Posts from — December 2010

It’s easy to dream about a job that allows you to work from the comforts of your own home, but when push comes to shove, working productively while working from home can actually be more difficult than you think.  Just imagine, your comfy couch, lounging in sweats, sweets and snacks all day, and your favorite TV shows streaming just beyond your laptop.  Perfect, right?  Wrong.

Home office photos found here and here.

It’s all too easy to send a mass email to your group, Subject: WFH, and then slack off the rest of the day, so here to help you are my tried and true, must follow tips for being productive while working from home.

1. Get out of bed. I know it sounds rudimentary, but seriously.  Go on.  Get up.  Get yourself out of bed.  I know your bed is comfy, cozy and warm, but it’s all too easy to forget that you’re actually supposed to be working when you doze off to dream every other 5 minutes.

2. Shower. Again.  You’re thinking, come on, right?  Well think again.  Showering not only wakes you up and gets your blood flowing, but it makes you believe that it’s time to start doing… something.  And today, that something is going to be work!  So wash away those eye crusts (gross, gross, and gross) and soak in the hot water.  It’s time to go to work, kind of.

3. Get dressed and look presentable. Yes you are likely going to sit at home all day by yourself and not physically meet with anyone except maybe the mailman who, presumably, has seen you looking much, much worse than your morning bedhead.  But in today’s day and age, working from home does not mean working alone.  Especially with modern companies, iChat, Google Video Chat and Skype are all too common in the workplace to think that working from home means it’s okay to lounge in sweats and your boyfriend’s oversized tshirt all day.  Not only will getting dressed and looking semi presentable (I’m not suggesting you dress to the nines) save you from an impromptu Skype call with the president, but dressy casually also melts your mind into a lax mode that is not going to benefit you when it comes time to crunch numbers and get things done.

4. Set up shop. For the same reason’s that I suggest in tip 1 to Get out of Bed, it’s important that you create a workspace that actually welcomes productivity, not a place that hinders it (eh hem.. like the couch).  When a blizzard has me working from home, I clear off our apartment’s island and gather all of my work day’s essentials:  laptop, power cord, cell phone, cell phone charger, sticky notes, a pen, my papers and a glass of water.  Grabbing all of your work essentials first thing in the morning makes it easier to sit in one place for almost 8 hours (how do we do that in the office?!), and it weakens your excuses as to why you want to get up and wander around the apartment, 5, 10, 20 times a workday.  Also, my couch is comfortable.  I love my couch.  But slouching on the couch with computer on lap will hardly win your home office an ergonomic award, and please, revisit Tip 1.  Snoozing and drifting into slumbers does not help productivity levels!  There’s a reason nap time stopped in kindergarten folks!  My island’s stools make me sit up straight and stay attentive to my work; my back is to the living room and TV, so even if I wanted to watch my favorite day time soaps, it would be hard to do. Capice? Capicú.

5. And finally, stick to a schedule. As I’ve referenced in Tips 1-4, it’s easy to snooze, to snack, to watch last night’s episode of Glee, to run some errands that you’ve put off for months now.  But the point is, you’re working from home, you’re not on vacation.  You have a boss, and a team that are depending on you to be productive and to execute the same way that you do while sitting in your cube.  Follow the same schedule that you do while in the office.  Do you always spend 30 minutes catching up on emails in the morning?  Do the same from home.  Do you always check in on your intern’s progress right before lunch?  Do teh same from home.  Pick a time for lunch.  Shut down shop and eat lunch for 30-60 minutes.  Then return to business.  Whatever your routine may be, try to stick to it as closely as possible while working from home, to remind yourself that today is in fact a work day.

So there they are – my top 5, tried and true tips on how to work productively while working from home.  I never promised they’d be ground breaking or innovative, did I?  No.  But I do promise that they will help you start your day strong, stay on track and keep focused throughout the work day.