It felt a little lonely when we started working from home due to Covid. We struggled a lot—but we also survived. And then it became a new normal to work from home (WFH).
Now some people might be heading back to their physical offices but not everybody. Millions of people started freelancing during this time and they are going to stay like that. Freelancing is still booming and many companies are planning to switch for long-term remote work.
However, there was always one problem with this new lifestyle—distraction. Distraction is the biggest enemy responsible for breaking your flow. It takes many forms. Your urge to check the new notification, your cat being cute, replying to e-mails, or even your family being too loud.
For this reason and many more, one must learn work from home productivity. These tips and suggestions will let you to achieve the same.
1. Choose a Working Place
When your work in an office, outside your home, you don’t have to force yourself to follow the steps. In fact, you follow a particular order of doing things and everything happens within that system. It’s because, over the period, your brain learns to get triggered by doing different things over and over again. You can make your brain do the same when trying to achieve work from home productivity. Like taking a shower, reading a book, making coffee, etc.
Now the next thing should be choosing a workspace. What we are trying to do here is to follow a routine and make it easy to get to work without wasting much time. So to maintain this consistency, you should be thoughtful when choosing a place to work.
For some people, they can sit anywhere in their house and start working. But like we said, habits create the triggers, and choosing a specific place to work, will process your brain to cut to the chase and start being productive instantly. So be more structured about it. Create a desk where you find privacy and the least distraction.
2. Declutter your Table
It’s not just about the table, but being organized in general. Our brains are often distracted with tons of thoughts from past present and future, and you can’t really do much about it. But when your physical space is also disarranged and cluttered, it can get pretty challenging to focus on one particular task at a time. The good news is that you can easily take care of your surroundings so that work from home productivity can be accomplished.
You can start by cleaning your surroundings. Take care of the small household chores that’s been distracting you. Clean your desk, take care of your clothes, arrange the bookshelf, etc. You know the drill right? If something is taking your attention while you’re trying to focus on your work—you should probably stand up and take some actions about it. These tasks often take us few minutes to complete but provide hours of productivity in exchange.
You should do the same things while dealing with your digital life. It’s called digital minimalism. The core idea behind digital minimalism is to negotiate our time with the technology we use—the internet, social media, video games, and so on. Therefore, the decluttering process is avoiding the usage of non-compulsory technologies. Read the full article here.
3. Track your Tasks with a To-Do List
A to-do list is one of the most underrated tools for maintaining work from home productivity. This simple tool can drastically impact your tasks, thoughts, ideas, and daily routines. It can help you in staying motivated, organized, and traceable. An effective to-do list will make sure that you’re getting things done.
Write everything under your to-do list. All the pending tasks, long-term and short-term goals, daily tasks, and everything else according to your routines and lifestyle. You should also write things that are messing up your mind but you can’t do them right now.
Let’s say you’ve to upgrade the hardware of your computer but you haven’t really planned it yet. Hence every time you sit and try to focus on your work, these unplanned things keep striking—it gets hard to concentrate. For this reason, you should also note these abstract tasks and leave them there. Now that you’ve written it somewhere, your mind will stop reminding you; you can focus on more important things.
4. Leave your Home
While this guide is all about embracing work from home productivity. But at times, leaving your home would be the most reliable method to rejuvenate your workflow. Our mind gets lazy and blocks the flow of new ideas when we work in the same environment for hours on end. This can be extremely tiresome if you are involved in any form of creative work.
Therefore, a simple walk around the block or even a park is all you need sometimes. You might as well enjoy the coffee at your local cafe, to refresh your mind. Whatever works for you, the idea is to get the outside air and change the scenery a bit. This could also be the time to enjoy some time with your buddies or someone who also work from home.
These ideas might sound simple but they work wonders for amplifying your productivity. And when you’re back to work, you will notice the urge to indulge in your work again. Your mind will produce positive thoughts and you will feel energized to work again.
5. Have a Discussion with your Family
Work from home is a fairly new notion of doing your job. It’s not as new for this generation because of the digitization, freelancing culture, and lockdown. Therefore, young people mostly understand the nature of remote working. Whereas for older people, it’s a whole new concept. Or at least they don’t take it that seriously as going to a traditional office.
Therefore, it’s up to you, that you make them understand the importance of it. Because it’s something that keeps on breaking your productivity in many ways. For example, you just began to work on a project but your father without noticing much, wants you to go to the supermarket with him—although you were free a few minutes ago. Or let’s say you are in the middle of an important zoom call, but your younger sister walks into your room and started talking to you.
Hence to avoid these situations, you can make everybody sit in one place and talk about it. Talk to your parents about what’s feasible during WFH and what not. Let your younger siblings know that they can’t disturb you when you’re working. Let everybody know the estimated time you work and what time you’d be free to join everybody for a movie. Have a small chat and set some ground rules. Your family will definitely respect your boundaries.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a freelancer or you just prefer working remotely, sustaining work from home productivity is your priority. But it’s not easy to keep going—there is always some distraction lurking behind your computer desk.
Therefore it’s important to keep the track of yourself and your productivity. These tips are simple enough to follow along and will provide maximum work done without stressing a lot—perhaps effortlessly.
