Working from home is often looked at as a blessing–a little way to help you work just a bit more comfortably when under the weather or enable you to make that afternoon dentist appointment. At Findsome & Winmore, it’s a privilege that helps inspire a healthy work/life balance in our team. Though there are plenty of reasons to treasure working from home, there is one substantial challenge for many who try to get work done outside of the office: staying focused. With that in mind, we’ve collected a few of our favorite productivity tips to help you take full advantage of your work hours when you’re not actually in the office.
Mastering Your Home Office: Productivity Tips
- Dress for a Day in the Office: Dressing for the job you want has been sage advice for innumerable years but when working from home, how you dress can impact your output. According to an article from Fast Company, there is data to support the idea that dressing professionally, even when working from home, can positively impact your focus and productivity, among other things.
- Make Room: Yes, packrats–even if you know exactly where everything is within the pile of papers and dirty coffee mugs on your desk, you can boost focus and productivity by simply starting from a clean slate. Clearing your workstation and digital desktop can help you more quickly focus on tasks at hand and feel less encumbered by clutter.
- Turn Off Distractions: Only the most disciplined of us can claim innocence of this one. We’ve all caught ourselves focusing on Facebook instead of that quarterly report. Though it may feel similar to cutting a life-sustaining umbilical cord, simply putting your cell phone on airplane mode and logging out of all social media channels while on your computer can make a world of difference for your productivity. At home, it’s also all too easy to turn on the TV for a bit of background noise. This is an amateur mistake and can easily end with you paying more attention to the on-screen drama as opposed to the drama building from your team and clients in need.
- Step Outside: Though working from home can help you get a bit of solitary, highly-focused time away from the chatter and noise common in most offices, it can also create a bad case of cabin fever. By the end of an eight-to-10-hour day of work, anyone would get a bit stir crazy. To avoid letting your solitude distract you, step outside and get a bit of fresh air to refocus.
- Work From a Café: Some simply cannot focus when at home. It’s absolutely understandable when you consider the number of distractions one encounters when working in an environment that’s usually spent resting, relaxing and being not much more than a couch potato. Instead, many professionals who work from home recommend getting out of the house and into a coffee shop, library or café that offers the light background noise, food and refreshments needed to stay energized and focused on the task at hand.
- Take Breaks: It’s important to remember to take a few five-minute break when necessary to refresh your mind, get in a good stretch and approach your next task with vigor. Consider pairing this tip with the “step outside” tip and go for a walk or simply get a bit of sun on the patio.
What’s important to note is that every professional works differently. Some prefer louder environments, others need a vacuum of silence and serenity. Some work just fine in sweatpants and yesterday’s tee shirt while others need a tie to feel ready to take on the day’s to-dos. Though these productivity tips can help most stay productive, at the end of the day, you need to find the right work-from-home environment that works best for you.