How To Stay Organized When You’re Working From Home

Getting distracted by the laundry pile, and the dishes, the kids, and the latest Netflix show….?

If you’re relatively new to working from home (i.e only since the start of the COVID era) then you may still be adjusting to your new setup. But this is something I’ve been doing for almost 7 years now, so I’m going to give some insight into how I keep myself organized and I’m hoping it will be of some help to you too.

The main thing about getting organized is to find out what personally works best for you. Everyone will have their own way of doing things and what works for a colleague may not suit your individual working style. But there are a few common tips for staying on top of things that will help anyone who’s working from home and that’s what we’re going to talk about here.

Plan Your Task List

What happens when you go to the store without a shopping list? You often come home with a ton of stuff you don’t need and nothing you actually do need, right? Or maybe you forgot to get the toilet roll because you got distracted by the 2 for 1 cookies on the next shelf?! It’s easy to forget about the important but less interesting things when you don’t have a list to work from and the exact same thing applies to your work to-do list. Your brain is going to gravitate towards doing the things you enjoy doing first rather than the things that are most important to get done, even if you don’t love doing those particular tasks! Writing everything down in a to-do list will make you hold yourself accountable for getting everything done, even the bits you don’t like, AND it takes a lot of stress out of trying to balance a million things at once when you have an actual task list in front of you.

I use Buckets to create my to-do lists and the cynics amongst us will say of course I do — I work with the app, right? But in all honesty, I don’t know how I’d manage my workload properly without something to help me keep track of details and simply stay organized. You probably know already that Buckets is a task manager so I won’t go through the whole spiel on that, but I’ll give you the lowdown on how I use it in case it might help you to give it a try too. I have a LOT of different projects on the go at once with a lot of different tasks contained within each one and by using Buckets I can manage all of these in one place. I do this by using cards within Projects to manage tasks along a process of “to do” > “done” and I use Checklists within the Cards to complete steps required to finish the overarching task (i.e. whatever the Card has been created for).

I work on a number of different projects with my job and between organizing those and the rest of my life I’ve found it much easier to get other people in my life using Buckets too. This allows us to easily share notes with each other and collaborate more efficiently on getting different tasks completed.

Take Life Into Account And Adapt

Working from home has so many benefits but you do need to embrace it as a new way of working in order to really see those benefits, otherwise, you may start to get frustrated by trying to completely mimic the office atmosphere you had previously. If you have kids, it’s going to be tough to get work done if they’re around the house, so if they’re old enough to look after themselves then make sure you have a specific workspace set up and explain to them that you need “quiet time” during certain hours and not to interrupt you unless it’s urgent. Now, full disclosure, I don’t have kids, so I’m the last person to advise anyone on parenting strategies, but Buckets co-founder Eric definitely has some expertise in this area:

“Working remotely at home this past year has been much different from the past 10 years of my remote work lifestyle. During the pandemic I’ve had to adapt as my son’s school moved into a virtual environment and his extracurricular activities paused until circumstances could change for the better. These were valuable hours I had spent taking care of work, but it made the most sense for me to become his primary caregiver (and newly found tutor) in our house since I was already capable of being physically present for him. While business continued to move forward as usual, the extra time and attention my son needed with his school work, meals, and companionship took valuable time that I would need to make up for somehow. But there is truly only 24 hours in a day to work with.

By leveraging Buckets even more than usual to track the beginning of thoughts and ideas, I was able to manage the daily responsibilities I had already committed to as well as be there when he needed anything and everything throughout the day. Before I could forget what I was doing or losing my train of thought and dead-ending myself, I could leave a voice to text comment or rattle off a grocery list in my Sandbox to come back to as soon as I was finished helping him out. On the flip-side, my Projects tracked Cards filled with things I had running with different teams, even those working outside of Buckets.” — Eric Greninger

Another thing to make sure you do is embrace the flexibility that working from home allows you, as although there will be times that you do need uninterrupted time, you will also have more freedom to spend more time with your family and take time out when you need it/work around events (or crisis situations!) involving them to ensure they have your full attention when they need it. The lack of commute is another thing that is really going to free up more time for you.

If you have other things that you need to work around in your life, then working from home really does offer you the opportunity to do so, so take it! Use the planning I outlined earlier to organize your schedule around your life to create a successful work-life blended lifestyle which in turn will give you the “work-life balance” people are always talking about. Although, to be honest, I much prefer the idea of a blended lifestyle where you’re not constantly swapping from one mindset to the other and can successfully combine both your work and personal life in a happy medium.

Setting Up Your Workspace

You’re going to see lots of articles about the perfect workspace setup and how getting dressed in professional clothes and sitting at a desk maximizes your productivity and makes you “feel” like you’re in work mode. This isn’t one of those articles. I have a desk and it’s great — when I want to use it. But guess where I am right now? I’m sitting on the sofa on a recline with the laptop on a stand over my knee (laptop stands are the best, highly recommend getting one!), wearing my sweatpants, and that’s working just fine. I don’t know about you, but I work much more productively when I’m comfortable. And our co-founder/CEO Mike has been known to set up his laptop from the jacuzzi tub…

So, you do you. If working from a desk all day is better for your mindset, do that! But if not, then don’t, and that’s absolutely fine too. Personally, I switch between the two. I have a chronic pain condition and sitting at a desk all day just doesn’t work for me but alternating between it and the sofa has turned out to be the perfect solution. I love my desk so I usually work from it at the start of the day and then switch to the sofa. This also brings me back to the idea of adapting; remember that you’re not confined to an office anymore and if you feel that you work better at a desk, on the sofa, or even on the kitchen counter, you go ahead and do that! There is no “one size fits all” here, you can find your own way of doing things that works for you.

Minimize Distractions

For some people, they’ll have less distractions working from home than in an office, but for others the opposite is true, especially if you have a family at home. For me, I actually get distracted most by mess; if I have it in the back of my mind that I need to do laundry or need to wash the dishes or anything, it bugs me until I do it, so I try to get all of those things done before I sit down to work. If that’s just not something you have time for, but those things still bug you, I recommend creating a new to-do list just for those things, i.e. “Household Chores” and list all of them down so that you have them out of your head. This means you know you can do them later and won’t forget, so you can focus on the work at hand. Or even just write them down in the Buckets Sandbox for safekeeping, which only takes 1 minute to do.

Another big distraction is your phone and social media. If your phone is beeping every few mins it’s going to put you off. So put it on silent and do a quick check every hour for anything urgent if you need to. One thing I find really helpful to use is something called the Pomodoro Timer which blocks your work into 25 min chunks of time with a 5min break in between and then a 15 min break after every 4. I usually use the 15 min break to grab a snack or have a quick nosey on my social media accounts (not my work ones!).

Finally, Embrace Your Natural Productivity Rhythm

Some people are more productive at different times of the day and although not everyone has the flexibility to change the hours they work, you can take control of what you work on during those hours. So for example, if you’re really not much of a morning person, that would be a good time to do any easy tasks on your radar that don’t require much thinking (this would be me) and then do tougher or more creative tasks later in the day. Check out this post I wrote a while back on “How To Figure Out When You’re Most Productive” and it will help you get into a good groove!

And That’s It!

This post turned out a little longer than I expected, but I really wanted to give you an honest and authentic insight into how I actually organize my day and show you that you don’t have to do what everyone else does in order to be organized. You just have to find your own way and sometimes that takes some trial and error but I hope you’ll find some inspiration from this post to help you get there!

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