How to Stay Productive When Working From Home

Whether working completely remotely, or taking up more of a hybrid schedule, opportunities for people to work from home have been on the rise; what was once a perk reserved for a handful of different professions has now blossomed into a working arrangement many people are actively seeking out.

In fact, McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey shows a whopping 58% of Americans reported having the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week.

Many businesses reluctant to explore the idea of remote or hybrid work often cite the need for supervision, or a potential decline in productivity as reasons to avoid implementing a WFH policy – never mind that workers given the opportunity to work from home see productivity increases, even when sick.

So how do you help to maintain that statistic? Juggling productivity and work-life balance can be difficult, especially when working from home, but how do you maintain productivity when working remotely? Here are a few tips.

Table of Contents

• Create a Dedicated Workspace
• Define Your Schedule and Routine
• Minimize Distractions While Working from Home
• Take Regular Breaks and Practice Self-Care
• Stay Connected and Communicate Effectively
  • Effective Communication is a Must
• Set Boundaries with Family and Roommates
  • Utilize Productivity Tools and Technology

Create a Dedicated Workspace

Establishing a dedicated home office space offers many benefits, one of which is helping you to be more productive. Ensuring that you’ve set up a comfortable and organized work environment helps you to get into the proper mindset for productive work.

To recap the benefits of a dedicated home office space:

• A dedicated home workspace helps you to get into the right work mentality to be productive
• Having a home office gives you the opportunity to close the door after work, lower the odds of overworking
• Home offices lower the odds of distractions from family, roommates, pets, or the usual hustle and bustle of the home
• Establishing a dedicated workspace helps to ensure work-life balance by creating a designated working space separate from your living space

It goes without saying then that the first step to designing a productive home office is to create the dedicated workspace that you’ll be working from.

If you’re new to working from home, it may take some time to adjust to the working arrangement, but the sooner and longer you establish that this established place is now where you get work done, the sooner you’ll find your productivity increasing whenever you’re in it.

Once you’ve picked out that dedicated workspace, save it for work! Don’t blur the line between work life and personal life by using your home office for things outside of work or you might find yourself tempted to start doing that during the actual workday too.

Define Your Schedule and Routine

Working in a traditional office tends to help create a schedule and routine without a whole lot of effort; your start and end times are pretty clearly defined, you know by now what to expect from your commute, and you know how to shift your personal life around to accommodate these things.

But what happens when you can work from your phone? What about when everything you need to do your job is just a few feet away?

When you don’t create a consistent schedule and routine, you run the risk of embarking down a slippery slope that can look a little something like this:

Situations like these can spiral over time, and quickly lead to an unmanageable work-life balance and stress. Needless to say, when you’re stressed, you’re not at your most productive.

Time management can be difficult for a lot of people without the built-in bumpers provided by a traditional work schedule – so why not just build that into your day yourself?

Establishing a daily routine and structured schedule will help you stay more productive at work – which is great – but it’ll also help you manage your stress levels and work-life balance – two additional perks that will also help you stay more productive at work.

Minimize Distractions While Working from Home

When it comes to arguments against working from home, one of the first you’ll typically see put out there is that the home environment is too distracting to productively accomplish work tasks.

While I don’t necessarily agree that a home office – worked in with discipline – is more distracting than a traditional office, the fact of the matter is there are different distractions at home.

While you may not have coworkers jumping up to meet you at the water cooler and chat your ear off, you may have a pet at home that needs to be let out.

You won’t have a local lunch place where you and your coworkers grab lunch every day, but you may be more tempted to whip up a meal in your kitchen at home.

The list goes on and on.

You know the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? This applies to your time working from home too. If you can set yourself up for success to begin with, your odds of becoming distracted are significantly lower.

Maybe you cook a little bit extra at dinner so that you can have leftovers for lunch the next day as opposed to needing to spend time whipping something up from scratch.

Maybe you time your pet’s walk and bathroom breaks during slower parts of your day to make sure they’re not whittling away at your productive moments.

The name of the game, ultimately, is trying to identify and address potential distractions before they come up. With as many distractions removed as possible, you stand a higher chance of staying productive longer. At that point, you’re just working.

Take Regular Breaks and Practice Self-Care

I didn’t spend too much time on reducing distractions while working from home because nine times out of ten you’re going to experience the opposite problem: overworking.

Making sure you’re not overworking is one of the key elements of avoiding burnout that can come with working from home.

If you think about it, the traditional office is full of breaks and distractions that whittle at your productivity. Maybe you spend a Monday morning chatting with coworkers about their weekend, or you attend an impromptu meeting to get the creative juices flowing. There’s also the aforementioned lunch with coworkers that can pop up, and the need to walk around the office for certain reasons.

At home, you won’t have many of these things, which makes it all the more important that you take breaks. Consciously take breaks that is.

If you’re not disciplined about taking breaks, you may find yourself sitting in your chair for the entirety of your shift hardly having gotten up. Not only is this awful for our bodies, but it also makes the day drag on even longer.

A failure to maintain a work-life balance can erode your mental health, take time away from friends and loved ones, and ultimately make you dislike a job that you otherwise like.

Try adding self-care to your remote workday with some of the following tips:

• At some point during the day, get up and take a quick walk around your block if you’re able to. This will get you some fresh air, get your body moving, and sometimes help you leap over creative hurdles.
• If you’re doing something tedious or monotonous and can handle the distraction, put on some of your favorite music while you work. Sing along to it and enjoy the moment!
• Clean up your workspace! When we’re working from an area that’s clean, it feels good, and we’re happier and more productive as a result.
• Add a smell to your workspace that you like; maybe it’s an air freshener, a candle, or even just some flowers.

