When you run your own business or freelance from home, the borders between professional work and personal chores are not always so clear to make out. Perhaps you find yourself dashing from one task to another as they come up, leaving each one unfinished and just creating more mess. Or perhaps this was how you used to work, and you now run a streamlined ship, locking yourself up in your study in the morning and concentrating on one solid brief until your concentration expires.
Well, there is a happy medium to be found. Working on more than one task at once can be productive and creative, and it needn’t mean a descent into chaos. Smart multitasking is a great way to save time, and to feel like you’re making progress on several fronts at once. It is also great for keeping your mind sharp, as one exercise informs another, the solutions discovered during one chore providing unexpected solutions for a problem elsewhere.
The important thing is to mark a clear line between those tasks that you wish to include in your new multitasking routine, and those, which should be kept strictly for your personal time. That might mean that social networking, housework – even answering the front door – remain forbidden during ‘office hours’. That will clear your mind to concentrate more productively on more than one professional duty at a time. It will also help you to relax when you finally sign out, as you and the people you share your home with have a clear understanding of when you’re ‘on’ and when you’re ‘off’.
Of course, you shouldn’t forget to integrate breaks into this new schedule, but that’s where the beauty of working from home comes back into it. Save your living room for breaks and work elsewhere, and you will truly appreciate the change of scene every hour or so when you stop for a coffee and to peruse the newspaper – comfortable in the knowledge that you’ll return to work fully charged and in control of your own destiny.
For more great ideas on how to multitask effectively when working from home, have a look through this step-by-step guide from Pound Place. It’s everything you need to know about spring-cleaning your professional schedule when you work from home.