The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies to require employees to work from home. It’s a new normal for many, but at Grafana Labs our team has always recruited and operated with a remote-first culture in mind. To help everyone transition to a home office environment, we launched a new WFH series in which Grafana team members have been sharing their best advice for staying productive at home – yes, even if you have kids around.

In person, you can easily tell someone’s mood based on their body language and how they speak, but that’s much more difficult with text alone. Emojis are a great way to add tone to a piece of text and also help make text-based conversation feel more casual, relaxed, and fun. Thanks to emojis, we can chat with much more real emotion than you might get by being careful about your word choice or by including just the right number of exclamation marks and periods at the end of a sentence.

History books will one day write about our time. What will they say? Worldwide pandemic caused governments to issue stay-at-home orders in 2020. People were advised to wear masks in public and keep six feet of distance. Rice, toilet paper, and household cleaners were impossible to find. It has been a major adjustment for everyone, to be sure. From the restaurant owners trying not to lose their businesses to the homeschooling parents trying not to lose their minds, we're all facing unique challenges.

Even before a global pandemic caused many of us — willingly or not — to suddenly start working from home, it had long been on my list to compile a “work from home” guide, crowdsourcing the advice from the folks here at Sensu. As a remote-first company, we have our fair share of pro tips for working from home; we also want to acknowledge that these times are anything but normal.

Starting today, you can receive notifications from AppSignal in your Discord channels. With AppSignal, you get endless insights with just a few minutes of work. We already have a whole list of out-of-the-box integrations besides Slack and Discord. AppSignal was built with developers in mind and that is why it also allows you to customize it and build upon it with your solutions. You can use webhooks as the ultimate free form to get alerted on any URL you want.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic so far, it’s that existential threats don’t just go away. Not even if you ignore them. (Actually, they get worse if you ignore them.) We’ve all been touched by the events of the past few months and we need a new way forward. Whether it’s climate change or public health, we need to face these threats head-on and solve them.

As far as productivity is concerned, you cannot afford to stay complacent. That is because, without productivity, it is not possible to thrive in this age of stiff competition. Today, you have numerous things to do, perform multitasking to stay ahead of the competition and if you haven’t done so yet, your business will take a backseat.