A home-based business or job seems ideal, but it definitely comes with its own challenges. Managing time, according to those who work from home, can be incredibly difficult, especially with all the distractions present. If you have a family, it can be hard to ignore their pleas for time with you. Meanwhile, if you live alone, leisure activities such as watching TV or playing computer games so close to your workstation, can easily lure you away from the job you’re supposed to do.
Ensuring productivity when working from home requires intense discipline so that a work-life balance can be achieved. Here are some tips to help you with this:
1. Establish your work hours – Don’t just set a work schedule for the day. Rather, maintain regular work hours because this will prevent your home life from interfering with your work life, creating an atmosphere of professionalism and efficiency. Set reminders on your phone, to let you know when you’ve only got an hour left of your working day.
2. Make your work station off-limits to your family – This is a must for productivity because you can waste a lot of time just looking for things in your work station, that members of your family decided to borrow. It’s imperative to keep the space where you accomplish your job organized. Also, by doing this, you let your family know that the moment you enter your work area, you are not to be disturbed anymore. I also find this helps me, when I work remotely (which can be from anywhere in the world at times), my handbag is my “go-bag” with everything useful I need to do my work – smart devices, business cards, and yes, even for super digital me, a pad of sticky notes and some pens! 
At the end of the day, make sure you close the door to your office or workspace, or if you work remotely or in a shared space, pack away your gear so you’re not tempted a few hours later on, just to go check that email you’re waiting for a reply on…
3. Get help when needed – Don’t think that only you are capable of certain things; if you’re overwhelmed by your tasks, seek the assistance of family and friends who have the time, or outsource some of your work. Say, you have a big order from your online shopping site to prepare; get your spouse or your siblings to help with packaging. Or if you don’t have time to organize your calendar, hire a virtual PA, the time you’ll save not procrastinating, you can be out earning more money to pay for those bought-in services. And, if it’s not something you particularly like doing, give it to someone else who’s job they love is doing exactly that!
4. Invest in equipment or systems that can simplify work for you – Know the latest technological offerings for your industry that will allow you to do more in a shorter period of time to boost both productivity and profits. As you no doubt know already, I’m a totally productivity convert, I’ve spent the past couple of years learning a different way of doing things, trying out different apps and tools that super streamline my processes. If you want any suggestions, or need any help, just give us a shout. I’m always happy to spend some consultation time helping you use tech to become more effective. I love it!
5. Identify key hours of the day – This is a great way to streamline efforts and get the results you want. For example, determine the best time for business meetings, or when to call clients. Many have learned that these two are best done in the morning because most people are unavailable during and after lunch. However, learn what works for you and even, if it helps, block out time in your calendar for specific tasks. I know I’m a morning person, so I love to get my productive juices flowing first thing in the morning with tasks like emails and to-do lists to organize my day ahead. I know once 7pm rolls round, if I’m still working, I won’t be at my peak performance. So trust your body and mind to lead you into when is best to do things. If you have the luxury of setting your own calendar, remember to also schedule in fun things too!
Are there any other tips you’d suggest?
For me, when I work from home, or remotely, I find two apps super useful. The first is my Pomodoro app, I use PomoDone to get myself chunking my time in 25 minute focused sessions. A simple way of helping you focus on one thing at once – multi-tasking is now dead!
The second app I would highly recommend links beautiful with the PomoDone, it’s ToDoist a task list app, where you can have multiple lists, items and sub items – and more importantly for you colour coders, great color coding for lists, tags and filters!
There are many benefits from working from home, recent studies are showing that we can be more productive working at home, it reduces our commute times to seconds, and you also get less cake-based and office gossip distractions than if you’re seeing your colleagues every day in the office, but you need to remain focused to get the best out of your peaceful calm working environment.
Start the day as you mean to go on – uber organised!
Mine starts by writing up a day book of what happened yesterday, just quick bullets and any photos or images that are relevant. It helps me get back into the mindset of “work” and reconnects with what I’m supposed to be doing.
Then comes the to-do list. Written in a notebook with meetings / calls and to-do list on one side, space for bullets on the other (that’s tomorrow’s day book!) I then work my way through the list steadily, breaking between tasks for a few minutes to check email (notifications are switched off on my devices), jot down any new to-dos for the day and so on. Then it’s on to the next task.
That 10-15 minutes at the start of the day is pretty important for me to make sure I stay focused on what clients need and don’t get distracted by the frivolity of working at home.
Thanks for your comments Ross! Really appreciated.
A follow-up question from this we were just thinking about, is how do you work it after a long bank holiday weekend? We’ve just had one and most people say it puts more stress on them to complete their tasks in less time, do you have any pointers for that situation?
Exactly the same approach. Tuesday I sat down with my notebook and did the same thing. Great thing is I could (largely) switch off over the long weekend because I have confidence in my approach to “reconnect” with work after the break.
I’d agree there is a perception of a need to “do more” in 4 days thanks to the weekend though. It just needs better time management to resist the urge to do more because it feels like you should.