7 Tips To Boost Productivity While Working From Home
Every day, we all suffer due to lack of focus and excessive distractions which in turn affects our productivity and quality of work. Now, with the challenge of remote working and paradigm shift on how we manage our work, most of us are surely getting messy and confused.
Many of us are wondering today about how to maintain our productivity levels while working from home and strike a great work-life balance.
Working from home in crises bestow on us massive distraction sources which affect our focus more than ever! Social Media, psychological worry, disruptive news, concerns on family, friends, and society in addition to the invasion of work to our personal space, those are all affecting our productivity and distractions can seem impossible to avoid!
So, we have prepared 7 Tips To Boost Productivity While Working From Home that helps to create the right habits and support in minimizing the distraction and increase focus while performing your tasks from home.
So, how can you take back control of your time and attention? Here are the seven proven strategies for overcoming distractions and reclaiming your focus.
1. Put yourself in a distraction-free zone (Time & Space)
It is as simple as visualizing that you are working from your office. Choose a corner in your house that you can organize to be your working station. Once you do this, you will need to ensure that your family respect this zone. You can add fun by printing a post and sticking it to the door mentioning that “WORK IN PROCESS. KNOCK & WAIT!”.
Make sure that this is your only working station in your house and arrange your space to suit your mood.
Your time also here is very important and you surely need to be productive and creative during the allocated working hours, as such, we recommend the following tips:
- Identify the working hours per day (recommended from 7-8 hours only)
- Make sure your phone on silent and you are isolated from any distraction source
- Take short breaks as if you are at the office and make sure those breaks are time allocated
- Avoid accessing social media and any stressful news
2. One Task at a Time
Identify the tasks that you want to accomplish during the day and focus on the top three tasks that you can do within the frame of the working hours allocated. Ensure you process those tasks perfectly and with passion. Write those tasks on sticky notes and post them around your space and make them visible. Perform one task at a time and avoid multi-tasking unless there is a need for it!
Ask yourself every morning: What are the three most important things to accomplish today? Create a separate to-do list for any other tasks. You can begin to tackle those less-important tasks once you’ve accomplished the first 3 goals.
3. Control Your Thoughts
Our mind is a big source of distraction, and it is time to learn to tame our thinking!
Yes, thinking is a major source of distraction and many of us cannot run away from it. You need to prepare your mind for work and find simple ways for shutting down the appearance of non-important ideas as well. Here are some simple ideas that can help you to overcome this:
- When you cannot stop thinking move away from your working station and come back only when you are ready (remember this is your break as well)
- Practice meditation and allow your mind to channel its thinking process towards one thing only
- If you like the music you can play some gentle soft music without words in the background to help you gear up your focus
- Talk to your mind: yes, this approach stimulates focus. You can do it asking yourself why I am being distracted and try to isolate the source of distraction
- Be mindful about your thoughts, instead of allowing yourself to skip between tasks and distractions.
4. Allocate Deadlines on your tasks
The mind is wired to conserve energy whenever possible! More hours worked doesn’t mean you necessarily get more things accomplished. Therefore, to increase your productivity give yourself specific deadlines for each task in hand.
5. Work as play
I’ve been promoting this idea for a long time now! Fun makes it easy for the mind and unleashes its productivity. Changing the workplan to play-plan will surely allow your mind to be more focused, and in turn, it increases dopamine secretion which makes you feel satisfied and creative. I’ll share with you some tips that I found personally useful and helpful:
- Use colors and do doodling
- Plan your work as drawing
- Write your project/ task as a story with all its surrounding factors
- Try to have small play-game around you like darts, or mini basketball
- Always isolate stress by ensuring telling your mind that I am enjoying my work and my work is my next piece of art
- Think outside the box and unleash creativity
6. Create Task Metrix
While working remotely people tend to send you tasks that need attention from time to time. And you keep adding these tasks onto your list continuously! Well, there’s no problem with that. But with the increased list of tasks, it becomes overwhelming and hard to manage!
Now, remember the 3-tasks/day rule mentioned above! Apply it here! Prepare a Task Metrix where you can allocate your important tasks and identify how many hours per days they require. Then move on to other important or less important tasks that need completion. Ensure your task list is always in a visible spot right in front of you! This will help you to be on track and make things easy to manage.
7. Celebrate Achievement
Don’t forget to celebrate your success! Yes, people working from home forget to do so.
If you are leading a team, do a video call and celebrate success with your team members; try to make something creative like having group celebration coffee moment! Also, don’t forget to celebrate with your family, friends, children and even yourself. Indulge in some fun activities, like watching movies, playing with children or even cooking!
Share your success story with family and friends and team!
About the Author
Mahmoud Iskandarani
CEO & Managing Partner