Tips for working for home

Tips for working for home from someone who works this way on a regular bases:

• Don't worry about being distracted, it happens in the office too. If you get too distracted you can always do extra work to "make up for lost time", as you settle into working from home, you will find yourself being distracted less.  
• When you start your workday, use an environment on your computer that is distraction-free, so shutdown any messaging programs you have, only keep the email up you use for work or ignore all none-work messages. Turn off your cell phone, unless your boss needs you to have it on. 
• Take breaks every so often and walk around your house. 
• Give yourself enough time for your computer to startup, it's easy to think "I am at home, so I can get to work fast" but this is a mistake even I make. It takes time for your computer to start. 
• Freel free to listen to music, so long as this does not distract anyone, you have to try and see how well it works for you. Unlike in the office, you can listen to anything you want and you won't disturb others. 
• Close your door, if they are other people in the house that might distract you. 
• Work in whatever space is most comfortable  
• Some people work better when they wear work cloaths but this is not the case for me. You have to try it and see what works for you. 
• Of course, talk to your boss and see what advice or requirements he/she might have. 
• Service like Zoom/Skype/Google Hangouts is glitchy even when everything is open. 
• You might feel some agoraphobia or fear of large spaces, so it's important to get outside from time to time. Virtual Reality is a good cure and if you don't have it yourself I am sure the library will be running VR programs in the Summer and Fall. 
• Your boss can't see what your up too, or if your delayed, so make sure you check in often. I write my boss a progress email at least once a day and an "I understand this" ever time he gives me new instructions. 
• Make sure you and your team are on the same page about things. There is nothing worse then doing the wrong thing cause your not on the same page. 

How to send better email

Since I can't drive and do a lot of remote work, I send a lot of emails, so here is some advice:

• 90% of communication is none-veribale, so you have to speak differently when writing than when talking face-to-face. Imagine you are writing part of a book, not necessarily a textbook, it can be informal but the important thing is to think of the way you read text and how this differs from how you speak.
• I have found giving context to questions often helps, for example*:
• "What VR games do you have for people to play?" is not as good as
  "What VR games do you have for people to play? I want to decide what I and my friend when to play when we book VR, this season."  The longer question helps the answer "zero in".
  I would suggest Beat Saber in the first case. In the second, the asker, mentions a friend, I would mention "Stop Talking and Nobody Explodes" stating that it's a multiplayer game. In the second case the follow-up question  "and which ones are multiplayer?" is avoided.
• Explain context with parentheses, if they are things confusing you want to explain them but never treat your audience like their a dumb. "Can I book a Librarian over the phone when you are closed?" may make sense to you but probably not it to your audience,  "Can I book a Librarian over the phone when you are closed? (do to COVID)" makes sense and brings me to my next point.
• Email can be slow, so depending on when I sent the previous email, I may not get a response till the library reopens. so it's important to give context to these things. 
• Know your audience, Libary staff may not be able to easily answer "What are the system specs for the Creativity Center computers?" but you can go in and find out for yourself. 
• If you need something fast, call, email is slow. 
• Try and sort things out on your own before emailing someone, this is because it's slow.
• People can re-read every word of an email(unlike speech in life) so be careful not to say something that could sound hurtful. Having said that, I try not to get too hung up on it, example "What VR games do you have for people to play? I want to decide what I and my friend when to play when we book VR, this season". This is the way I would write that email but now that I think about I could just say "what multiplayer VR games do you have?" but to error is human, so I expect people to be understanding when I do make a mistake like this. 
• Stick to one subject per email, I don't think anybody has any limit on the number of emails they can send/receive
• If you do have to talk about more the one subject, make sure it's clear what your doing, separate your subjects by paragraph or by writing the senders questions, one at a time and answering them one at a time. 
• Make templates or drafts that you reuse if you keep answering the same question over and over. 
• Know when to use "To", "Cc" and "Bcc". If you don't know:
  -> To: is the person you are sending the message to.
  -> If you are sending a message to more then one person use "Cc", you can use "To" for the first(main) person but the rest should be Cc. Technically their should  only be one "To" but most people probably don't know the difference between "To" and "Cc" so MOST mail servers allow more than one "To"
  -> Bcc sends an email to someone without others knowing, it's useful when you want to email a bunch of people who don't know each other. (a privacy thing) 
• Know about email priorities, you can set the priory when you send an email, it ranges from "lowest" to "highest" with the default being "normal". The higher priority message will show up first or be marked as such. I am not sure but I suspect that some mail servers ignore them. Beware that if your message is not a high priority to the sending, it might come across as rude. I leave it on default, most of the time, the only time I changed it was when I sent an email to the library that they did not have to read till they reopened, so I set it to lowest, to reinforce the idea. UPDATE: In these unprecedented times I have set emails to height but that's because I don't know if the phone systems are being monitored and I need a response in a timely manner.  
• The phone is better if you want a response in a timely manner. 
• Know about Return Recipients(AKA Read Recipients), like the ones you can send in the physical mail, requesting a "Return Recipient", means when the person opens your email, they will be asked to send a "Return Recipient" before replying. This can come across as rude, people see it like a winy kid saying "are we their yet?", email is like a car trip, we will be there when we are there. Still, they are rare cases in which you want to do this, for example, you keep emailing someone and get no response.
• You probably know this but just be aware that people often don't like attachments or links in email cause of spam/scammers.
• A "Devery Status Notification" asks the mail sever to tell you when a message is delivered, it's the less rude version of a "Return Recipient", it's done completely automatically but does not tell you if the email has been read, only delivered. Some mail systems do ignore them(not sure if they should but they do). 
• Do not worry about encoding or plan text vs HTML in this day and age, people will tell you if you have to worry about them. 
• You don't have to write an email to yourself to use "Bcc" everyone can be "Bcc" and the message will be too "undisclosed recipients" 

* Yes I know the Libary is closed at the time of writing, it's just an example. I will probably keep this guide when this COVID stuff is done.