More professionals are ditching the traditional office in favor of flexibility, convenience, and lower overhead costs. Roughly 8 billion people work from home in the US, in fact. But this trend isn’t without its challenges. Sure, it’s convenient to be able to pop into the office any time day or night. Or to step away from your desk to keep the laundry rotating. And doing away with the 5 o’clock traffic is something worth singing about.
The big issue many of us have in our home offices is simply staying productive! Picture it: you’ve left the TV on for background noise, and the next thing you know, you’re jotting down recipe ideas from the Barefoot Contessa instead of finishing that new client proposal. Or, perhaps you’ve got a hive of activity buzzing around your house—kids coming in and out between class and after-school activities, a spouse running the vacuum cleaner, and the dog’s ear-piercing bark every time a car drives by.
Sound familiar?
7 Strategies to Manage Your Time & Productivity Levels When Working from Home
1. Schedule your time.
Set a time for yourself to clock in, take a lunch break, and clock out. Within your schedule, create standard blocks of time for focused work. Spend your first 90 minutes of the morning plugging away at a tough project. Then take a little 10-minute break (go change out that laundry!) before starting in on another 90-minute block. In the afternoon when you’re a little less energized, aim for shorter 30-minute blocks to focus on simpler, easier tasks.
2. Don’t check your work emails before clocking in.
Make more division between work time and home time. This bad habit of checking our mobile inbox constantly causes our minds to shift just the tiniest bit into work mode mentally/emotionally while still on personal time. Instead, practice ignoring the email until after you’ve at least completed the first major work block of the day.
3. Use a timer for focused working.
For the block of time, do nothing but focus on your task at hand. Ignore the phone—silence it! Don’t be tempted to pop open social media in a new tab. You don’t really need a quick sip of water from the fridge—trust me. Humans have been using those tactics for distraction since preschool—my 4-year-old is always suddenly thirsty when it’s time to go to bed. I’m not falling for it, and you shouldn’t either. If you really struggle mentally with staying focused with a timer, then shorten your timer to 30 minutes until you get accustomed. Stretch it out to an hour or an hour and a half over time.
4. Speaking of your phone, give yourself permission to ignore calls, texts.
This is one of the biggest time-sucks of anyone’s day—not just those working from home! Picture this: you’re working on a project, and ping! In comes a new email. It’s a client asking for another copy of something you sent that they’ve now lost. As you pull open the document, you spot a mistake. So, you correct the typo, but while you’re at it, you remember something you wanted to look up in reference to the subject matter. Next thing you know, a half hour has passed, and you never finished the project you started with.
Ignore the pings. Keep plugging away at your task and let everything else collect in your inbox—that’s what they’re there for. Just after lunch and again 10 minutes before you’re done for the day, you’ll glance through your new messages to see if anything is urgent. Everything else you can pop into your schedule to devote proper time to tomorrow.
5. Turn off the TV.
Studies have shown that due to the way our brains work, it takes several minutes to mentally switch back and forth between tasks. That includes glancing up to see that new commercial with the weird little Diet Dr. Pepper guy (did you recognize that guy as Justin Guarini, the runner-up from the first season of American Idol?) Bam. See what I did there? I distracted you momentarily. That adds up to about an hour of your workday spent in distractions.
6. Keep a notepad close.
Jot down everything that pops into your head while you’re working. You can schedule some time for each of them tomorrow. (Or not! You might realize that it wasn’t so important after all.)
7. Take movement breaks in between work blocks.
Movement breaks are fantastic for the brain’s focus and energy. Do some stretching while you make some coffee or walk the dog while you are on a phone call. Maybe it will tire him out too much to bark for the next hour!
Remote businesses and home-based-offices are the future of corporate America, according to current trends. So, if maintaining productivity levels are a challenge for you, experiment with schedules and strategies until you find one that works for you!
References
*https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/news/data-releases/2017/release.html
*https://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/4/1/e000341.abstract
*https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02701367.2018.1431602
