Getting More Done Working From Home
Working from home can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, work from the comfort of your home in a more casual outfit and no commuting to work or making small talk with other people. On the other hand, the distractions can be hard to resist especially when you have no structure to your days or you don’t leave the house.
So how do you go about encouraging productivity to your working day if you are used to working in the office? Get in, get your work done and enjoy the rest of your day at home without the dread of unfinished tasks or unopened emails hanging over you?
Remove Temptation
Making a cuppa, feeding the cat, washing last night’s dinner dishes are all little jobs that can distract you from doing what you need to be doing. However when you need to be ‘at work’ these jobs need to remain undone.
Set yourself office hours to work during and avoid doing any little jobs in between calls, meetings and anything else you need to be getting on with.
It may help to find a space at home away from as many distractions as possible to work from and avoid rooms with TVs or messes that need tidying until after you have finished work.
You Are Only As Good As Your Tools!
The quote is actually “you are only as good as your team” however, when your team is also working remotely you have to rely on other things to help you be able to connect to your team and bring your A-game to those frequent Zoom meetings!
Is your laptop up to speed or could it do with some decluttering? If your laptop, PC or Mac is maxed out on storage space, chances are it will be slow and fairly unresponsive. This will undoubtedly be making work harder. Clear some of those unused files, move items to cloud-based storage. It may be worth seeing if you need to downgrade your macOS if recent updates are causing your Mac to run slower.
Making sure you have the right tools for your work to help be more productive when working from home is essential. Both online and offline.
Productivity Apps
If procrastination is your middle name, then don’t worry you are not alone. You are also not a lost cause as there are many apps out there that can help you remove distractions – social media scrolling anyone? And help you stay on track.
Whilst Trello is perfect for organising projects and tracking progress with colleagues, Todoist can help you action jobs to be done and compartmentalize when you need to do.
Stayfocusd does exactly what it says on the tin. Well, website and help you keep focused on the job at hand and remove all unwanted distractions for a duration of your choosing. Limit your ability to use other sites that are causing you to become distracted and get your work done on time.
Oh and don’t forget everyone can see your messages on Zoom calls and sometimes, you need to wear pants to those virtual meetings, no one wants an unfortunate outfit fail when trying to impress the boss or potential clients!
