Working from Home - The unforeseen impact of COVID19

Within a matter of days, businesses have closed their doors, converted nearly all office based staff onto laptops and sent them home to work remotely in order to keep safe. As blissful as this sounds initially, for some it will be an absolute nightmare.

We have provided some tips below to help you remain focused and make the most of your working day.

Differentiate between work and home mode:

This is possibly the most critical action you can take. During work time, set up a desk, keep the lights on, open curtains, remove any distractions and get dressed as if going to work. This helps to make your home into an office during work hours.

At the end of the day, clear all your work away, we mean everything. Don’t even leave your laptop on the kitchen table. Light a candle, dim the lights, put on your pyjamas and turn on some music. At the end of the day this area must clearly become a place to relax and not work.

Be realistic:

One key aspect to WFH is to be realistic about what you can actually achieve. It will take some experience to work out what’s possible and what’s not. However, once you have this worked out, be sensible and don’t try to overachieve. If you don’t succeed you will simply become less productive as the days go by and your list gets longer. It will be too over whelming.

Set goals:

Set goals not only for the day but also for the week. Work out your deadlines and then build a plan as to how you will achieve these throughout the period of one week. A school style timetable works beautifully for this.

Make paper lists. Every day make a new one, even if you repeat some of the previous day’s tasks on a new list, its critical you make a fresh one. This helps aid motivation and get tasks into the correct order for that day. Tick them off – this is intensely satisfying aiding even greater productivity.

Use a clean page for every day. This starts the day as you mean to go on. Ideally use a pen and notebook which you have pride in as the physical exercise of writing helps to get the brain working and stay focused.

Manage distractions:

When we work in an office, it’s easier to remain focused as we thrive off the motivation of our colleagues. However, working on one’s own allows for plenty of distractions especially in a familiar environment where multi-tasking becomes inevitable. We often hear people saying they drink umpteen more cups of coffee when working alone as it’s something to keep them entertained! Also, many traditionally tedious DIY jobs suddenly become much more fun than work tasks often being put ahead of work. These short tasks start with a small break and end up taking half the day. With no one to monitor you its easy to lose track of time.

Creating a home office? Look at our online shop to see how you can convert your home into the dream working environment.