Working from home is the dream for many people across the world, and with the rise of the internet and the growing acceptance of telecommuting and remote working arrangements among many employers, it’s a dream that’s becoming accessible to more and more people.
Spare rooms can easily be converted, and for dedicated working areas, Steel Buildings Direct offer a prefabricated Nissen hut just right for the purpose.
The only issue is that when we’re working from home, there’s not quite as much incentive for us to stay properly productive. There’s no boss looking over our shoulder, no team member stopping to chat about our progress. Just us sitting alone in front of a computer.
If you’re living the dream and working from home, but find your productivity lagging as a result, here are a few tips to overcoming this issue and getting the best of both worlds.
Manage your energy
It may sound a bit odd to say that managing your energy is one of the most important things you can do for maintaining peak productivity. Consider, though, that everything you do in life — ranging from going for a walk, to calculating the total price of your groceries in your head — takes some kind of energy to execute.
“Energy” here refers to both of our physical energy — how wakeful, engages, and healthy we feel — and our mental energy — how calm, inspired, and enthusiastic we feel.
Of course, both of these types of energy are closely related.
To ensure peak productivity, do whatever you can to optimise your overall energy. Eat foods that make you feel happy and alert, instead of bloated and tired. Get enough sleep at night. Do something fun in the evening to recharge your batteries.
The key is to keep yourself fresh and energised for the various tasks ahead.
Keep to a regular working schedule
One of the great benefits of working from home — and one of the reasons why it’s such a sought-after lifestyle — is that it allows a degree of time flexibility and schedule freedom.
Suddenly, instead of having to spend a set block of time during the day in an office, being watched, we have the ability to go out for lunch whenever we like, take a break to watch a TV show, have a nap, or read a book.
Of course, this also means there’s a lot of temptation for time-wasting and procrastination.
Sticking to a regular working schedule is one of the best things you can do for your productivity. Not only does it focus your mind and get you working steadily and routinely, it also gives you predictable blocks of free time you can spend with friends and family — instead of having to grind until midnight to finish a project you could have completed by 5:00pm.
On top of that, working during normal business hours will make you feel more a part of the normal working world, and will make it easier to collaborate with conventional workers as required. Whether you work for an outside company or are an entrepreneur, you’ll need to interface with the wider business world on some level.
Track your time
If having set “start” and “stop” times for your daily work routine are important ways of preventing procrastination, auditing your time during the working day is essential.
Without anyone to check up on you during the day, and without looming, set-in-stone deadlines (which are often absent from much of the Monday-Friday routine of entrepreneurs), it can become all too tempting to space out for 10 minutes here, or get lost in an interesting article or Facebook post for 20 minutes there.
Tools such as RescueTime and TimeDoctor are good modern solutions to this problem, allowing you to track your time both passively and actively during the day.
You’ll likely find that you’re far less inclined to waste a couple of hours during the work day if you have a report at the end of it, telling you just how unproductive you’ve been.
Keep a log of your projects and tasks
There are many different tasks that you’re likely to need to complete during your working day. These can range from major, long-term projects that will have a dramatic impact on the future of your career, to small must-do errands like updating spreadsheets with new contact details.
To maintain peak productivity, it’s imperative that you have a good system in place to record and categorise these tasks as they come in.
Whether you use a notepad or a digital tool, you should mark the urgent items somehow, and group together related tasks into project categories.
