An Introvert’s Survival Guide in The “Loud” Virtual Working World

How to improve productivity and be happier when WFH

By now I’m sure everyone has heard extroverts’ complaints about the whole WFH situation — the fun of meetings and being surrounded by people is taken away from them. But since introverts gain energy from the solitude, that means WFH should be easy for them, right?

Well, not really.

Like a lot of people, at the beginning of the pandemic I thought that WFH would be more introvert-friendly and less draining in comparison to an in-person working environment, and as an introvert myself, I was looking forward to that. Man, was I wrong: The virtual work environment can be very loud, arguably louder than being in the office at times.

Work from home (WFH) I hoped for:

9am-11am: A couple of important meetings with small groups

11am-12pm: Lunch time

12pm on: Heads down coding/modeling/analyses time without interruption or distraction from office noise etc.

Work from home in reality:

9am-forever: Meetings to eternity with 10+ people, with a couple of last-minute “can we hop on a call real quick” requests sprinkled on top.

10-minute-intervals in between meetings: Trying to quickly get some heads-down work done

Remote work during COVID has unfortunately resulted in more frequent meetings and emails. It definitely took a toll on my mental health when my calendar was suddenly filled with huge meetings where it was hard to get points cross without cutting people off; my slack beeped every 30 seconds; and the little red circle on my email app increased counts every minute. The virtual working environment quickly became too “loud” for me to be productive.

Know what energizes you and what drains your energy as an introvert:

Even though extroversion and and introversion are not binary, if you self-identify as an introvert, it’s likely that big groups drain your energy to some extent and you prefer smaller, more intimate interactions. It shouldn’t be a surprise that you need time and space to reflect and/or work on things that involve deep thinking and analysis thus it’s helpful to find ways to eliminate distractions.

For the past several months, I experimented with different ways to improve the remote-work situation trying to reduce the distraction and noise so I can be productive and keep my mental health in check.

Meetings

Control your schedule by grouping all your meetings together

For introverts, what’s more annoying that having tons of meetings everyday is having tons of meetings spanning the whole day with 30-minute breaks in between. Because those 30-minute breaks are not enough to do any deep work before you get pulled into another meeting, they are essentially “wasted”. And introverts get energy from being able to dive into and focus on a topic.

What works better is trying to group all of your meetings together. So instead of having meetings filling up your whole day, have them fill your whole morning (or afternoon, or early morning and late afternoon, your choice) so you will still have chunks of time to do in-depth work without getting distracted outside of those meeting blocks. In order to make sure that nobody schedules over your focus time, block if off on your calendar as “DNS” (Do Not Schedule) or “Please ask before scheduling”.

And instead of having back-to-back 30-minute meetings, I would usually try to schedule 25-minute meetings: end the meeting 5 minutes early or start the meeting invite 5-minutes after the clock. This way you have enough time to take a break between meetings and reset.

Have a pre-read and agenda for meetings

It’s always hard to get your point across in big meetings, especially as an introvert. Not to mention you will often have participants in the meetings ask a marginally-related question and take everyone down a rabbit hole; as an introvert, I find it hard to then drag everyone back to the original topic.

To avoid situations like these, for the meetings I run, I prefer to send pre-reads and an agenda before the meetings detailing the topics we want to talk about and providing some background/context of the meeting. This will help decrease the amount of digression and help drive the points home. When the discussions get out of hands, it’s also easier to have the agenda serving as a lighthouse for people to re-focus on the agreed-upon goal of the meeting.

Keep your meeting size small and focus on small-group interactions

Giant meetings and 100-people slack channels can be a nightmare for introverts.

I prefer to keep my meetings small so I can ask targeted questions and make sure everyone’s opinion gets factored into the discussion. When having cross-functional discussions with other teams, instead of inviting everyone, I only invite one or two key people on each team and count on them for intra-team communication from there.

For giant virtual meetings, I find it easier to ask questions through the chat function of the meeting tool than trying to talk over people.

Other working tools

Turn off your slack notification and check it on your own terms

Instead of getting distracted by the sound of slack every 5 minutes, try turning off the notification and only check it when you want to take a break from the analysis you are working on. Even if you can’t help yourself but to check the message right away when a little red bubble with number “1” shows up on top of Slack, the absence of the notification sound will make you less stressed.

Only dedicate certain times for checking/processing emails

Depending on your company culture and people’s working habit around you, you may get tons of emails on top of slack messages. I find it the easiest to make sure people know that emails should be used for non-urgent communications whereas Slack could handle the more urgent ones. This way I can bulk check my emails once a day and not get distracted by them during my heads-down time.

Hopefully some of the tips here are helpful to my fellow introverts out there — the virtual world can be loud and noisy but you have the power to turn down its volume and find your own rhythm in it.

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