Remote work and hybrid work spaces are becoming a norm particularly after the Covi9-19 lock-downs. The drastic lock downs pushed companies into an environment where they had to either adapt or collapse.
Demanding workloads and busy schedules are consistently complicating how workers allocate and manage their professional and personal time.
Productivity measures and instruments are crucial for office work settings, even more so for enhancing productivity in the home work space.
Home work spaces are often characterized by various forms of distraction. In addition to helping you to stay focused, Productivity apps are helpful for organizing, prioritizing and managing tasks, workflows and projects.
Beyond the black and white organizational codes of ethics and conduct, productivity remains a personal deliverable.
Without the effective measures and tools to streamline and optimize your work, it is difficult to maintain high levels of productivity particularly in home work space settings. This article presents 8 ways to enhance productivity in the home work space.
Contents
1. Establish a Routine and Maintain it
Establishing a routine enables you to stay focused on acing your goals. Without being intentional about establishing a routine and creating a conducive atmosphere for productivity, working from home can be easily thrown off by various distractions.
A routine ensures that you have a laser focus on the small, but crucial daily tasks that add up to your daily targets. Set a consistent time you will start work, work out when you will be taking breaks and how long those breaks will be.
Think about what it would take to look back at the end of the day and tick the boxes that make up a productive day.
Once you have established the routine, commit to it and strive to maintain it. In the long run, it is consistency that pays off and not the occasional bouts of intensity. Working from home should not negatively affect your rhythm of work and work ethic.
2. Set Realistic Daily Goals
One way you can easily stifle your intentions of working productively from home is setting unrealistic goals.
Set realistic goals by ensuring that your daily targets are achievable within the reasonable bounds of the time you have and the working environment.
When you are starting out, run with targets you can evaluate at the end of each day to establish whether or not your daily targets amounted to the desirable productivity levels.
Also do this to establish if your targets have been realistic. Make necessary adjustments where necessary until you find the delicate balance of optimal productivity that does not break your back.
3.Set Up A Designated Work Space
While thinking about working from home it can be tempting to relish the idea of typing away those reports from the comfort of your blankets, while watching your favorite show on Netflix.
While that can be done, it cannot be done without significantly compromising your productivity. Productivity in a home working environment requires that you designate an appropriate and conducive work space.
You may consider setting up your workspace in a separate room if possible. Depending on your environment, figure out where you can set up a workspace that, at best, is free from distractions or, at worst, affords you minimal distractions.
Make sure that you set boundaries accordingly and let those you live with understand that your workspace is off-limits during your working hours.
4. Have your Lunch at Consistent Time
This may sound less important, but taking your lunch break at a consistent time, daily, ensures that you do not derail your work schedule.
Productivity in the home work space requires a level of vigilance to keep the potential threats to your flow at bay. Beyond its time management and productivity benefits, eating your lunch at the same time every day has health benefits.
5. Reach out to Work Colleagues
One of the biggest challenges of remote work is its threat to life-work balance. A study on Remote work and Work life Balance showed that the threat to life-work balance can arguably be the single biggest challenge employees have to contend with.
Working from within your home can lead to loneliness and feeling isolated.
This is true particularly for types of work designed to leverage teamwork and collaboration. To mitigate against this hurdle, a home based worker must be intentional about reaching out to other work colleagues using video conferencing platforms.
Having face time with colleagues yields not only productivity benefits but psychological benefits as well. Without effective measures to ensure life-work balance, working from home can wind up feeling like living at work.
6. Communicate Effectively
Effective communication as a critical component of productive remote working and reaching out to work mates. Being detached from the office environment and from the face to face encounters with work colleagues has its own problems.
However, failure to reach out to your work mates and communicate effectively creates ripple effects across the entire workflow. Leverage the technological channels at your disposal: the email, Zoom meetups, phone calls, etc, to reach out.
Regular communication may seem like pushing it but the importance of expressing yourself clearly and receiving clear feedback; regularly cannot be over emphasized especially in remote work settings.
6. Use Productivity Apps
Working on your computer or laptop from a home environment requires intentional and effective productivity measures.
Productivity apps come in handy for eliminating distractions and for keeping off a great deal of “digital noise”.
The spectrum of productivity apps is wide. Different productivity apps deal with different aspects of productivity. Task management apps will help you organize, time frame and streamline your tasks.
These can also help you to prioritize and track your own performance so that you can adjust your daily, weekly and monthly work schedules if need be.
Some productivity apps help you to shut down the distracting social media chimes, alerts and notifications so that you can focus on a single task at a given time.
Some productivity tools come in the form of time tracking apps.
7. Use a Time Tracking App
A time tracking app enables you to track the amount of time you are spending on certain tasks and projects. Beyond the billing objectives (converting timesheets to invoices), a time tracking app has a tremendous and positive impact on productivity.
If the kind of work you do is largely digital, you certainly need to leverage a time tracking app to keep a solid grip on how your productive hours are managed as well as to track the amount of time that goes into certain tasks and deliverables.
A time tracking app is a useful companion for software developers, graphic designers, artists and various professionals that do most, if not all, of their work online.
A good time tracking app comes with robust billing and reporting capabilities. A tool enhances your productivity in the home work space by tracking how much time goes into certain tasks, projects and processes; enables you to identify workflow efficiencies and bottle necks.
This way you are able to optimize what works and eliminate the causes of workflow bottlenecks.
Pro Tip
One important principle in prioritizing your tasks is captured in the adage taken from the wisdom of Mark Twain: The adage goes: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first”.
The time management principle articulated by the adage is the importance of targeting those tasks which you are less inclined to tackle due to their size or nature. The “frog” is that boring task which you are likely to defer.
Eating these “frogs” early on in the day is the best way to avoid procrastination. This also boosts your morale and self-esteem.
Targeting these “frogs” early also gets you in the mood and mode to devour even more “frogs” in your to-do list.
Final Thoughts
If you want to manage your time more productively, and you are keen to spruce up your remote work routine, have a look at the features of this intuitive, user friendly and cutting edge gPlay Project Management and Workflow management solution.
