Tips for Making the Most of the New Home Office, Part 3 of 3

For better or worse, I have worked out of my home for nearly my whole life. Out of necessity, I have learned some tricks for improving my productivity. Mainly, they all boil down to the necessity of staying in the zone - this is the happy, fulfilling moment when the day seems to fly by because you are concentrating so hard and so completely. It is actually easier to get into this highly productive state at home compared to at work. Nevertheless, you need to do everything you can to keep yourself in the zone.

1. Don't answer the phone. Phone calls are a terrible distraction. The worst thing about answering them all immediately is that you teach your customers, lenders, suppliers, and employees to call you at the drop of a hat when things get tough. Surprisingly, if you are a little tougher to get hold of they can sometimes solve the problem on their own. I like to avoid answering calls immediately. Instead, I allow phone messages to pile up and then I deal with them all at once. 
2. Don't do email first thing in the morning. Sadly, responding too quickly to your emails is also a great way to bust up your home office routine. It is better to batch those as well. I try not to even open up my email until later in the day. If you begin with your email, you will quickly find yourself doing less important tasks, generating additional unnecessary work, and distracting yourself from the work that really matters - meeting deadlines, closing deals, collecting checks. 
3. Eat the frogs first. This means get your unpleasant chores done first. I number all my chores each evening or morning and then force myself to do the top one or two first thing in the morning. Usually, the call or confrontation isn't any where near as disturbing or as time consuming as I feared. I also feel great for the rest of the day because I know I accomplished something that was tough for me to do or say.  
4. Use games to stop procrastination - remember you don't have a boss watching you any more or peers to inspire you. For example, to overcome call reluctance, I often find it helps to imagine that when I call someone I'm just calling their answering machine. 
5. Take a baby step to get started. Another great gimmick is to just tell yourself you are just going to do something for five minutes. You will often find that once you are started you fall into the flow state and you work until the task is finished. 
6. Leverage your advantages. Use all the resources around you to be more productive. Have your wife or children help with simple tasks. Make use of your assistants, co-workers, and others around you. Just because you are alone at home doesn't mean you can't be on the phone every hour checking up on people, assigning tasks, and leveraging the talents of others to get things done. 
7. Bliss out. It is easier to be spiritual at home than in the office. Use this to your advantage. You have more ability at home to be serene, in the moment, and happy. You don't need to conform to useless social conventions. In fact, you have more time to meditate, feel the balls of your feet, enjoy the fact that you are alive. I know I am taking advantage of this COVID-19 crisis to improve my meditation skills. I'm noticing I'm seeing opportunities sooner and profiting from them.
8. Don't wear pajamas. I think it is better to dress up for work at home just like you would at the office. Clothing is a psychological cue for you even if no one else notices it. I think people can tell if you are answering the phone in your pajamas. Don't do it. 
9. Watch out for sound quality. Remember that small sounds travel when you work at home. More likely than not, the other party on the phone will hear the clatter in the kitchen, the flushing toilet, or the dog in the background. You need to be sensitive to these sounds and not allow them to impact your listener. This means no music during phone calls. No television in the distance. Above all, don't wash dishes or clean cabinets while on the phone with a client. They can hear the noises and know that you are distracted. 

In the absence of office peer pressure, you need to find other ways to make yourself productive. Creating a happy, calm, quiet atmosphere will go a long way toward allowing you to outperform your office self by making it easy to concentrate and harder to be interrupted.

Tips for Making the Most of the New Home Office, Part 2 of 3

Due to the spread of COVID-19 many of us be working from home. As I heard a friend say, "It makes no sense to drive one hour just to go from one computer screen to another computer screen."

Nevertheless, I think there is good reason to be cautious about the benefits of working from home. The only thing that makes the office more productive is peer pressure. It forces you to show up on time and leave on time. You are in a competitive environment and the social pressure for performance is immense. Without that social pressure your productivity now seems to depend on an almost inhuman level of self-discipline.

To be productive at home, you need something else to keep you working. For me, I've found it helps to get into the flow state. This is the state-of-mind where you happily work for hours seemingly unaware of your surroundings. Getting into and staying in the flow state is the principle behind all my specific suggestions for improving home office productivity.

If you follow them, there is a chance that you may be more productive than you would normally be in an office.

