Atlassian’s global staff worked From Home during the outbreak, and in addition to continuing to write code, they also wrote the superappealing “Virtual Insanity – Work From Home,” with the lyrics at the end of the article.

The future of work is here, and listen to what the experts say. We asked a number of industry leaders who support telecommuting for their opinions. Every deal completed, successful campaign launched, or distributed team building a better product is proof that remote working is the way of the future.

Telecommuting is an evolution. Here are tips and predictions from telecommuting experts on multiple teams.

There are even organizations predicting that every office will be virtual by 2030, thanks to increased public awareness of health risks and carbon footprints, as well as evolving technology. Can you believe it? In the not-too-distant future, knowledge workers at the smartest companies will work remotely from anywhere in the world, interacting in full virtual reality or via augmented reality, similar to this Microsoft prototype.

Telecommuting means you have plenty of quiet time to focus on your work. However, it’s easy to get tired of deep work! Adjust the rhythm of your work, stroke the cat, walk……”

Sarah Goff-Dupont, Atlassian’s editor-in-chief, works remotely from Minnesota

For remote workers, the need to improve collaboration is even more pressing. This is a great way to do it, but with more responsibility.

Automattic product manager Leif Singer

When it comes to tools, it’s best not to unreasonably restrict the tools that remote teams can or can’t use, because productivity can be a very personal issue.

Beat Buhhmann, EMEA Marketing General Manager, Evernote

Flow mode is almost impossible to achieve in a regular physical office, and working remotely can help you use it to your advantage! Include “focus mode” periods in your calendar so that you are not interrupted by scheduled meetings when you are there. _

Stephen Ohmstead, Vice President of Design Business at Invision Partners

We have a close remote team that constantly pursues the best standards of communication and collaboration. We break down the barriers of information exchange and share our innovations across the company. _

Michael Pryor, co-founder of Trello

As a manager, meeting the needs of a globally distributed team is no small task. Being proactive and creative in problem solving will help keep your remote team in positive shape.

Tanya Accone, Senior Chief Innovation Officer, UNICEF

The story of the United Nations Children’s Fund

Over a 12-month period, the UNICEF team evaluated and tested 17 different collaboration applications across project management, video, chat, and email domains. As part of the experiment, they ran workflows in four different project collaboration tools.

In the end, they decided to use a set of tools to run their virtual office. Trello became their first choice for teamwork because:

  • The simple “Kanban-list-card” structure is easily adopted by team members without project management training;
  • Its flexibility and transparency mean that everyone has access to the information they need;
  • New workflows can be designed on demand, and Kanban does more than just track tasks;
  • From a visual perspective, combined with features such as tagging and filtering to help them view information in different (and valuable) combinations, whether by country or by job or solution;
  • We were able to shape Trello according to the way the organization thought and acted, rather than trying to integrate our teams and our changing needs into a fixed structure.

Trello is an excellent project management and task management tool. Visual Kanban is flexible and shareable, allowing you to put all the details into each card. Trello is not just about work. You can use it to organize anything, maybe your whole life.

As Trello co-founder Joel Spolsky explained, someone saw Trello and said, “Oh, it’s Kanban, the agile way of developing software.” Yes, but it can also be used for wedding planning, listing vacation plans to share with family, tracking job seekers’ job openings, and a billion other things. In fact,
Trello is suitable for any scenario where you need to maintain a list with a group of people.

Spolsky says he regularly uses about 30 Trello Kanban boards with people in his daily life. Check out these exciting templates and suggestions for what you can do with Trello besides managing work projects.

Trello uses a variety of creative scenarios

Day task plan

Your days are filled with all kinds of things in all aspects of your life. Keeping these tasks in one place is key to getting the job done. Unlike traditional to-do apps, with Trello, you can collect your tasks into a list while still getting a bird’s eye view of the day. This makes it the perfect tool for planning what to do next.

(Photo by Ross Rojek)

Recipes and meal plans

Trello makes it easy to organize your favorite recipes and schedule breakfast, lunch and dinner meals that don’t look the same for a week or even months. Create a recipe board where you can customize each card with a photo of the recipe, a list of ingredients, and cooking instructions. Then, create a meal plan by simply adding the date to the recipe card you’re going to make. If you go to the calendar view of Trello Kanban (enabled by opening the Kanban menu, selecting Power Ups, and then clicking the “Add” button on the calendar card), you can view your meal plan by the week or month.

(Photo credit: Trello)

Reading List Management

Want to read more and more books! ? You can simply create a dynamic list of titles, or add more information by creating cards for each book in Trello. Then, as software engineer Juvoni Beckford shares, you can track and manage every aspect of your reading life, from storing book recommendations to managing reading queues to writing book reviews for personal use.

Better yet, share your bookboards with family, friends or colleagues and start a book club.

