Top 10 Secrets To Working From Home

Whether you’re considering starting work from home for the first time, or looking to hone your productivity and motivation for an ongoing home business, actually thinking about the way you organize and arrange your day and daily tasks can be a powerful secret for keeping working from home a viable and rewarding job option.

Setting Up Your Work Space

The act of dividing work from home is important: it’s difficult to maintain productivity and motivation when your place to relax and be with your family is also your work environment. Designate yourself a work area to suit your job, that during your working day, is only used for that activity. When the day is over, clear the space so you’re not tempted to put in gratuitous overtime…

 

Your Work Contacts

Friends and family can find it very hard to understand that working from home is a ‘real job’. Separate your methods of contact: have a work phone and email that you only give to colleagues and clients, or screen calls constantly. Resist the temptation to have a personal phone switched on, your personal email open or social networking pages accessible: use these activities as ‘rewards’ for meeting a minor goal or when on a planned break.

 

Your Schedule

Working from home is about self-motivation and organization, which means developing clear strategies for keeping yourself engaged and active during your working day, and away from distractions. Take some time planning how your day will run and how you will manage your time.

 

 Managing Your Time Your Goals

Make daily and weekly ‘to do’ lists: keep changing and updating your format until it works for you. On paper or on the computer, using check boxes or crossing out achievements, setting up priority sections and hourly deadlines or task schedules, separating work goals from personal ones and big tasks from small ones: give yourself achievable goals to aim for, and plan little rewards for meeting them (a lunch date Friday, five minutes more for coffee time, knocking off a bit earlier).

Your Hours

Be strict in maintaining designated working hours: as your own boss, you need to make sure your employee is not starting late or finishing early because then they’re not doing what you pay them for. Decide the daily hours to work and stick to them for maximum productivity, but also because you need clear non-work time. It can be hard to leave work physically when you can’t do it geographically, but you need leisure and home-time that is not connected to working hours.

 

Your Routine

Self-employment is sustained by ritual – developing a unique work routine that functions specifically for you. Get into habits, devise systems of doing things, and enjoy the security of routine and repetition. Maintaining structure and work schedule will allow you to continue working successfully from home in the long-term.

 

Sustaining Your Productivity Starting the Day

Just as if you were going off to work, complete home and personal tasks before your working day begins, whether it’s checking home email, getting the kids off to school, or hanging the washing. People focus and unwind on their way to work: give yourself a transition time to do the same. Relax with a coffee for half an hour before beginning, and use the time to also update your ‘to do’ list, get your head into work mode, and carefully plan out your day.

 

Taking Breaks

If you’re on a productive roll, you need not stop at scheduled times for breaks, but make sure you enforce a time limit when you do take them. Eat, rejuvenate, maybe do a household task, make a personal phone call or run an errand, just as you would if you were at work – but be back ready to start again when your self-imposed time limit is up.

 

Getting Out of the House

There is a serious danger in getting cabin fever or becoming reclusive when working from home. You either need to get out desperately and then don’t want to return, or get so ensconced in your little work/home cocoon that you forget to break out at all. Make outside tasks regular occurrences and use them as rewards: a walk to the post office, a trip to the store or a café coffee break can still be a work-related activity while getting you some exercise, fresh air, human contact and a change of scene.

Adapting and Evolving

As your own boss, you are creating own your daily business schedule that works for you. Change and experiment with different spaces, systems and schemes constantly to keep improving your working life and output. No-one can work effectively and efficiently in exactly the same way, but usually the job dictates the method and means. When you’re self-employed and working from home, understanding you have the freedom and the responsibility to develop the most effective and efficient method for yourself will the hardest and the most satisfying thing about your working day.

 

Keep at it: people who don’t do it think that working at home is easy, but separating work from personal, leisure from labour, and productivity and motivation from procrastination is always difficult. However, the benefits of control over your environment, time and methodology are a significant pay-off.