Social distancing regulations to combat the coronavirus outbreak are forcing millions of people around the world to work remotely.
Now that more offices are sending more workers home for the foreseeable future, what are some of the ways that you can make working from homework for you? Below are those five ways to improve your productivity when you are working from home:
Physical demarcation of workspace
The first thing that you should do is to give yourself a dedicated workspace away from distraction. Choose a separate space for work and home that might be your drawing room, your living room where you work or if you do not have that much space then just choose a space in your room.
Have a dedicated workspace, a place where you can organise all of your work materials and a place where you go consistently to do your work.
It is important from an organisational standpoint as all of your work stuff is in the same place but also from a mental standpoint as having a dedicated workspace draws a boundary between your personal life and your work life working from home.
Thus, physical demarcation of workspace is quite important, mentally and physically. In addition, it makes things more easily accessible in the workplace making you much more productive.
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Stick to regular working hours
A lot of people struggle to keep regular working hours because of the fact that they are working at home and can fundamentally work whenever they want.
But the bottom line is if you keep regular working hours, it will help you not only keep your schedule in good health but will also enable you to know when there are start time and stop time each day.
A strict routine is essential when you are working from home as the lack of physical boundaries makes it hard to be able to switch between home and office mode.
Make sure that you start, pause and finish working at the same routine you would in regular office hours.
Hit pause
Taking a break may feel a little counterintuitive in terms of being productive or being motivated but in reality, it is not.
Ensure that you take a break whenever you need a breather or want to get away from what you are doing and you will notice that you always come back with an added level of motivation and energy to solving the problem.
Take short breaks, go to the window, look outside, take a walk, take a pad of paper over to a different chair, give yourself five minutes, doodle.
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Take a long 30 to 40 minutes break too; you can watch your favourite shows or movies online. In fact, by using a VPN for Netflix, you can bypass the country restrictions and watch movies of other countries as well.
This is important to give your brain a rest and what happens when you do take a break is your brain actually keeps working on the problem that you were just working on many times.
If you are looking for inspiration, if you are looking for an idea then, just by resting your brain, it will go into those machinations and a lot of times it solves the problem on its own.
Therefore, when you come back to it you may be sparked with a new idea or a new approach or added energy for how to deal with what you are working on.
Clock out on time
Clock-out is the time when you are going to end your day, don’t let it drag. Don’t be that person who says, “I will finish this work after dinner” and then it is eight, you will panic and say, “well, I really need to finish this project” and then you stretch it till 10PM, guess what?
It will be 10:30PM and would still be left with a lot of work uncompleted. You will again push yourself to finish the project no matter what and the next thing you know, it is 1 in the morning.
So, to avoid such situations make sure that your start time and your end time look like bookends. Make sure that you have got two bookends to your day.
Communication is key
When you are working from home, it is essential to have efficient communication with your team to be more productive.
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While email might seem like the practical way to stay connected to team members but utilising services such as Skype, Google Hangout, Zoom, and FaceTime is also important as they allow for face to face conversations and allow you to see facial expressions of other team members of your team.
If you are in an office and you are sitting back to back with someone, then you might feel free to ask him or her any questions you have but it is much harder baseline when you are in a virtual setting, you have to open Slack, you have to send an email making it even harder.
Remote work requires transparency, thus, making over-communication an important factor to convey what is considered traditional workplace emotion and conversations.
Try to check-in with your team members on a regular basis. Create a list of the work on a daily basis and share the sheet with your team members so that they are informed well about the status of your workload and to ensure that they know you are on top of your work.
While working from home does come with many perks, it also does have some real challenges because there is less structure, you may actually work too much and focus too hard and get burned out. The opposite of it is equally possible that it might just be hard for you to focus and get as much done as you really want to do.
The key to overcoming both of these challenges and to be productive while working from home is to set boundaries around your time and space. So when you are working, you are working and when you are not working, you are not.
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