Last article working from home – Why It’s Hated Why It’s loved and Why You Should I explored why you should aim to escape the cubicle and work from home as much as possible. In this article I want to explore how you can maximise your work from home time.
We all know that the home has the same if not more distractions than work. Especially kids if you have them, stay at home wife or husband if you have one and pets if you have them too. They all think, excellent he or she is home it’s just like a Saturday or Sunday, let’s party.
This of course is super disruptive and one of the reasons why people want to go to work in the first place, to escaping the carnage at home.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Have you ever wanted an office just like the big gun managers? I did I’d love an office. It means you can hang your pictures up, get a big monitor, setup some sound and more importantly shut the door. Well here is the big secret to effective working from home - pretend you’re the super boss with his own executive office suite. You want to effectively lock the outside world out for a few hours. To make this effective you’re going to require a few things.
- Establish a private working space. To make working from home truly effective you need to have a small private working space. This is your office space. It’s critical that this space has a door that can be fully closed. You need to shut out the distractions something that most of us CANNOT do in an office unless we are the boss.
- Establish a house rule. When the office door is closed it’s a no go zone simple. Sell this to the family by stating that the faster you cut through your work the faster you can finish and do fun activities. When that door is closed it means you’re working and should not be disturbed. Ideally you will need to make business calls from your office. You can’t make serious work calls from home if you have kids screaming right next to you and dogs jumping up on your lap carrying on like idiots.
- Define emergencies. Remember alternatively you’d be at work anyway so something must be so important that it would require you to physically leave work. This should help you define an emergency at home. Would you leave work in the middle of the day to get Milk? No you’d get in when you’re finished on the way home. Would you leave work because you hear a knock at the front door, no you wouldn’t because you wouldn’t be home to hear it in the first place. Would you leave work because your partner fell down some stairs and is in hospital, yea that might quality? I’m sure you get the idea. Home phone calls and door knocks are distractions and DO NOT need to answered, remember you’re at work.
BUT HOLD ON – isn’t this just a cubicle in a different form? I thought the idea was to escape the cubicle completely. Yes however there are four CRITICAL differences with work from home.
- You’re at home, you can, should you wish, walk to your kitchen. You can drink your drink, listen to your music, get up when you want
- You don’t have to sit on a train, bus or car for hours on end
- Most importantly, because you’ll be more efficient you’ll finish work early and you’ll be free for the rest of the day
- It’s not total escape but its close
Doing these simple things I’ve found makes working from home really effective and really enjoyable I feel like the big boss in my super important office and when I’m finished my commute home is 5 steps. I hope this helps make your working from home more effective.
