How to Work from Home Effectively on Quarantine
These days we’ll be spending a lot of time online. Some of us are stuck home by choice and others because of the law. Whatever your situation might be, one thing is for certain, we have to try to make the best out of it.
Working from home for such a long period of time is a first for many people, and some are getting easily bored, unmotivated or too distracted to work as effectively as they might’ve hoped for.
That’s why I’m compiling a list of tips and recommendations to improve your home office routine and stay safe online as much as in real life. Take it from me, I’ve been working from home for more than a year and I still remember the unexpected hardships I faced at first.
Let’s get into it!
Conditionate Your Home Office
Here’s the thing, when you’re working from an office you have a strict schedule and a boss who’s constantly checking on you, but when you’re doing it from home you’re the only boss of your time. It sounds like a good thing, and it can be, you have more freedom after all, but it can also lead to a loss of your usual performance on the job.
You can wake up whenever you want, work on your pajamas all day and take a nap if you’re tired. If there’s no one watching it’s also easier to procrastinate with social media, YouTube and Netflix. Try to do this for a week or just a few days and you’ll lose a lot of your momentum, leaving everything for the last minute and rushing your work to reach a deadline.
Those small distractions can amount to a whole lot of time when you combine them all together, and they’ll leave you feeling unproductive in the long run.
What can you do online and offline to improve your home office routine?
Improve your Offline Habits
Let’s start with some offline habits. First, you need a self-imposed schedule. Without a schedule, you’ll be wandering around through your day trying to get things done without clear goals.
Make a list of all the things that you need to accomplish this week, then distribute them day by day. Only set two or three big important things at most for a single day. If you try to put too much on your plate you’ll end up doing nothing right. Once you’ve done this set a time for each task and divide those big goals into smaller goals that are achievable within a few hours.
For example, if you need to write an article or a marketing campaign, you can divide those tasks into pages. Page 1 from 9:00–10:00, Page 2 from 10:00–11:00 and so on. Make sure to write this down on paper or digitally and check every task you complete, that way you’ll feel the progress as you go through it. You also need to establish some breaks within every few hours so you can take a breath, relax and go back to work with a fresh mind.
Remember that your schedule should also limit your working hours as if you were still in the office. Many people tend to work until the late hours of the night just because they can or they feel they haven’t made enough progress. I recommend you respect your own time and treat yourself just like a good boss would treat his employees.
Besides working on a daily schedule you also need to work on your habits around the house. Take a shower and get out of your pajamas before you start your working hours. Why? Because you need to tell your brain that you’re not here to sleep. If you can, try to separate a room for work and another for pleasure. It’s not a good idea to work a few feet away from your bed as it will be a tempting distraction whenever you get stressed. If you need a break, by all means, take a nap to recover your energy.
However, you should have a specified time to do so on your schedule, otherwise, it will be counterproductive.
Productive Solutions for your Online Habits
Okay, so you’ve got your home workspace covered, now let’s get into your actual working tool, your computer. The internet is a vast place where you can have one tab with your work open and five other tabs with funny memes that your friends sent you.
How do you avoid procrastination then? This will not be easy, of course. We tend to do it even when we’re working from the office, so it will take some will power.
Here’s my advice, just like you need to separate one room for work and one for pleasure, you should do the same with your browsers. For example, if you tend to use Google Chrome to consume all your entertainment, then download another browser like Firefox or Safari and use that one specifically for work. Train your brain to separate work from pleasure and apply that to your browsing experience.
Here comes the hard part, your phone. Yeah, you need to get rid of that. I know that you probably have to answer some messages or emails from work, but you can do that from your computer anyway. The thing with your phone is that maybe you answer a message from work, but then it leads you to see a notification for that new game you were expecting or that comment on your Facebook post, which will finally lead you to a downwards spiral into procrastination.
Leave your phone outside the room you work in or at least outside your immediate reach. Have it with the sound on in case you’re expecting a call, but otherwise don’t pay attention to it until you’re on your break. Trust me, this will increase your productivity like nothing else.
Another thing, when it comes to emails you should be extra careful during this time. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the concerns of most users and any news about the topic are easy bait for malware.
Hackers are exploiting the fear of the virus to spread misinformation and malicious software that will infect the computers of their victims, so you should protect your devices from these threats.
If you would like to know more about this topic, you can read our previous article “Hackers are Using the Coronavirus to Spread their Own Malware”.
Another distraction, while we’re trying to focus on our work, are the annoying ads we tend to encounter while doing research on the web. If you want to get rid of ads and malware for free, you can try our own solution Online.io. We know a thing or two about blocking nasty stuff, so take it from us.
You can stay home and take care of your health while we take care of your online security.
Hopefully, this advice was helpful to get some motivation and work done from home effectively. And remember, it’s not all work. Try to separate some time to relax, spend time with your loved ones and make the best of this situation.
Stay healthy and help to flatten the curve! #StayHome
