More and more people are finding themselves working remotely, as digital nomads, from the comforts of their homes. While there are certainly many benefits to remote work, this type of work environment does intrinsically come with its own set of unique challenges.
In this article, we will explore some of the most common setbacks of working remotely and provide tips on how to tackle them, as understanding these challenges can help you be more successful and productive in your business endeavors.
How to manage your time effectively is definitely one of the major challenges of remote work jobs and one that most digital nomads struggle with or are at least extremely familiar with.
The importance of time management can’t be understated, but it becomes even more prominent when working from home. A lot of problems regarding time management that wouldn't be present at the office can rear their ugly head when working remotely.
This usually happens when you’re trying to juggle both your work and home responsibilities at the same time. Whether it’s doing the dishes, laundry, or simply tidying up your place – all these things can “eat” into your work hours. You could end up working late into the night and completely throw your work schedule off balance.
Distractions are another reason for mismanaging your time when working remotely. By distractions, we mean things like:
Although you can easily get distracted when working in regular offices, too, there’s one significant difference when working remote jobs – the lack of external pressure to keep you on track. With all of those things close at hand and no “peer pressure” (i.e., colleagues and managers nearby), it’s much easier to get lost in unproductive activities and completely lose track of time.
Now, don’t worry because it’s not as bad as it may seem at first glance. Here are a couple of things that you can do, as a digital nomad, to improve the way you manage your time:
Creating and adhering to a time management strategy is one of the best ways to improve your overall time management. You could do this by implementing an existing time management technique into your work routine or inventing a new one that suits your needs.
Time-tracking apps are becoming a staple of remote work, and for good reason. They allow you to track time at work (i.e., the number of hours they’ve spent working) and gain a deeper insight into how long certain tasks take to complete. You can then use this data to improve your productivity and efficiency when completing work-related tasks.
Additionally, time management apps like My Hours allow their users to create detailed time reports (for those “pesky” clients or bosses), calculate project profitability (meaning, is the project even worth your time?), create and send invoices, and more.
Creating a to-do list is another sure-fire way that you can utilize to improve time management and your daily organization skills and counter the challenges of working remotely.
It’s relatively simple to do, and it basically boils down to writing down a list of your daily tasks and then completing them. You can use a whiteboard, a piece of paper, your phone’s notes, or whatever you feel like to write down your daily to-dos.
A sedentary lifestyle and related health problems aren’t fully exclusive to remote workers. The negative impact of this type of lifestyle can also affect people who work in a regular office. But, as you’ll see throughout this guide, some challenges tend to overlap.
Working from home (or from an office) can cause people to develop bad habits and fall into what's popularly called a sedentary lifestyle, “championed” by the lack of physical activity. That can further cause a lot of different health problems, both mental and physical.
However, remote workers have a bit of an advantage when it comes to dealing with or preventing issues caused by sedentary lifestyles, as opposed to regular office workers. This advantage mostly boils down to:
With the additional free time slot you have as a remote worker, combating the negative effects of a sedentary life requires only an attitude change and a pinch of self-motivation (and some exercise). This means you can reduce the risk of developing such a lifestyle altogether.
Here are a few things that you can do to achieve that:
Technical problems are another one of the most common challenges of working remotely. There’s nothing worse than experiencing an internet outage during an important Zoom call. Well, maybe there is, but you get the drift.
The internet outage can only be second to problems with your computer, such as viruses and other software or hardware issues or failures, and, unlike at the office, there’s no IT Department that you can ask for help. In fact, more likely than not, you will have to figure out a way to deal with the problem on your own.
Now, if you are good with computers – a boomer way of saying tech-savvy – you should be fine. But for those who aren’t, here are a couple of things you can do to mitigate the chances of technical issues occurring and negatively affecting your work performance:
Remote work has completely changed the job market, as it allows employers to hire workers from all around the globe.
While this practice has several benefits, it also comes with some additional challenges, like syncing with your entire team if they all live on different continents or in different time zones.
