Productivity Boosting when you are working from Home

It’s been a couple of months since the Coronavirus outbreak worldwide. As governments announced general holidays to encourage social distancing. Now, many companies have started to put a heightened emphasis on working from home, and few are still stuck on decision making. Actually thinking about employee safety, they can’t start the business. During this time of uncertainty, employees may not be at their best productive period. There’s a lot of anxiety with fnf, and rightly so. WFH needs high Accountability, but also Empathy and Trust. Be mindful, this is a stressful time for everyone. But after years of working from cafe and home, there is one thing I’m sure now: working remotely takes a lot of purposeful planning. Working from home is fantastic, right up until your neighbours start firing up all sorts of power tools and noisy machinery across the street. Managing your entire time and selecting your hours are often incredibly hard if you don’t deliberately plan your day prior to time.

There is a say that, “While you’re alone you’re entirely your own master.” When working remotely, you’re more likely to spend half your time battling procrastination, distractions, or managing energy dips. If you surrender to your distractions, you may finish up devoting productive time to fighting off the guilt that comes from giving in to those distractions. Distractions are as endless as you permit them to be. And bad habits form quickly.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• For employers, WFH can boost productivity, reduce turnover, and lower organizational costs, while employees enjoy different facilities.
• To work effectively from home, you’ll need to make sure you that you have all the things that meets your need, a workable schedule you can stick to, and ways to connect with others.

Start Work as Early as Possible

Rising before the sun is a habit shared by most successful people. In an exceedingly survey of few executives cited by Vanderkam, majority of them said they get up before 6 am on weekdays. This makes excellent sense from a productivity standpoint — you will have fewer distractions and a detailed environment to focus on.

Believe it or not, a technique to figure from home productively is to dive into your to-do list as soon as you awaken. Merely starting tasks very first thing within the morning before the remainder of your family have woken up may be the key to creating real progress.

Plus, consistent with one study, waking early may also cause you to be happier, which is incredibly important during this lockdown time. If mental state is satisfactory, then your productivity will automatically increase.

Dedicate Mornings to High-Value Work

Work on your high-value tasks very first thing in the morning — cut the design and begin doing real work when you are most active.

Don’t waste all that mental clarity and energy on planning what to try and do for the following eight hours. If you’re a morning person, you’ll get a tonne tired the first morning hours. It pays to specialize in essential tasks for the day during your morning.

A plan from yesterday makes it easier to induce started immediately after you rise up.

If You’re Not a Morning Person, Work When You’re Most Productive

When you’re working from home, it is important to recognise when you are most focused and energetic and to plan your schedule around that. Energy is that the critical component we all have to consistently produce our greatest work, regardless of where we are.

If you’re a night-owl and wish some hours to ease into the day, leverage your afternoons and evenings. If you’re productive between the hours of 3 pm and 11 pm, plan your tasks accordingly and make those your work hours.

It’s better to concentrate your energy into a selected period than randomly insert it across chunks of your time. To maximize your most efficient periods, save your harder tasks for once you know you will be within the right headspace for them.

Prepare For a Successful Morning in Advance

Planning your day the night before will provide you with back lots wasted hours within the morning and lower your stress levels. The first quiet hour of the morning will be a perfect time to target meaningful work without being interrupted.

Try this tonight. If you’re pleased with the results, then decide to try it every week. After every week, you will be able to decide whether you wish to feature “night-before planning” to your life.

Structure Your Day As You Would Normally

When working from home, you manage practically everything — calendar, projects, tasks, and breaks. Without a correct structure, you’ll be able to quickly lose focus or die.

To stay on schedule, segment what you’ll do and when over the course of the day. Use a web calendar to form personal events and reminders that tell you when to shift gears and begin on new tasks. If your mornings are for writing while within the office, use the identical schedule reception.

You could even dress the part and remind yourself you’re in work-mode. Which means comfortable work clothes — not pyjamas. it’s a component of the mental trick of demarcating between work and therefore the remainder of your life.

And remember to require breaks, refresh and recover. After you sleep in your office, it is simple to overwork. log out when you’re speculated to. And resist the urge to return back to your computer after dinner.

Structure is not the enemy to freedom, it’s the gateway.

Separate Work Zones From Relaxing Zones

Office spaces provide designated areas employees start associating with work and focus. This may not be the case in a home environment, so it is important to recreate this space. Some ideal prerequisites include an area proper light, minimal distractions and a comfortable desk and chair.

Once a setup is established, don’t neglect the importance of taking breaks. The absence of colleagues and social interaction should not lead to long uninterrupted sessions. Use the time to spend time with family, or work on personal projects that require the occasional check-in or do excercise! There’s a silver lining to every scenario.

When you work from home, it’s easy to curl up in bed with a laptop and pretend that you’re “working”. But to improve your efficiency, build a separate home office/desk just for work. This sets your brain up for enhanced productivity — your brain gets spatially wired to think of the office as the place where work happens.

The right mindset

The shift to remote is going to be alien for lots of us. Be respectful and considerate — everyone’s doing the best they can. Founded core work hours when the whole team is anticipated to be available and clearly define these on a calendar. Be mindful of every other’s calendars and schedule sensitively so all concerned parties can extract the utmost output from their workday. Quantify what’s being done at the top of every day, and by whom. Transparency is vital here. you’ll be able to shape this right at the start during daily team meetings.

It’s equally easy to also overwork yourself when working from home. Be mindful of your on-screen time.

Plan breaks

In between your focused sprints go on Twitter and Facebook. Watch random YouTube videos if you want. Do the dishes. Run an errand. You no longer have an excuse to step away (physically or mentally) from focused work time because these breaks are already planned into your day. You’re going to do these things anyway — so be smart about it.

Keep Socialising for mental health

Connecting with other people is needed more than ever to stay healthy mentally and physically, productive, happy and sane. You can hold virtual meetings, jump on a phone call, or send a friend a text. Reach out and support one another — and laugh!

Modern technology has made it insanely easy to stay connected. Use tools like Skype, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, and Facebook to stay connected with friends and colleagues at work. Positive social support can improve our resilience in coping with stress. Check-in with your friends, family, and neighbours regularly.

Using Right Tools

Ensure the coordination tools used by your organisation/team are installed on your laptop and working properly. Here are a few quick tips from our WFH Best Practices on how best to use them in a remote work scenario:

Document everything: Meetings may become increasingly asynchronous, so it is important to document all the items discussed and assigned. Record key decisions in a centralized decision log. This can be done via written notes hosted in a common cloud folder, like Confluence.

Get the internet speed you need: If you have kids, their FaceTiming and Xbox habits may slow your connection and download speeds. Moving as close as you can to your Wi-Fi router can help (devices that are distant tend to draw on bandwidth), or you can consider switching to Ethernet. You’ll likely need a dongle since laptops don’t have Ethernet ports these days, plus an Ethernet cable to connect your computer to your router.

Use Phone Apps: If your job involves making long distance and/or international calls, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, and Skype all let you call over the Internet across the globe on the cheap. And if you and the person you’re calling are on the same service, the call will be free.

Clean up your desk

Evolution has selected for us to be constantly scanning our surroundings for dangers. That’s why our ancestors survived and made babies, when the other ones got devoured by various beasts.

This may sound silly, but I found that cleaning up my desk helps me focus better. The more clutter I have, the more my eyes keep wandering around.

The Bottom Line

Working from home can be challenging for many people. How you choose to face that challenge won’t just determine your productivity — it will determine your mental health and even your happiness. It can be exciting, empowering and even profitable, provided you are realistic about the pros and cons.