In 2020, working from home became reality overnight for many professionals. If you’re still working from home and likely to be for the foreseeable future, it’s worth taking a pause to evaluate – are your work-from-home habits and workspace are serving you, or is there room for improvement? For your reflection and inspiration, this post is a compilation of work-from-home tips and tricks to help you increase productivity, lower stress, and make the most of your remote lifestyle.
Time-Based Tips
1. To the extent possible, set and keep regular, consistent working hours.
2. To improve focus and productivity, try the Pomodoro Technique – use a timer, phone alarm, or app like Tomato Timer to signal times to work and times to take a break. Knowing that an alarm will sound when you need to move to your next task helps you focus and keep your eyes off the clock. Read more about the Pomodoro Technique here.
3. Preserve 1-2 minutes of quiet time before each meeting. Use that time to take some deep breaths, refresh yourself on the agenda and purpose of the meeting, and consciously choose the attitude and energy you want to bring to the meeting. The impact of these 60-120 seconds cannot be overstated – defend this time as fiercely as you can.
4. On average, it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to recover your focus after an interruption. If others are at home when you’re working, minimize interruptions as much as possible by using headphones (bonus points if they’re noise-cancelling), sticky notes, or closed doors to signal to others at home that you are in ‘Do-Not-Disturb’ mode. Depending on culture and expectations at your workplace, experiment with turning off email or chat notifications, at least for part of your workday.
5. Know and honour your internal clock. Many people are primed to do complex, focused work in the early morning, admin work in the late morning/early afternoon when our energy dips, and creative, loose, collaborative work in the afternoon. Learn your patterns and design your day accordingly, to the extent possible.
6. Track your time, either temporarily or on an ongoing basis. Record your day in 15-minute increments to get the real, hard data about how you’re spending your time and where you might want to make adjustments.
Tips for Your Physical Space
7. Respect your workspace; whether you’re aware of it or not, you are influenced by your physical surroundings. Make and keep your working space pleasant, comfortable and visually appealing to you.
8. Use your working space for working only, if possible. This conditions your brain to recognize that when you are in that specific chair, or at that specific spot at the table, it’s time to work. When you’re not, it’s not.
9. Use visual queues to signal when it’s work time and when it’s not. If you have a separate office at home, the office accomplishes this for you. If you don’t, try other visual signals like different lighting, pushing furniture aside, tucking the work laptop away, or even putting up a room divider or curtain to remove the workspace from sight during off-hours. Visually remove as many reminders of work as possible at the end of your work day, especially if you are working from your bedroom.
10. For the sake of your sleep, don’t work from bed.
11. Remove tempting distractions from your workspace, like the TV (or at least the remote) and your personal cell phone. Turn of all unnecessary notifications to avoid interruptions (see Tip 4). Try noise cancelling headphones or earplugs to reduce audible distractions.
Nutrition Tips
12. To help you make choices that support your vitality and health, eat and drink mindfully, paying attention to how you feel before, during and after.
13. Keep an ample supply of healthy snacks and cool, fresh water readily available. Keep the unhealthy food hidden from sight, or even better, don’t have it in the house.
14. If you’re a coffee drinker who’s prone to anxiety, invest in high-quality decaf and reduce the number of full-caffeine drinks you have each day.
Mental and Emotional Well-Being
15. If you’re not feeling like your usual self, cut yourself some slack. Acknowledge and give space for what you’re feeling, and check in with yourself on what you need. Managing and regulating your emotions during interactions at work might feel more challenging that usual due to underlying stress in yourself and in others. Practise self care and be kind to yourself.
16. Be mindful of what information you consume, and when. Notice how checking the news and social media impacts your ability to focus and your mood. Notice the situations when you feel tempted to check your phone; often it’s when we’re feeling anxious and our brains are seeking a dopamine hit. If this is you, consider how else you might ease your anxiety.
17. Without your boss or colleagues present to see you, it might be more tempting to use social media during work hours. Set boundaries around when and how often you check social media and the news. If you struggle with this, try an app designed to block social media sites during certain hours of the day. Your mind and mood will thank you.
18. Daily exercise is extremely helpful to improve energy and keep stress in check. Try to find a form of exercise you enjoy and if all else fails, put on your favourite upbeat playlist and shake that booty!
Routines
19. Prioritize and protect your sleep; sleep is the foundation that affects all other areas of your life. Every other tip in this list will be more difficult on a bad night’s sleep.