(Photo by Juvoni Beckford)

Holiday plan

Planning a trip usually involves a lot of information gathering and decision making. Trello can easily capture all the details of everything from booking confirmation to packing list to daily activities so you can relax and really enjoy your vacation. I use this on both short and long trips because dragging and dropping cards makes it easy to move the plan and stay flexible, but still organized.

(Credit: Melanie Pinola)

Wedding planning or other major events

If you’re planning a big day with a lot of guests involved, you might want to plan every detail ahead of time so that the day goes as smoothly as you imagined it would. In her book Travel and Beyond, Macy Volpe writes that Trillo’s wedding bulletin board saved her countless times when she was planning her wedding, especially when she needed information on her phone.

“I keep contracts, photos, notes, etc. on each card and then move around as needed to update my schedule. As usual, it took me a little while to figure out how Trello _ worked for me in this particular way, but in the end, it was the only tool that kept everything centralized and synchronized.” _

(Photo by Macy Volpe)

Record the children’s development

Between the time they’re born and the day they move out of the house, kids go through so many changes, most of which you might want to record and look back on when they’re older. Starting with the baby’s first year, use this baby milestone Trello Kanban. Cards can record milestones month by month in a list, but you can create a separate list for each month.

Then, as the child grows up, create a list of their transcripts, achievements, and other memorable events. Share Kanban with your family so they can enjoy these memorable moments, too.

(Photo credit: Trello)

Housework and spring cleaning

Heather Farris uses Trello to capture all the tasks she wants to accomplish in a deep house cleaning: “I go from room to room, adding tasks to each card on my phone. Then, when I’m ready for a deep cleaning, I know what I need to do.”

If you find yourself getting distracted by lower-priority tasks during spring cleaning, this Trello Subban will remind you of your most important tasks and help you stay on track. You can also use Trello to plan your weekly chores for your family, keeping everyone in order (and keeping everything spotless).

(Photo courtesy of The Balanced Mamas)

College application

Applying to a foreign university is a multi-year, multi-step process with a large number of tasks and many different deadlines. Trello can help you get everything organized so you don’t miss out on getting into your dream college because of a simple oversight. CJ, a student at the University of Chicago, started using Trello at the end of his junior year in high school to keep everything organized.

“I use Trello to manage myself, and that helps me a lot. The system I use helps me keep track of deadlines, requirements, and processes for each school. It allows me to maintain a brief description of different schools and programs throughout the process for comparison purposes. I can keep all my papers in one place and keep track of my progress on them, recall the schools I visited/interviewed with, and the scholarships I applied for at each school. Basically, I can keep all of my college application information in one place and easily organize and manage/browse.”

(Photo credit: Trello)

Virtual Insanity – Work from Home

Ooo hey hey oh

Yeah, I’m work from home

Let me tell ya

Man it’s a wonder that I fit at all

This Human big

Apartment small

COVID-19

Is really mean

Now we’re all workin from home

So I’m sending ops of hugs to my friends

The Atlassians

Who were told

You can’t go

Can’t go into your office

And now I gotta change the way I work

To sweats, and chips and arbitrary twerk

Checkin’ on my Confluence for updates

Waaaa

It’s a crazy state that we’re livin’ in

And I can’t believe that after

Sars, Ebola, Swine Flu this is even rougher!

Work From Home Is

Virtual Insanity

Coronavirus

Infecting me with cabin fever

Dialing Into Seven zoom calls every day

Would someone mute their sound

Cause your chewing’s very loud

A declared pandemic’s what we’re got

And no sign of a vaccine shot

Pages change in real time – thank god for the Cloud

We were closed one week, now wur

Closed for another

Stuck inside

Feeling so remote

I guess that I could change my coat

I’ll look and see what Tami wrote

The CDC should file a Jira Ticket

Waaaaa

It’s so insane

Jamiroquai to viral strain

Don’t know what the future holds

But dang I’m restless!

Work From Home Is

Virtual Insanity

Coronavirus

Infecting me with cabin fever

Slacking channels

Living for the karma points

I refuse to be ignored

So just join my Trello board

I refuse to be ignored

So I made a Trello board

Now that Confluence n’ Jira are free

I will make an instance just for me

Oh I guess it’s not so bad

With such awesome tools at hand

But oh man

Don’t know man

Work From Home Is

Virtual Insanity

Coronavirus

Infecting me with cabin fever

World Health Org needs to get themselves a Statuspage

And OpsGenie as well

Cause this incident is hell

Oh now this work from home situation

Is all goin’ wrong

I stare out the window

You know

There is nothin’ worse than

Being stuck at home

There is nothing worse than

Slow wifi

Yeah

Virtual insanity is what we’re livin’ in

Yeah

But it will be alright

After all, the best part about the future is that it’s not quite written yet. Telecommuting is a process, and thanks to these innovative teams, we have a promising path ahead.