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On staying productive while working from home

  • remote-work
  • writing
  • essay

Key takeaways

  • Keep your phone away from your working area
  • Incorporate movements throughout work

Staying productive and disciplined while working from home or remotely sometimes is really hard. And sometimes we try so hard which even makes the effect worse because we start to feel bad about ourselves. On days when there are pending deadlines or great work is moving on is all well and we are excited to kick off and start every single day gunning towards that big target.

But there are those days where nothing enormous is coming up and all we have is some mundane code cleanups, or some edge cases to patch and it's just yahck, everything is a drag.

My desk setup in Kampala
Researching message queues - April 2025

One thing i have found, that has recently helped me is to keep my phone away from my working area. Often, i want to reach out to my phone to browse hoping to see something exciting on X or hoping to get an exciting text message on whatsapp.

What i decided to do was to permanently relegate my phone to my wardrobe during all activities where the phone is not the primary form factor for carrying out the activity. This helps me to stay and give my 100% on whatever i am trying to do without having to reach for that interruption in those short moments while i am waiting for a build to complete or waiting on an LLM output. That way i am forced to get some extra steps to pick a phone call or if i need to check something i will step away from my desk which is healthy as well.

Also, i have started using the new google health app to track my exercises. I usually use the strong app to log my dumbbell workouts, pushups and activities which i do which strong then directly syncs to google health. Seeing the stats just gives me the positive feedback that spirals back into more motivation to keep moving more and add intermediate activities between focus sessions throughout my day.

These essays are my experiment on being able to think through writing.

Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard. ~ David McCullough