Time flies when you ‘work from home’

Posted by admin at May 12, 2014

How amazing it is to able to earn money from a throwing distance from your bed. How liberating and it feels to wake up and stroll over to your work desk, access to home cooked meal and the entire contents of your refrigerator, you can always keep an eye on things without even putting you drawers on.

However, with great freedom, comes great responsibility, it takes a great amount of discipline to concentrate on work when you have all the facilities that ensure your comfort and relaxation scattered around you. You tend to get lazy and distracted at best. Putting in 100% is hard. I am referring to work that promotes you and not routine work that just helps you get through the day. I mean the work that you do that could determine your and your team’s success. Any one could check and reply emails or fill out cost spreadsheets without bating an eye, but try writing or reviewing a strategy document from top-down or designing the mock-up of a new application or project and you’d be met with difficulties finishing a single task on time.

Solution: Make yourself a little uncomfortable! Your home is a haven of comfort and relaxation, in this domain Inertia*link is king! You need to water down that comfort a little and inconvenience yourself a bit to enable you function.

How do you do this? One way would be to dress up in work clothes, I have found that shoes and socks particularly, are an effective way of bringing down the comfort levels, keeping you on your toes. You get up, shower and dress up just as if your are going to a proper office. This also helps you respond to calls that will require you to leave your home and desk during the day. It becomes pretty difficult to respond attend a unscheduled meeting at 2pm when you are still dressed in your pyjamas!

Another technique is to locate your work desk in another room, away from your living room or your bedroom; the garage is not a bad idea if you can’t afford a secluded study. This will mitigate the urge to check whats on TV or whats in the refrigerator to the umpteenth time. Finally, just the same way as working in a proper office, get yourself acquainted with productivity tools such as Evernote and tine logs that allow you track work done.

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