20. Maintain good hygiene and take care of your appearance just as you would if you were going to work; shower, brush your teeth, brush your hair and do whatever else you’d do if you were going the office. Notice how you feel on days you do this, versus days you roll out of bed at 8:55am and work in your pyjamas (we’ve all done it).
21. Replace your old commute time with simple routines or rituals that contribute to your well-being and book-end your workday. Incorporate time outside, if safe to do so. Start your day with things that energize you and get you ready to focus, like a walk around the block, a 5-minute meditation and putting on your favourite work playlist. End your day with things that ease you into your evening, like putting away your laptop, lowering the lights, stretching, taking another walk around the block and enjoying a cup of tea from your favorite mug.
22. Log in to your work computer at least 15 minutes before your first meeting to give yourself some time to settle in to the work day.
23. Take breaks, including lunch breaks. Prep your lunch ahead of time to make it easier to eat well during the height of the work day. Physically walk away from your working area during breaks, and try to spend the break off of screens entirely. Look out a window to give your eyes a rest.
Social Tips
24. Don’t let your relationships slip to the bottom of your priority list. Working from home can feel lonely and isolating, especially if you live alone, and as humans, we need relationships in order to thrive. Look for opportunities to virtually connect with others by organizing phone-call walking dates or online happy-hours, coffee catch-up’s, book clubs, trivia nights – anything that sounds enjoyable to you and keeps you in connection with others.
25. Take a few minutes to check in with your colleagues; ask them how they’re doing, and know that you might need to ask twice to get past the customary answer of ‘fine.’ Look for opportunities to support others who seem down or stressed, and don’t be afraid to ask for help or support when you need it.
26. If you’re managing others, practise spontaneous expressions of praise and gratitude to your staff. Give them specific details about what they did that was great, and why you appreciated it. This is a mood-booster for everyone involved.
Productivity and Effectiveness
27. If you find yourself distracted by all the things you need to do at home, keep a notebook or piece of paper handy to write down any new personal tasks that come to mind throughout the day, like booking your next dental appointment or picking up some more toilet paper at the store. When you know they’re written down and won’t be forgotten, you can put these pesky tasks out of your mind for the time being. (If this tip is appealing to you, check out Getting Things Done by David Allen for the holy grail of productivity systems).
28. Unitask both on and off work. Unitasking helps you strengthen your focus and concentration, making it easier for you to get into a flow state where you’re doing quality work, and time seems to pass without you noticing it. Who doesn’t want a work day like that? Plus, unitasking pleasurable activities in your off-time helps you savour the experience, which has been shown to increase overall happiness.
29. Try the Ivy Lee method – at the end of each day, write down your top 6 priorities for the next day, in order of importance. The next day, start with item one and work your way down the list.
30. If calendars are more your style, spend time every Friday afternoon scheduling time to work on your top priorities for the following week. Break bigger projects down into finite actions and schedule a realistic amount of time to complete each action.
31. Working from home means communicating more via email; take 15 seconds to emotionally proofread your emails before sending them. Does the email convey the tone and attitude you want it to? How could it be perceived by the reader?
32. Chances are you and your colleagues are getting more emails than you’re used to. Help yourself and others by keeping your emails concise yet friendly, focused on only one subject, with the subject clearly stated in the subject line, and make it easy for the reader to understand your message and if applicable, what you’re asking them to do.
33. You might find that you are able to work more efficiently at home with fewer co-workers interrupting you. Use that extra time to get caught up on your emails, complete backlogged tasks, and to connect with others deliberately. If you still have time left over, consider upskilling by reviewing and improving your systems, brainstorming, reading materials relevant to your role and industry, and looking for opportunities to help out your boss.
34. Prioritize ruthlessly and don’t default to ‘Yes.’ Be realistic about your workload and whether you can take on more work without compromising existing commitments. Have a response ready for new work requests, like “I’d love to say yes, but my plate is full; let me discuss with my manager / evaluate and get back to you.” Stay aligned with your boss on what your top priorities are. If you have more autonomy to determine what you work on, tools like Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Matrix can help.
Wrapping Up
If your productivity is down, be patient and kind to yourself. It’s ok to be impacted by what’s going on right now – everyone is. And just because you don’t have it ‘as bad’ as someone else, doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to feel and express whatever is present for you.
Use the tips above to make one or two adjustments at a time; aim for sustainability and consistency. Take good care of yourself and most importantly, remember that even though it might not always feel like it, we are all more than our jobs.
Have a bigger work challenge? Looking to find more work-life balance? Feeling burned out? Get in touch for a free coaching consult.
