When you’re working from home, it is up to you to set up your own schedule. And when there’s no one to look over your shoulder, it is easy for you to get off course. You just have to avoid the countless distractions that you have in your home in order to stay on schedule and stay in line with your goals. Without a supervisor or clear expectations of your time, you are usually left feeling distracted and aimless. Other leisurely activities suck your attention and energy if you don’t watch yourself closely. This is why having a work schedule and sticking to it is crucial when working from home. However, with some tips for working from home can help you in solving all the problems.
That is so because working from home brings the professional and personal aspects of your life under one roof rather than having a dedicated and separate space for each. It takes time to get serious about working from home if you haven’t done it before. Interestingly, working from home is an exercise in learning about yourself.
Tips for Working from home:
Follow these simple tips for working from home to stay focused.
1. Have a dedicated workspace
It is important for you to carve out space in your home that is used jut for work. A dedicated workspace is a very important element. It is easy to sit anywhere in your house but in all the place, you will have one thing or another to distract you.
Just like your bed is made for sleeping and resting, your workspace should be reserved for productivity and work. It is amongst the most important tips for working from home.
2. Stay off social media
Is there any distraction more tempting than social media? A quick news feed check on Facebook or Instagram can turn easily into an hour or possibly hours of nothing.
Reserve a specific amount of time from your 24 precious hours for these apps. Let’s say you reserve 30 minutes of social media activity per day. It doesn’t matter if you use all the thirty minutes at once or in segments. After you have consumed the amount of reserved for these apps, don’t bother looking back.
StayFocusd is an app that lets you do just that. It limits the amount of time you spend on the websites you consider distracting by letting you set up a time limit for using these apps. After you have consumed the set amount of time, the app will restrict your access to these sites and app for the rest of the day.
3. Set boundaries
People have a common misconception that working remotely means hardly working at all. When you tell your friends that you are working from home, most of them assume that you are free most of the time.
While this is true to some extent, It is important for you to make your friends, and more importantly, yourself, realize that just like a normal person, you also have a certain amount of time that you can spend on leisurely activities. Such as hanging out with friends.
Make sure that you let people know what time you are available for socializing and what times you prefer to spend working. Working from becomes a disadvantage when your time is not organized. So make sure that you let people know how to valuable your time is.
4. Avoid procrastination
Procrastination is a big problem at the office, and it is a huge disaster when it happens at home. Because in an office someone might be there to pull you out from your day-dream but at home there no one else to help you recover.
It is very easy to put things off to later in a day or first thing tomorrow because you are not bound by office hours at home. This, however, causes stress and before you know it you have one day left to write, proofread and submit 20 articles. Yes, it happens to everyone at some point.
Procrastination is a dangerous endeavor, firstly because you put off your work for later without any compelling reason. Secondly, if something unexpected happens, like your internet goes down or a real emergency, you are left with nothing but disappointment.
5. Save household chores for later
One of the important tips for working from home is to create differentiation between the house tasks and the work tasks, only then you’ll be able to reap maximum benefits.
Just like everything else set aside some time in your day for your chores. It may seem reasonable to start cleaning while you work, but all it does is disturb your workflow.
Decide which chores you need to o and when they need to be done during your day. Then assign each chore a time limit and try to complete it within that time. It may be hard to stay in time for the first few times, but you will catch up and your mind and body will start working at the same pace very soon.
6. Create a schedule
Your calendar and daily schedule should work the way that you do. If you are the type that likes everything sorted out, you should then create a schedule for every minute of your day. So, that no time is being wasted in thinking about what to do next.
If you are the easy type, just make a to-do list and make sure that you are properly utilizing your time and not wasting a lot of it.
Lastly, If you like to go with the flow, just plan out your day in your head and make sure that you are accomplishing at least one major goal every day (besides your daily work, of course).
Just get to know yourself and learn at what time of the day you are most productive and use that time achieve or work towards your most immediate goals and complete your tasks. These tips for working from home can save you a lot of your time.
7. Take a gym break
Exercise plays an important role in your life. Moreover, it helps you keep fresh and warmed up for the day. Schedule a sweat session in your day to stay on top of the game. Tips for working from home here is don’t indulge yourself in too much work.
By working at home you eliminate the necessity for the commute that you would have done if you were working from an office. This means that if you don’t schedule a workout in your routine, you will most probably be staying within the few square yards of your home.
Walking and running is a very important aspect of your daily life and it helps keeps your body and mind working at the same pace. Your physical health is more at risk while working from home rather than the office. If possible sign up for fitness classes. They will help you stay fit and more importantly they will help you stick to a schedule because classes start and end at a set time.
Additionally, taking an exercise break gives your brain a boost by getting those much-needed endorphins flowing to delver a natural burst of energy.
8. Take care of your hygiene
One of the important tips for work from home is to take care of your hygiene. Hygiene is very easily neglected when you don’t have anywhere to show up to on a regular basis. It is very easy to get absorbed into your work and forget about your surrounding environment and what bad effects it may have on you.
Make sure that you have regular cleaning rituals which you implement to stay fresh and healthy while staying at home. Bad hygiene can lead to sickness and other health problems which undoubtedly will prevent you from working smoothly and act as a barrier between you and your goals.
9. Automate as much as you can
Technology makes for a great assistant. Instead of doing every task manually, you can schedule your online tasks using an app. Build filters to sort out any unimportant messages during working-hours, set up automatic billing, schedule your social media, website and blog posts. These tips for working from home can save your real time.
Use different ringtones for different people so you know when you don’t have to answer your phone and when you absolutely have to.
10. Know when to clock out
Work is work, regardless of the environment, you are doing it from. Whether working in an office or at home your brain has some limitations and it also needs to rest. When you don’t have a physical barrier between professional life and personal life it’s pretty easy for you to zone out in any one of them.
When you’re working all the time, you can easily exhaust yourself and get frustrated with your work. It may seem like a good thing to squeeze in a few extra hours of work after dinner, but it will lead to a shorter attention span and a burnout.
Like everything else we discussed, it is very important for you to set up fixed working-hours from your day so that you don’t feel too tired or out of the zone to work the next day. So, by following this tip for working from home you can maintain a steady routine.
11. Make human contact
Working from home should not all be about just working. Just like a normal professional routine, you have to have some time to chatter or relax with your friends and buddies.
If you ar someone who like the hustle and bustle of office life, you can find a co-working space around you to make sure that you get that human contact necessary for you to survive. It is one of the important tips for working from home. As lack of interaction can make you a robot.
12. Have a long-term plan
Having a checklist of things to do and sticking to it is a major component of working from home. It helps you stay on an agenda and focus on one task at a time. But this is a part of short-term planning.
You have to think of the big picture when it comes to making your own rules and working on your own schedule. You have to have an overall business plan in mind. Keep a big goal in mind that you work for by achieving your day to day goals and tasks. Many people have great business ideas but what most of them lack is an actionable plan to achieve their vision.
Without an actionable and realistic plan, you are just going to be working without getting anywhere. So once you have a long-term plan, break it down into yearly, quarterly, weekly and daily goals. Once you have all the steps of your mission outlined, you will feel more motivated.
These tips for working from home can change your rough routine to a scheduled one. So, you must follow them and get the best out of your routine.
