As coronavirus continues to spread, many people are learning to work from home for the first time. After doing it for more than 10 years as consultants with employees and clients around the country - while raising five children in the home where we built our business - here are a few things we’ve learned at Coats2Coats to stay productive and sane.

Workplace:

Create a designated place to work, whether it’s a home office, a desk in the living room (far from the sofa and Amazon Prime) or any other designated zone. Don’t use it for a den, craft table or folding station for your laundry after you’ve punched out. Honor the workspace.
If your spouse, partner, significant other or roommate/s also work from home, have separate workspaces if at all possible. We’ve found it more productive to “go to your corner” and then set times to get back together so each of us can focus on work without being tempted to talk about personal or household distractions.
If you have children home from school, give them a designated area, too, and establish office hours (if they’re old enough to understand that) - but make peace with the fact that they will come and go. If you’ve worked in newsrooms, this is nothing new - the interruptions just come in smaller (and more adorable) packages.
Consider the background. You’ll be spending a lot of time on video calls, and you probably don’t have a green screen like the talking heads who get interviewed on cable news. What’s behind you should convey professionalism with personal touches - but be wary of over-personalizing. You’ll be inviting dozens of people into your home on video calls, and you won’t want all of them in your personal business.
Also consider the ambient noise. We’ve learned to put blankets on floors to dampen echo, since we don’t have carpet in our offices. Rugs help, but rooms with mostly hard surfaces need more to prevent your calls from sounding like you’re in a cave.
Dress for work, and (if you’re a manager) expect others to do the same. Business casual is the norm for most virtual workplaces.
The quest for the perfect headset is never-ending. If you’ve found the ideal headset, with great audio and a crisp microphone, do tell.
Dogs happen. They will bark, usually at inopportune times. We used to put them in a time-out closet and even tried bark-suppressing devices (which definitely do not work on terriers). Now we just apologize. With so many people being asked to work from home, barking dogs (and cats jumping on your shoulder in the middle of a call) are just part of working from home.
Manage bandwidth. This is especially true if you have children at home. We learned to set limits on when our kids could stream videos, particularly if we were leading web seminars or on video calls. Establishing bandwidth priorities is important to prevent lag - and remind others that this isn’t a snow day.
Take a lunch break as far from your work station as you can. If you’re working at home with anyone else, use this as social time to check in, ask what they’re working on and what they’re noodling.
Set an end to the work day and be strict about it. While we’ll dip into email and work extra hours when projects demand it, we’re wary of letting everything become urgent. With work literally at your fingertips at all times, you need to self-govern - we’re looking at you, Type A people - or you’ll never be off the clock.
Take days off. Working remotely is working. Recharge your batteries.

Software tools:

We use the following tools outside the ones prescribed by clients to increase productivity, manage the workplace and have a little fun. Of course, if your company has defined all of these for you, these are optional add-ons that may be helpful to your personal style of work.

Monday. We’ve tried all forms of project management platforms and even built our own, but Monday is simple, elegant, collaborative and very flexible. The secret to a good project management platform, though, is whichever one you’ll use consistently.
Cloud storage: We started with DropBox and continue to use it, but have migrated more to Google Drive over the years as more people/businesses use it. We’ve found the version control of using Google Docs, Sheets and other collaborative office products superior for project work, but still use DropBox for “cold storage” items such as billing, contracts and internal documents.
Slack Our main communication channel. After years of bouncing between text, email iChat, Evernote chat and numerous others, we aligned on Slack and never looked back. Great for group-wide collaboration, team- and individual-specific channel discussions and brainstorming. Be sure to create a Random channel and treat it like the metaphorical workplace water cooler - and learn the Giphy function to add humor to the day. (From my experience, this is the only way extroverts can survive working remotely.) Bonus: You can hold virtual happy hours with remote colleagues. Cheers!

Mind/Body/Spirit:

Move around. We wear FitBits, which alert us every hour if we haven’t clocked at least 250 steps. Find whatever device or system works for you to prevent sitting in front of a laptop for several hours without a break.
Exercise. Just because the gyms are closed doesn’t mean you can’t stay in shape. Five miles of walking a day is an achievable goal (I’ve done it in a hotel room) and you may find a treadmill under that pile of laundry - and dumbbells in the closet. Walking around the block a few times to clear your head is safe as long as you keep a social-distancing zone. And you can do pushups and sit-ups anywhere.
Calm down. A 10-minute guided meditation with apps such as Calm can work wonders when you need to put a pin in the home/work/family/pets chaos.
Take calls on the porch or balcony if it’s not a video call. Get some sunshine and breathe. Maybe say hello to a neighbor and ask how they’re doing.
Take time to treasure your family. If you’re working from home for the first time because of the coronavirus, remember that we’re all doing it together and to stay safe. That begins with the ones you love most. Remember that when they walk in during a video call and ask where you hid the remote.