One of the best things you can do to help improve your work-from-home productivity is to create good habits. If you find yourself sleeping in, not starting work until after 10am, taking a long lunch break, and quitting work at 4pm, then you might need to adjust your habits or may find yourself looking for a new job. You also have to be careful about spending too much time working. That will lead to burnout and your family may hate you.
I have discovered that the best way to make sure I start each day is to have a daily meeting at 10am where I check in with people on my team. That allows me the morning to go through e-mail and prepare for the day before my first meeting. Should I have something such as a doctor's appointment, I can still make the meeting. That 10am meeting serves as a great way to force me into my home office at the beginning of the day.
To help remind me when it is time to leave the office, I make sure to add "dinner time" to my work calendar. I love food and have no problem quitting work to go eat. I also make sure to communicate this time to my wife so that we can eat together. Sometimes it is necessary to have after-dinner meetings with my colleagues in Japan. In those cases, I try to schedule activities during the day that would normally be reserved for my evenings such as working in the yard or other home chores. I just have to be careful to make sure those activities fit within the time allotted.
Scheduling the start of my work day and the end of the work day are a good start to creating good habits for working from home but there are more. Working through the entire day is a very necessary habit to form. You will need to figure out what works best for you. It is very easy to get distracted by personal e-mail, text messages, or random YouTube videos. To help combat these distractions, I try to limit these activities to no more than 10 minutes every couple of hours. I also find that if I keep a running task list of work-related items on my computer, I spend less time trying to figure out what to do. The list allows me to remain focused on tasks that need to be completed and things don't get forgotten.
With regards to forgetting things, I find that there are ways to remind myself of what needs to be done. The task list helps but there are other things you can do as well. If I am working on something important but need to walk away from my desk, I will leave a sticky note on my computer keyboard to remind me where to start when I return. This keeps me focused after an interruption. I will also place things in my walking path so I trip over them and am reminded to take care of them. One example of this is if I need to refill my water glass. When I leave my desk, I am reminded it is empty and that I need to fill it.
I have mentioned leaving my desk several times now and that is an important habit to get into. When there is a natural break in your day, get up and walk around. If you have time, don't hesitate to take a short walk and change your surroundings. It will help with your thinking process. I find that I often come up with solutions to problems much quicker on a walk than by sitting at my desk, trying to pound something out. While working in an office with your co-workers, this happens much more naturally as you physically walk to meetings or meet with colleagues. When you are at home and all meetings are done through video conferences, it is easy to stay at your desk all day long.
I am sure there are many more good habits that will help but these are the ones that stand out the most to me. The important thing is to create good ones and not those that will keep you from being productive.
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