Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Seven Tips to be More Productive While Working at Home

Guest post by Roger Rae

Everybody who dreams of working from home know the facilities they can benefit from while working at home. Some of them are – comfort of working in safe homely environment, flexible work hours, no office politics, no monitoring. But what they don’t know is that the comfort they are enjoying can also negatively affect their productivity. You have to face a lot more distractions while working at home as compared to working in an office. But then should you stop dreaming about working from home? NO. By following the seven tips given below you can easily reap the benefits of working from home without sacrificing your productivity.
Set a Work Schedule – Working from home allows you to set flexible hours but it doesn’t imply that you can work whenever you want. You must have a fixed working schedule designed according to your convenience. Once the schedule is ready then follow it religiously.

Create a To-Do list – Start your day by creating a to-do list of tasks which you want to finish that day. Order the list according to the priority of tasks and start with the task having highest priority. Also make sure to leave some empty slots in your to-do list to adjust with unexpected tasks that need immediate attention.

Create a Work space – Create a separate work space to work for. Working in bedroom is not same as working in a home based office. Keep a separate room or at least a distinct work area with no distractions where you can focus on your work easily.

Turn Off your TV and music system – It is very easy to get yourself enthralled in Television shows and music while working at home. And you won’t even realize that how much time you are wasting in it. So turn off your TV and music systems while you are doing work.

Limit your Internet usage – As, almost all work at home providers have to spend most of their time in front of the computers. It becomes very hard to stop yourself from checking emails, reading blogs, update social accounts and eventually wasting lot of the time in non productive activities. The ideal solution to it is to disconnect your internet connection or limit your internet usage while working. Also you can take help of some free tools which can block the internet access for you during your working hours.

Inform your relatives and friends – Whenever people come to know that you work from home they think that you are free for most of the day and they have the privilege to call you and to disturb you whenever they want. So it is always better to inform them beforehand about your daily schedule. When they call you, politely remind them about your working schedule and request them to call you later.

Have social life – If you are working too hard, working at home may blur the boundaries between your personal life and work life. In fact, it may destroy your personal life at all. So make sure that you take regular breaks at least once a week and recharge yourself with creative ideas and energy for next week.

So these are the seven tips that every work from home provider should follow to be more productive. Do you know of any more tips? Feel free to add in the comments below.

Author Bio:
Roger Rae is a freelance writer working for Fortepromo promotional products, a promotional tote bags company based in Minnesota.

No comments:

Post a Comment