Many of us are still working from home after the initial Covid-19 lockdown. For some of us, we have shifted to working from home for the long term and this won’t be changing any time soon.
Working from home can be a great thing. It gives us power back over our days and we can work in ways that suit us best and keep us comfortable. We can also incorporate other responsibilities into our workday without needing to keep the two entirely separate.
But, if we are being candid, it can also be hard to concentrate, focus, and be completely productive when we are working from home.
With no one watching us and all of our home comforts right at our fingertips, our productivity can occasionally suffer.
If you want to avoid this or get out of some nasty habits you have already fallen victim to, here is our best advice on the matter.
Separate working zones
Working from your bed or sofa is never a good idea. It blurs the boundaries between what is work and what is relaxing, and this is never a good thing for our brains or mental health. Separating our work and home zones within our house, where we can, is the best way to maximise the working from home situation.
You don’t need a mansion to do this, however, and it doesn’t need to be lots and lots of space you need to set aside for your daily work.
It could be one chair and one small desk space, and that’s it. As long as it is somewhere where you only do work, then this will be sufficient.
The more you separate your working area from the rest of the house, the more you can focus during work hours and stay on task.
Noise-cancelling
Domestic noise can be one of the biggest pitfalls for our working from home productivity levels. Whether that’s noisy neighbours or on-street construction, or something less offensive like our partner cooking or our children playing.
The best thing we can do for ourselves while we are working is set boundaries that we can’t be disturbed while working and so we will be wearing noise-cancelling headphones, going to a quiet room, using a white noise machine, or wearing earbuds.
Noise is a huge distractor and one of the easiest ways to stay more productive is to create a quiet space to work in, regardless of how you do that.
Stay accountable
One of the reasons that working from home is so fun is that no one is watching us. No boss, no manager, no office spy.
However, this can also be our downfall when it comes to productivity.
To stay efficient and productive, we need to keep ourselves accountable for our workload and how much we get done in a day.
We can do this by creating to-do lists in a visible place and checking tasks off them throughout the day, or by keeping a diary, or by keeping a spreadsheet of what we have accomplished each day.
While it can be fun to slack off sometimes, it isn’t in our best interest and it certainly isn’t productive.
We are our own in-house bosses when we work from home, and so we need to act like it sometimes.
(Sometimes we can take a long lunch and blame it on the kids, but don’t tell anyone).
