Staying Productive While Working From Home
This was not my original planned blog for today, lest you think timing just happened to work out perfectly. However, given the current condition of much of the world, my own country included, I’ve suddenly found myself in the strange position of having years of experience with something that tons of others must grapple with for the first time: working from home. Since a lot of folks are having to adapt to this without warning and are worried about keeping up with the demands of their job, this seemed a topic worth making room for.
On the outside, working from home seems like a perfect setup, and it is… in terms of comfort and enjoyment. You’re in your home, wearing whatever you feel best in, with total control over your environment; that is a recipe for loving your new work space. What it isn’t necessarily a great setting for is productivity.
I touched on this in more depth in The Importance of Structure, but working from home eliminates a lot of the systems modern offices use to keep us productive and accountable. While yanking yourself free of their (I’m just assuming) ridiculous rules on time management and limited breaks feel like plucking a thorn from your foot, it would be false to say that thorn didn’t force you to walk faster. Aside from establishing structure itself, as has already been covered, this seemed like a good time to dig deeper on specifics for those worried about losing momentum or failing to properly appease the corporate overlords in this new environment.
Break Up Your Day
Humans do better with smaller challenges than big ones. We aren’t as bowled over, or intimidated, and can focus on doing the task rather than boggling the mind with how tough it might be. There’s a reason one of the most default pieces of advice is to break bigger jobs into smaller steps: it works. Workdays can be much the same. Without any sort of shifts, the whole thing can run together into an 8-hour mess, one that only blurs further as more and more days are stacked atop one another.
Normal jobs do this largely because the law requires it, in the form of breaks and lunch “hours”. Not to mention, silly as they are, meetings also help slice up a day; I mean more than by giving you half an hour to idly gaze out a window. The result of this is that you’re rarely staring down more than two consecutive hours of work without something to signal a break.
Ways to do this at home are splitting up your respective daily tasks into sections, tackling them in specific succession. This has the bonus of building a habit, which can be very handy in staying productive, assuming you make good ones. If that doesn’t work, and your task is uniform all the way through, then if possible try to change scenery for different bits. Assuming you have a laptop, shifting rooms, going outside, hitting a favorite café, all are perfectly valid places to do a job, barring specific limitations. If you’re rocking a desktop with one dominant task though, don’t worry, there will be some chances to separate your day thanks to the next bit.
You Still Need Breaks
The act of working from home has not magically changed you. You are still you, with as much impulse control, dedication to the job, and general interest in your tasks as you had back in the normal office days. There is no switch that gets flipped, eliminating the need to go look at funny pictures online when a task gets even the slightest bit boring.
All of that is to say that if you try and suddenly become the paragon of effort, there’s a strong chance you’ll burn yourself out on the first week. If the change to a new environment spurs you to greater heights, all the power to you, however for most folks the job doesn’t fundamentally change along with the setting. Whatever you were able to handle before is probably your equilibrium, the sweet spot of getting work done while saving some mental energy for yourself. The goal of all this is to help you stay in that zone, and breaks are a big part of that.
Not only are they essential in segmenting your day, they are just, well, essential. We need to blow off steam. We need to step away, stretch, walk, find a way to feel relaxed. And yes, that includes dicking around for fifteen minutes sending your friends stupid memes. Even now, in the luxury of your own home, those breaks are still vital. On top of all the positive effects on your mental state (work a day with none and you’ll see) giving yourself breaks also makes you be a bit more productive in between. Part of that is because you know there’s relief in sight, but in the working from home arena it also plays into a larger concept overall.
Control Your Schedule
In a way, both of the prior tips were really laying groundwork for this one. When making the shift to working from home, the lack of structure and freedom are what most folks expect to be the greatest boons, and instead become the anchors that sink their ability to work effectively. Now you know you better than me, so there’s always a chance you’re an exception, but for the most part people do better with structure, even if they don’t always like it. So now that you’re in charge, why not get the best of both worlds?
Rather than hating the necessity of a schedule, embrace it. What would your ideal work day (where work does still have to get done) look like? Would you sleep until ten, take an actual hour for lunch, or maybe do all your deliverables at midnight and then blow off the rest of the day? Outside of contact with the main office via meetings, calls, etc, there is pretty much nothing stopping you from building that dream, so long as you keep delivering what is expected.
This one is a double-boon, as not only do you get to create an environment perfectly suited to your particular habits and needs, you’ll also get a crash-course in figuring out what those needs truly are. Most people don’t start this journey and pick the right schedule or habit out of the gate; there’s often a divide between what we think will make us the happiest in a work environment, versus what actually will. Taking control of your schedule lets you see, concretely, what aspects you genuinely enjoy and which sounded better in theory.
That way, if you ever decide to make this working at home situation more permanent, be it through entrepreneurship or telling the boss you want to keep telecommuting, you’ve already got a huge head start on knowing the best methods to make you happy, and at a productivity level that keeps the paychecks rolling in.
Hope this helps give some guidance for all of you out there suddenly thrust into this new situation. Above all else, stay safe out there, and take care of one another.