Since last year these times, almost all of us had a big change in our personal and professional lifestyle. The combination of working at home, dealing with personal responsibilities like childcare, cooking, cleaning, shopping between the meetings & business tasks forced us to be more flexible, adaptable and multi-tasked more than ever. In addition, we all developed new skills or improved the existing ones.
These are some of the skills we developed due to current situation as per my own experience and observation to others;
- Time Management: Setting time for particular tasks and pre-scheduled online meetings parallel to daily responsibilities help us organize time wisely. Many of my clients have learned ‘Pomodoro Technique’ and started applying it to their busy day full of business tasks and personal interests.
- Time Blocking: Addressing the priorities and blocking our time in advance with personal and business related tasks help us create perfect balance and also helps improving time management skills.
- Mastering on Body Language: We all attended handful of virtual meetings and meet with people maybe we met fist time. Reading body language is one of the keys to have a better communication and having virtual meeting s by seeing only half body of others improved our skills to focus on upper body. The eyes are strongest part of body language and Zoom meetings made us mastered on reading others’ eyes to understand and communicate with each other on online platforms too.
- Power Networking: Online platforms offered us to meet new faces or re-connect to existing ones more than ever. Being able to reach many people that normally not so easy to connect is one of the biggest skills that we developed during these circumstances. Just try to count how many people from other parts of the world you have naturally connected during these online meetings…
- Family Tasking: Having a family with various scheduled daily activities helped us control our time to spend on work vs family. It’s been one of the most difficult periods at the beginning of the pandemic but most of us already adapted ourselves and family life around online school time, virtual meetings and our partner’s work schedule.
- Digital Fluency: Many of us developed new skills to learn new applications and programs to handle online seminars, webinars, courses and to make new connections around the world.
- Focused Conversation: Online platforms improved our skills to listen deeper, ask powerful questions and focus on the conversation with less distraction. I believe coaching and training business is one of the sectors benefited from improvement of this skills since during our sessions, both parties can only focus on the conversation and present in the time.
- Focusing Hobbies: Working from home help us replace commute time or lunch breaks with personal interests and hobbies like reading book, sleeping a bit longer (yes, for some of us it can be counted as a hobby😊), keeping a diary and personal journaling.
The main fact to be able to get & keep these skills while trying to have a balanced work-personal life is to set a routine to line between those.
As a result, to benefit from these skills, we can do few easy things; before finishing our daily work routine, we can wrap up current assignments, note where to continue next day, close all work-related tabs on the computer (it sounds good, right?😉 ), note leftover tasks and relax for a moment with 10 deep breaths…
And just enjoy rest of our day all personal…
Let’s see what more skills time will make us develop in near future by considering working from home continue to become new routine for many of the companies around the world.