These breaks and self-care acts don’t need to be big and grand things, but you will notice a lack of them over time. If you don’t keep your physical and mental health in check while working from home, it can quickly become an isolating experience.

Speaking of isolating…

Stay Connected and Communicate Effectively

Despite the wide variety of platforms available to us to communicate with our colleagues and friends, communication can sometimes inadvertently take a back seat with remote gigs.

If I don’t have any meetings planned for the day, and nobody at work needs anything from me while I chip away at my work, it’s entirely possible to go a full day without chatting with anybody.

I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but to me, that’s a nightmare.

As a social person myself, the isolation that can come with working from home is probably what I’d consider the biggest downside of it.

With that in mind, it’s all the more important that you stay in touch with your coworkers using whatever communication technology they happen to use, whether it’s Slack, Teams, or something else entirely.

If you were in a traditional office you’d likely be chatting with your coworkers around you – a virtual setting doesn’t have to be any different! Reach out, say hello, ask your coworkers how their days are going.

By establishing these regular check-ins with your coworkers you can develop a rapport, which helps to work against the inherent isolation that can accompany remote work. This is great for the social battery, but it also serves another purpose: it creates easier pathways to collaboration and teamwork down the line.

Staying connected to your coworkers when working remotely will help you succeed at work socially and professionally.

Effective Communication is a Must

Without the ability to visit nearby desks and chat things through, effective virtual communication skills become an absolute must in a remote workspace.

While some may prefer to have a meeting over lunch to discuss a big new project, remote workers aren’t afforded that opportunity. You won’t have the nonverbal cues of the person across from you to read if you’re chatting via Slack or doing a voice chat. If you’re doing a video chat and your internet is rough that day, you may have an even worse time.

So why is this important to consider?

It means that you need to be great at communication without some of the other tools and things we might otherwise lean on.

Remote team collaboration is all about effective virtual communication. If you’re unsure of something, send a message, or schedule a quick call rather than charging forward with potentially inaccurate or incomplete information.

If your remote team doesn’t have an effective virtual communication framework, establish one! Get in the habit of sending meeting recap emails, setting up periodic check-in meetings, or starting text conversations. The less taboo it feels to engage in conversation with coworkers and teams, the more the door opens for collaboration and success.

A few things to keep in mind when it comes to virtual communication:

• If it’s over text, tone doesn’t always carry over well. Be mindful of this!
• If you’re conversing via email, people check their emails at different times of the day. Elect for a different avenue if you need a faster response.
• Try to elect for less time-sensitive approaches (like email) if you’re writing something outside of somebody’s working hours. Just because you’re burning the midnight oil doesn’t mean they are!
• Utilize collaborative tools like Google Docs, etc., to enable group projects and commentary on deliverables.

Set Boundaries with Family and Roommates

While most people understand these days that working from home relies on one imperative concept – working – some people have yet to get the memo or quite consider it on an equal level. Be mindful of this, and use this knowledge to set boundaries.

From personal experience, I have a family member that was notorious for dismissing that work element. She’d often call me up during the day to chat, invite me places to lunch, ask favors, anything you can imagine. Her reasoning for doing so was that I worked from home, so it didn’t matter.

But it does matter! When I’d ask if she would be able to leave her job in the middle of the day to have a chat for an hour, or to run across town to do a task, she’d answer with an eye roll.

At the end of the day, some people simply won’t understand, which leaves it up to you to establish and maintain boundaries around your professional life.

Children are another group that may not understand either.

My 9 year old son had a terrible habit of barging into my office having already started talking 10 feet away from the office door about something that happened in a show he was watching that day. Endearing? Yes. Enjoyable when it always seems to happen while I’m in the middle of meetings? Absolutely not.

To get around this, I bought a simple sign on Amazon for something like $7. On one side of the sign it says “meeting in progress” in red, and the other side says something along the lines of “please knock.”

He knows if the sign says that a meeting is in progress to come back later if the issue isn’t an emergency, and I make sure to communicate that by flipping the sign the correct way when I’m in meetings. We haven’t had a problem since!

A coworker of mine took this concept a step further and put a lamp outside of her room with a smart bulb in it. Much like a recording studio, she sets the bulb color to red if she’s in a meeting and shouldn’t be disturbed.

While you don’t necessarily need to invest in signage and smart bulbs, these at their core are ways of establishing boundaries, and that’s a crucial element of working successfully from home.

Would it be acceptable in a traditional office if your spouse or child barged into the middle of an important meeting? Of course not.

While most understand that this is a byproduct of working from home, and that life happens, it’s still unprofessional at best, and something you want to avoid if possible.

Have these conversations with the people you share a home with, establish the boundaries, and ultimately you’ll find yourself much more productive as a result.

Utilize Productivity Tools and Technology

Just as there are dozens of communication tools available in the remote workspace, there are just as many productivity tools and digital resources for staying on track.

Leveraging digital tools and software for enhanced productivity will help you go far, especially in a working setup that otherwise may be prone to disorganization.

A simple example of this is a Google Calendar – a free service that is, as the name might imply, a digital calendar that you can use to your advantage. Whether you’re adding deliverable due dates, meetings, or even just blocking out time for a lunch break, having a visible representation of where your time is spent can help you stay on track.

If you’re the type of person who finds the temptation to meander in another tab over to a social media site or other distraction, look up Chrome extensions that disable them while you’re at work. They exist, and there are many out there.

If you’re responsible for managing a product, try looking into project management tools like JIRA or Asana to help keep things neat and orderly.

Having a rough day focusing for one reason or another? Use your phone’s timer or alarm system to set up chunks of head-down time where you work straight through that period without distraction and reward yourself after.

As a remote worker, technology is going to be of the utmost importance to you in every facet of what you do – why not lean into that and let it help you be more productive too