1. Set aside special times for phone calls, writing, reading, and other work related activities. It is more efficient to batch these activities than to mix them up. Remember, the key thing is to get into the unconscious work flow state. If you establish the habit of doing certain activities on certain days at certain times of the day, then you will be more disciplined about following through. For example, at Drew & Associates I set aside specific times each week for introducing myself to new potential clients. Every Thursday between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. that is what I'm doing.
2. Never rewrite anything the same day you write it. This is a huge productivity advantage. Too many people tear their hair out writing and rewriting the same sentence over and over again until it is perfect. You cannot write and edit at the same time and expect to be successful. Instead, write without rewriting whenever you do a first draft. Then only review it the next day when your mind is fresh. Sometimes you will find that the material you were agonizing over what actually pretty good. You were just being hypercritical during the drafting process.
3. Make sure you have music in the background. It seems especially helpful to have familiar music which keeps part of your mind distracted while your higher mind focuses on getting the real work done. I have my own mix that I sued which you can see on YouTube. Using music to distract your wandering mind leave the rest of your brain the space it needs to concentrate. 
4. I like having a beverage on my desk, usually coffee, often a Diet Coke. Getting up for a drink breaks the flow state that is the key to home office productivity. This means anything that keeps you in your seat longer is good for you. This means moving the coffee pot close to your desk, keeping a refrigerator in your office, or making sure you have a beverage when ever you sit down before your keyboard. 
5. Go through everything in your office and reorganize it. Make sure the things you use the most are in the drawers or shelves closest to you. Things you use infrequently should be further away physically. It sometimes help to have an outsider help you decide which objects and which files should be closer or farther away. 
6. Create a tight, brilliant filing plan. Be consistent in your labeling and organization of your file folders. I was reminded of the importance of internal organization when we helped charities apply for Paycheck Protection Program loans earlier this month. I was under stress and moving quickly. I saved a lot of time my setting up a system beforehand which put the key information I needed for a loan application all in one place. In a sense, orderly files are more important than brains. 
7. Make sure you are happy at work. If you are feeling unhappy it is probably because you are doing something you don't need to do. Your subconscious will warn you. Your level of happiness is also a key indicator of whether or not you are in the flow state. Changing the task so that you remain happy is one of the secrets of staying in the productive flow state. 
8. Use fans, air-conditioning and/or space heaters to maintain a consistent temperature. If you work at home you absolutely need to pay attention to your environment. Anything which makes you too hot or too cold will now be more likely to knock you out of the flow state. Ideally, your environmental temperature and humidity, if you can control it, should be perfectly consistent in your home work space. You need a stable environment if you want to be able to focus 100% on your work. 

If you rely on the same techniques which worked at your regular office, you most likely will fail at working from home. This is what a lot of people advice however. This is why they say you need to dress up for work, maintain consistent hours, check in with other people to be accountable. You are better off, in my view, to take a completely different tact and concentrate instead on doing something you could never do at the office - maintain a clean, consistent, uninterrupted state of productive focus. If you are having fun, then it is working.

Fear Not: Foundation Giving to Remain Strong in 2020

I have enjoyed calling the upcoming economic crisis the Great Suppression. This is because the reduced economic activity we are enduring is not caused by anything seriously wrong with the U.S. economy.

The economy is strong. The increased unemployment we are seeing is a side effect of efforts to protect our population from the COVID-19 virus. Accordingly, we can expect the economy to bounce back quickly...especially if the current stay at home orders are reversed soon.

In this crisis, grant writers will be one of the occupational groups to be the least impacted by the economic crisis. Part of the reason is that grant writers are used to working on their own - either in an office or at home. In addition, one of the most significant factors which bodes well for grant writers this year is that the vast majority of foundations, that is the private non-operating foundations, are required to keep making grant and other contributions despite the hardships associated with the COVID-19 virus.

This is called the “payout rule.” With certain exceptions, private non-operating foundations must distribute five percent of the value of their net investment assets each year in the form of grants or eligible administrative expenses, with certain exceptions. The rule was created to prevent foundations from receiving assets but never actually making charitable distributions with them. Remember the donors who established these large foundations received a huge tax break and often tax free income for themselves and their families too. The payout rule is just the government's way of extracting an economic price for these enticing tax benefits. 

This familiar, if complex, rule is getting additional attention from foundations looking at the first quarter of the year amid the economic downturn associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Grant writers and their employers or clients are undoubtedly asking themselves what do the rules require? And what does this rule mean this year for foundations and the nonprofits dependent upon them?

The good news is that giving in 2020 will not be seriously affected by a slowed economy because distributions must be based on an endowment’s monthly averages throughout the previous year, 2019.  Nevertheless, we should be prepared to deal with the fact that the diminished value of foundation investments at the end of the year and into 2021 could affect giving beyond 2020.

In other words, because of the way complex distribution rules are structured, the short-term outlook for non-profits depending on foundation funding looks very good. In 2021, however, we estimate payouts will drop due to a decline in the stock market associated with a reduction in economic activity connected to COVID-19. 

The bottom line is that foundation payouts will remain strong throughout the rest of the year. It behooves charities to apply for this money now. All things being equal, these same foundations will not be as generous a year from now. Accordingly, it is smart for grant writers to redouble their efforts and maintain their productivity. Ironically, they will be among those least impacted by the crisis and among those most central to mitigating its impact.