Working from home can certainly be a luxury, but it comes with its challenges as well. While productivity expectations remain the same, your home office environment is bound to be quite different from your office office environment. You may find it hard to stay focused at home, and working from the couch in your sweatpants might lose its charm when your kids are constantly wanting your attention or your neighbour keeps firing up his leaf blower. To help manage the transition, we’ve come up with five tips to help you stay on track.
5 Tips to Help You Stay on Track
1. Create a Clean, Distraction-Free Workspace
The key to staying productive is creating an environment that allows you to focus on the tasks at hand. Make sure you have good lighting and a comfortable chair. At the end of each workday, tidy up your space so that it’s clean and clutter-free when you get started the following morning.
2. Set Your Schedule
Set an intention at the beginning of your day to ensure you stay on task. If you have a long list of things to get to in a day, create a task list and check things off as you go. We use Asana to manage tasks and projects, but a simple pen and paper will do too!
3. Create a Morning Routine
Without the usual morning commute to worry about, you may be wondering how to start your day. Create a new morning routine that works for you and stick to it. Whether you make your morning coffee and go for a walk, do some journaling, or get a workout in, creating a new morning routine will help you feel ready to tackle the workday from home.
4. Take Breaks
Use a timer to make sure you’re taking regular breaks throughout the day. Without the visual cues of your co-workers taking coffee breaks or going for lunch, you might forget to get up and move your body as often as you would in the office. And don’t forget – It’s okay to feel anxious about COVID-19. No one is expecting you to be at your best all the time right now, so listen to yourself and do what’s best for you. If you need a mental break, take one! If you need some help relaxing, check out Headspace. They’re offering free meditations, sleep, and movement exercises right now in addition to their full collection.
5. Be Accessible
At Fairware, we’ve found that being accessible to one another and having regular team check-ins allows us to support each other and stay on top of things, even while we’re working out of the office. We have a daily morning webinar with our entire team at 10 am through RingCentral, and we use Slack for quick conversations throughout the day.
Have other tips to share? Let us know and we’ll add them to the list!