But don’t worry; if you keep the following in mind, you should be just fine:
By now, you’ve probably found out that when both your personal and work obligations are set under the same roof, it can become difficult to turn off for the day. It might seem like there’s always a work task that needs additional attention.
This is such a common phenomenon that researchers from Latin America decided to do a study on it and concluded that overworking is a frequent behavior in remote workers.
So, the question now becomes how to deal with, avoid, or completely prevent overworking? Here’s what we found:
Distractions at your home office are a bit different, as there are no colleagues interrupting your workflow. But that doesn't mean it’s all fine and dandy. On the contrary, things can get a little dicey and over-complicated if you have children, pets, or other loved ones milling about your home while you’re just trying to work. The only thing that you can do is set up some ground rules and hope for the best. Here’s what you can do:
When you work alone from your home office, it’s difficult to form real connections with your co-workers, which in turn can have an unpredictable effect on team cohesion, unity, and overall productivity.
Luckily for everybody, modern technology has strived and managed (for the most part) to ameliorate communication issues and the “feeling of being out of the loop” when working from home. The solution here is to use platforms like Teams, Slack, Basecamp, and others that allow individual team members to chat about anything, not only work-related stuff.
A study done in Japan showed that people who work remotely four or more days a week are more likely to report feelings of loneliness than those who work out of an office. Humans are social beings, so not having enough interactions with other people can have a negative impact on our health, job performance, and overall quality of life.
And, if you feel like you are not getting sufficient social interaction at your job, here are a couple of things that you can do outside of work to mitigate that:
With the rise of remote work and the widespread use of digital technologies and tools, more and more companies depend on remote workers/digital nomads in order to fulfill some, if not all, of their workforce needs.
This shift towards remote work has opened up a whole new world of job opportunities, allowing people to work from anywhere in the world.
But, employees are not the only ones that benefit from remote work – companies profit as well. They can get access to a worldwide “talent pool” of employees, lower their costs by not having to pay for office space and other similar expenses, and more.
With almost infinite potential for growth, remote work, despite various challenges, is taking the world by storm. Here’s a list of some top trending remote jobs, just to give you an idea of the types of jobs that can be done remotely and the required qualifications for those jobs.
Freelance content writers and copywriters are in high demand, as almost every business has, to some extent, some type of online presence in the form of:
As far as qualifications for content writers go, they vary a lot. It all depends on the industry and the specific nature of companies that hire content writers. But, in general, content writers should have the following qualifications:
Virtual assistants are another one of the highly sought-after remote job positions. Virtual assistants can do many things, but their job usually includes answering messages on various social media platforms, responding to emails, and similar tasks.
In some cases, they may also find themselves assisting with video content, a growing medium in today’s digital landscape. By using helpful tools like VEED’s auto subtitle generator or video caption generator, they can easily add subtitles to video files, thus making them more accessible and helping to reach a broader audience. It not only streamlines their work, but it can also significantly enhance the impact of their client’s content.
As for the qualifications required to be a virtual assistant, for the most part, they are as follows:
Social media managers, as the name suggests, manage social media accounts. Because of the intrinsic nature of social media (it’s online), this is probably one of the jobs that makes the most sense to do remotely/from a home office.
Qualifications for social media managers most commonly include:
With the advancement in technology, especially the speed with which we can send information online (read 5G), developers and software engineers no longer have to sit in a stuffy office and do their coding from there. They can do their work from anywhere in the world and simply send it in at the end of each day or at regular predetermined intervals.
Required/desired qualifications for software developers or engineers are typically:
With so much content being posted online for various purposes, being a graphic designer has never been more profitable and in demand. Almost every company in the world has a need for some sort of graphical design (logos, promotional purposes, websites, and more).
And, with the rise of remote work, graphic designers can find jobs anywhere in the world. The same goes for businesses looking for designers, as they now have an entire world to search for that talent that fits their company’s culture and mission.
To find a job as a graphic designer, one should possess the following qualifications:
