Due to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak, we are currently a part of a world-wide work-from-home experiment, whether we want to be or not.

For some of us, we’re used to working from home, and the only change is that we suddenly have family members home when we’re used to peace and quiet.

For others, we crave the social interaction of a busy office and now find ourselves trying to get things done on the corner of our kitchen table.

OWL Labs recently did a survey and found that 66% of people think their company is “somewhat to very prepared” for employees to work from home, but 34% of respondents thought their employer was not.

This means that if you find yourself suddenly having to work at home, there’s a good chance that it is on you to make it work.

Whether you are a Work From Home pro and want some tips, or you are struggling to focus and make progress away from your familiar office, we want to help you not just cope at home, but thrive. We promise it is possible!

Introducing The Work From Home Challenge

In this 5-day Work From Home challenge, we’re going to show how to focus and get work done, even if you’ve never worked from home before and even if you have (though we love them dearly) distracting family members at home with you.

Plus, if you hang around until the end of the challenge, we’re going to be giving out some fantastic prizes:

First Prize: Bose QC35 II Noise Canceling Headphones ($350 value)

Multiple members of the AE team use Bose QC35s, and noise-canceling headphones are extremely helpful when working at home with others. You need to create the mental space to focus, and these can help you get there.

Second Prize – Apple AirPods Pro ($250 value)

If you do a lot of teleconferencing (and if you work from home, you probably will), AirPods Pro are amazing. Almost weightless with a built-in mic and active noise cancellation.

Third Prize – The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington

A book that will help you plan your life and structure your time that focuses on execution, not theory and planning.

What others have to say

This is the first time we are doing a Work From Home challenge, and we’re super-excited about it. In the past, we’ve done other challenges on focus, personal automation, and email, and they’ve been popular. Here is what some of the AE readers have had to say…

I did this challenge 17 months back and it was phenomenal. Now reading it over again still makes so much sense. – Amratansh

Mind. Blown. How is it that something so BRILLIANT is so ‘unknown’?? – Katie

I am learning so much and it’s so easy. I will also say, very helpful. I completed all the challenges. – Rose

This is a powerful tool. My life has gone through a lot of changes in the past 2 years. And I need to be more concrete on the next few years ‘ direction. Mapped and laid out. – Marian

We’ve found that there’s nothing like a challenge to encourage us all to start taking concrete action. It doesn’t hurt when there are prizes involved too!

We’ve been working from home for more than a decade

When we started putting together this Work From Home challenge, it made me wonder: how long have I been working from home, anyways?

I pulled up my Record of Employment (Canadian thing) from my last corporate job, and to my surprise, my last day was March 31, 2010. So I’ve officially been working from home for over 10 years now.

Thanh has been working from home for even longer — 12 years — and Asian Efficiency has been a remote company from Day 1. The entire team works from home in 4 different cities in 3 different (very different) time zones, so we are experts on working successfully from home.

Single, babies, young kids, teenagers, solo parenting, spouses working from home, we’ve worked at home through it all. And by “experts”, I mean that we’ve hit all the road bumps that you are likely going through right now, and are happy that we get to share our experience with you.

Here’s what to expect

We want this challenge to do three things for you:

1. Help you make the transition from working in an office to working from home (if that’s you) and be just as productive, if not more.
2. Help you stay focused — even with distracting news, family members, and co-workers who treat you being “Green” on Slack or Microsoft Teams as an invitation to interrupt you every five minutes.
3. Provide you with systems and practices so that you thrive in a new economy where the ability to be flexible with where and how you work will give you a competitive advantage.

We always have thousands of fellow AE readers across the world take our challenges, and we are looking forward to sharing this journey with you. Here’s how it will work:

During the week, we will be posting ONE new tip each day, starting Monday, April 20. We designed these tips to help you develop your work-from-home skills and give you the tools and techniques that will help you thrive.

Exercise

For each tip, there’ll be an exercise so that you can put your new strategy into action.

For this first pre-lesson, your homework is simple — comment below to let us know that you’re in, and if you’re a Twitter user, click this button to share that you’re taking the 5 Day Work From Home Challenge:

Why share? Very simple: You’re more likely to achieve a goal if you write it down, and by commenting and sharing it on social media, you’re letting others know, which boosts your follow-through rate even more.

So don’t skip this step! Comment below and show us, your friends, and (most importantly) yourself that you’re up for it.