15 minute walk at 10:30am and again at 3:00pm to ensure I moved from my desk throughout the day. This has now become a truely valuable part of the day giving me time to 'take 5 and chill out ready for the next set of calls or videos. I've also tried to ensure that when I'm on the phone I stood up and moved around whilst talking, much to the annoyance of the rest of the household!

My job as Business Development Manager revolves around my customers and during the first couple of weeks it was a challenge to contact some of them as many were settling into this new ‘remote working’ norm. My passion for video calling has increased massively as it's such a quick and easy way to show my clients our products to allow them to make an instant decision, and so looking on the positive side, that's one thing I won't be stopping when we do finally go back to our office. I have since used the time cleverly to pull together helpful blogs on home working, I have devised a range of letterbox friendly working from home packs as well as some articles for our next Inspirer newsletter, out soon!

Being ‘old skool’ with a strong preference to talk with people face-to-face or at least over the phone, it has been a rather strange way of working for me. I hope we will all be back to some sort of normality very soon when I look forward to unveiling the exciting new products and services we have had the chance to work on over the last few weeks.

Watch this space…