Ah, working from home is one of the greatest pleasures. Comfy slippers, as much tea as is humanly consumable, and being able to watch a cheeky episode or two from your sofa. As lovely as this all sounds, working from home can be tricky. All those tempting distractions ready to put the brakes on your productivity.
With that being said,
How DO you get the balance of working from home perks and productivity right? Here’s some tips that might help.
The tech
Making sure you have the best equipment for your needs that you can afford, might sound like a luxury, but did you know that a slow running laptop is more likely to cause you to procrastinate as the ‘wheel of doom’ spins? And being at home, you’ll see all the little things that you could be doing to fill your time whilst you wait.
Having good quality devices and an even better set up can reduce the chance of your mind wandering.
Wifi
One of the worst things when working from anywhere, can be having slow wifi. What should be a 10 minute job can take you an hour, and in that time you’ve stopped thinking in a productive way, and started flicking through your phone. Waiting for webpages and programs to load or connect gives you loads of time to be distracted by the things around you.
Not only is poor Wifi bad for your productivity, but if you have ever tried to have a meeting with someone who doesn’t have very good connection, you’ll know how frustrating it is.
Dropping in and out of conversations and freezing when trying to share you screen is not professional and can absolutely stifle your productivity.
Surroundings
Making sure your surroundings help to breed a more productive work day is another key tip. Have a clean, organised and designated space to work from, will not only help you get the most from your day, but will also help to create good work life balance.
Try putting your work space somewhere with lots of natural light, minimal distractions (like the TV) and if possible somewhere you can close the door at the end of your day. This will really help you to get into an “I’m at work” mentality.
That absolutely doesn’t mean your space should be boring. Add a speaker to play your favourite music, and if you fidget when you are bored, try investing in a standing desk. This way, when the fidget hits, you can stand and move around to get that blood and creativity flowing back to the brain.
Another fancy but great bit of kit for your work space is a treadmill. For similar ‘getting blood and oxygen to your brain’ reasons, this can mean you can get moving whilst still sending those all important emails. There are some great options out there, and even some that fold down so you don’t have to worry about storage.
Hello IT?
Our last piece of advice for anyone working from home (or with employees working from home) is to invest in a good IT supplier. It doesn’t matter what size business you are, we think it should be considered part of the ‘to do list’ when setting up.
Downtime for any reason can cause a lack of productivity and can cost you money. Having someone looking after your tech and sorting out any technical issues will not only save you time and money, but also from growing any new grey hairs.
If you’d like to discuss ways that we can help your business when working from home, book a call with Jon today.
