By Mauricio Prinzlau
As a work-from-home writer, I can completely understand how difficult it can be to remain focused and keep your productivity levels high throughout the day. There are of course great benefits of working from home including – less travel time and saving on gas. You also save a lot of time getting dressed up in the morning; this extra time could in turn be used to catch up on some much needed sleep.
But there is one major problem with home offices — it becomes more and more difficult to find that work-life balance and increase your productivity at the same time. That is why, the first thing to do is to keep your work completely separate from your personal life.
To help you make your home office more productive, we have compiled together some extremely effective tips.
1. Create a Separate Space
Just because you are working from home doesn’t mean you can work from any couch in your house. Decide on a specific space in your house that you want to turn into your home office. Make sure you have ample of natural light coming your way. Install a comfortable chair and table but make sure it’s not so comfortable that it makes you want to sleep. Hang some motivating posters around to keep your moving and place some green plants to always keep you optimistic.
2. Move Away from Distractions
May be the laundry needs to be done or may be the courier guy is at the door and he just won’t stop ringing the bell- whatever it is, you have to find a way to move away from all the distractions. Make your home office into your sanctuary and only come out of it when you are on a planned break or if there is an emergency. Getting up after every 10 minutes because of a distraction can highly tamper your productivity.
3. Use Organizational Apps to Keep You on Track
When you work from home, you often forget about the time or a deadline and this is because you have no one to remind you of that. Use timers to track the total time you are working and calendar apps to remind you about important deadlines or meetings. If you have team members at remote locations, you should definitely use a cloud storage app to share all the data in one place and collaborate in real time.
4. Take Regular Breaks
People are sometimes so much focused on work that the line between office and personal life gets blurred out. I have been drenched with so much work at times that my brain completely gives up and even if I am working for 10 hours a day, I am only productive for half of that time. That is why, it is important to set specific work time. Make a schedule and set your specific breaks to make sure you are not getting over-burdened by work so much that it’s getting to your head.
5. Get Out of Sweatpants
Yes, one of the advantages of working from home is that you can wear anything you want, including sweatpants. But here is a fact – sweatpants make you lazy. Wear something else that doesn’t make you sleepy. You might be staying at home the entire day but that doesn’t mean you can’t dress up a little. It’s all in the name of productivity after all.
