Without a senior employee monitoring you and an established culture pushing your progress forward, working from home may become challenging. Self-employed employees who struggle to focus can find this particularly taxing; after all, not working means no pay! But even working remotely for another company can present its own difficulties: there will still be work for you to do even when not at your office location.
To make things simpler, we’ve put together these handy productivity hacks that can help you manage your tasks when working from home.
Set out your to-do list first thing
Assume you know which tasks need to be accomplished each day. Make a list starting with your highest priority goal and working your way down through them all until reaching the least important. Next, plan out how much time each task will require and stick with it – scheduling can help organize your schedule while forcing you to focus on only important matters; confinement has also proven successful at helping people ditch routine tasks and focus on what really matters – starting by taking on your most daunting task first before proceeding onto smaller ones is also effective; both strategies work when adhered to by keeping up with their respective schedules!
Turn everything off
Human beings can easily become distracted. Without someone reminding us what’s expected of us, it can be easy to veer off into personal pursuits instead of doing work that needs doing. When your schedule is in place, however, it’s crucial that you stick to it – one way of doing that would be switching off all devices that could cause distraction from doing the task at hand, like setting your phone to silent mode or disabling notifications on social media and emails – it might even help if you checked it periodically to see if anything urgent came up – remember it’s your job not constantly responding back – don’t fall for an unintended trap by being accessible enough that half of what needs doing actually gets accomplished!
Make things difficult when you need to
If you find yourself falling into the habit of engaging in things you shouldn’t during work hours, one way to break this pattern is to make it more challenging to perform them. If television is an addiction for you and want to curb its temptations, ensure you work in an area without television; similarly for social media use: unfollow any and all accounts; this way you won’t end up scrolling endlessly throughout the day! You must be disciplined if you are serious about getting things done!
Arrange your tasks by importance as soon as they appear
Doing things later could result in forgetting, so writing down tasks to complete when they come in and assigning them a high/low scale of importance (red pen for urgent work and blue for non-urgent tasks) will help you prioritize them more easily. A general rule of thumb for quick wins would be: anything taking less than 2 minutes such as replying to emails or checking stats should be tackled immediately whereas all other tasks should remain on your calendar until completed.
Get up, get dressed and go to your designated work area
Are You Planning on Working in Pajamas? Don’t! For maximum productivity it is crucial that you dress and maintain an aesthetically pleasing workspace, whilst being tidy and clean at all times. Your brain needs to be in the proper state when working; otherwise your PJ-wearing brain might think working hours are close to sleep time which will throw off your frame of mind for eight hours of working – having tried this is exhausting and not the ideal frame of mind to maintain during eight hours of hard labor! Furthermore, research shows that those who dress well appear more powerful as trustworthy – two essential aspects when doing work even from within a living room environment!
