Working from home is a great thing. For one, it gives you flexibility in your schedule and lets you spend more time with your family. It also reduces the stress of commuting and lets you avoid some of the office politics that come with working at an office job. However, it can also be difficult to stay productive. Here are some work from home productivity tips for making sure that you get things done and don’t let distractions get in the way!
Create a dedicated workspace
Your workspace is your sacred space. It’s where you do all of your work, so it needs to be organized, comfortable and inspiring. Here are some tips on how to make sure that happens:
- Set up your work area with comfortable seating and soft lighting. Consider purchasing ergonomic office chairs to ensure you are sitting in a comfortable and healthy position throughout the workday. Make sure there are also a lot of windows in the room so you don’t have to work all day under fluorescent lights. Sunlight helps us stay awake.
- Keep your desk neat and easily accessible, and get rid of anything that isn’t necessary or isn’t contributing anything useful.
- Make sure it’s quiet! Use noise-cancelling headphones or earplugs to block out distractions like construction outside your window or loud neighbors upstairs.
Dress up like you go to work
The clothes you wear at home can have a huge impact on how productive you feel. If your normal routine is to throw on pajamas and slippers, then it’s time to change things up—even if it’s just for an hour of work each day.
Don’t put on something that makes you feel like an executive or a CEO; instead, choose pieces that make you feel professional and ready for action: perhaps a button-down shirt with jeans or slacks and some nice shoes. Dressing up will make it even clearer that you want to get things done.
Keep a fix schedule for everything
Make a plan for your whole day. This includes when you will start working, when you will stop working, and when you will take breaks. This will not only help you stay productive, but it will also help you avoid burnout and procrastination by making sure you have time to exercise and spend with your family.
Focus on your priorities and attend to emergencies
Little things can sidetrack you when you work from home. You might find yourself checking your email or social media every few minutes or answering messages. You can let these things distract you from focusing on the important tasks that will help you get things done.
To stay productive working from home, you must rank your tasks by how important and urgent they are. This means setting aside time each day for both important and urgent tasks. If a task is neither urgent nor important, you should move down the list until there are no more urgent or important tasks.
Minimize distractions
To be as productive as possible, you need to keep distractions to a minimum.
- First, put your phone away! This step lets people know they can’t call or text you while you’re working. Also, disable notifications on other devices. If someone wants to talk to you, they can wait until you check your phone and call you when it’s best for you.
- Second, don’t use social media! This goes for email as well. Check your Gmail messages only twice a day, or more if you need to, so they don’t get in the way of your work.
- Lastly, don’t talk to other people during the day unless you have to, and when you do, make sure the conversations are short and useful before going back to full focus mode.
Use methods and technique
You have to be intentional about how you work from home, or else you won’t get as much done. Keeping on track is easy when you use a timer to limit how long you work. One common technique is the so-called “Pomodoro Technique“. It is a time management strategy that entails working in 25-minute intervals followed by 5-minute breaks, with a single-task focus throughout each cycle and put away all other distractions. You can also use the “Law of First Things” method and go through your list of priorities before doing anything else.
These methods stress the significance of planning out daily, weekly, and monthly objectives to help you concentrate on what really matters.
If you take away nothing else from this article, let it be this: don’t beat yourself up! I hope the above work from home productivity tips will help you not just figure out how to stay productive while working from home but also maintain your sanity and a good work-life balance.