How to work from home and stay productive?

For many, remote work is a dream. 

First, you save your precious time. Commuting is eliminated completely, let alone the stress that comes with it. No more getting stuck in traffic jams or taking crowded transportation during rush hour. 

We also gain in comfort. More and more companies are trying to make their workplace more pleasant, but today many workspaces are still cold and austere. Between neon lights, metal blinds on windows, fake decorative plants, the noise of a xerox machine and carpeting from the 70s, we are far from the warm and familiar setting of our house. 

Working from home also means gaining flexibility. The chores we need to do in the evening (shopping, cleaning, washing dishes ...), can be done during the breaks we make throughout the day. We have more flexibility to organize ourselves as we wish. 

But working from home isn’t always trouble-free either. There are 3 types of problems we encounter when we work at home - Loss of efficiency, overwork, lack of communication. 

So how can we overcome these problems? How to work from home and stay productive despite everything? 

We would like to share with you some smart working techniques and approaches that could help you stay away from the common issues. 

Prepare for your day
Before going to the office, we usually follow a morning routine. We get up, brew coffee, take a shower, brush our teeth, get dressed, brush our hair and go to work. 

These steps prepare us for the day ahead. They draw a line between the time when we are at home in our comfortable pajamas and when we leave our house ready to go to work. 

When we work at home, nothing forces us to follow this routine. No one will judge us if we stay in our pajamas all day or if we don’t brush our hair. And yet it is important to keep up it, anyway. 

This routine as ordinary as it is allows us to get ready for work. Just like an athlete warms up before playing sports, our morning ritual wakes us up and prepares us to face the challenges of the day. 

Define a physical workspace 

Our place of work and our home are two very distinct places separated by a few miles. But when you work from home, this distinction no longer exists. Our workplace is our home, and our home is our workplace. 

We can then have the unpleasant feeling of being permanently in a kind of in-between. To be in a space where you cannot be completely focused on working, but where you cannot completely relax either. 

Our couch is both the place where we relax watching Netflix, and it is also where we make our professional calls. Our room is both the place to sleep and our virtual job space.;

So the brain makes associations. 

When we watch Netflix, we think back to our calls and when we make calls, we think about Netflix. When we try to fall asleep in our bed, we think back to our reports and when we write reports in our bed, we feel like dozing off. 

To avoid mixing everything up, we must keep our workspace separate from our relaxation area. Ideally, you have a whole room dedicated to work. A space where you come to work and to work only. This keeps it well separated from the rest of the house or apartment. 

If you don’t have a dedicated room, find a specific place at home where you can sit down to work quietly. This place must be the same each time. It should not be too comfortable at the risk of falling asleep. We must, therefore, avoid beds, couches or other things like too comfortable armchairs. 

Define a virtual workspace 

When you use the same computer for pro and personal, the work can spill over into leisure and vice versa. We must distinguish our professional and personal space on our computer, just as we do for our physical space. For this, you can use a simple technique that works very well. 

Let’s assume that the computer you have at home is your personal computer and that if you want to work, you have to enter your ‘virtual workspace’. This workspace is nothing more than a tab on the Chrome browser that you open in the incognito mode. All you need to do is log in with your Gmail work address and open all the tabs you need to get started. 

Once your workday is over, close your incognito tabs and your computer becomes a personal computer again. You no longer see emails and work notifications. Work cannot, therefore, take over your family time. 

And if during your time-off you are tempted to sign in to ‘take a quick look at the emails from work’ (a trap to avoid at any cost) you are quickly discouraged because you do not know your Gmail password. 

Yes, voluntarily choose a complicated password to remember. Write it down on a sticky note and put it in a drawer. If you want to sign in to your professional space, you must open the drawer, take the note and type in a long password. This little complication could help you resist the temptation to check your emails and work notifications. 

By creating dedicated virtual spaces on your computer, you would make a better distinction between your work and your leisure. 

Exercise
Regular physical activity is important to stay productive. 

Our bodies need to exercise. We are not meant to sit for hours. But when you work from home, this is exactly what happens. We move even less than if we were at an office. We must, therefore, find an activity through which we can let off steam. 

The best is to play sports outdoors or away from home so we don’t end up doing everything within the same four walls (work, rest, sport). We need to go to other places and get out of the house. 

Beyond spinning out our physical and mental health, regular physical activity also teaches us all the things we need to be productive: perseverance, motivation and will power to stave off distractions. 

Socialize 

A very common phenomenon that occurs when you work at home is feeling isolated. This is a problem because human beings are above all social beings. Isolation is a source of discomfort. Even if you’re introverted, you need a minimum of social connections to feel happy. 

But not all connections are created equal. Phone calls, emails, Zoom conversations ... are far from sufficient to maintain social bonds. You must see people in person to feel a real connection. 

For that, we have to go out, have lunch with friends, have a drink with them in the evening, play a collective sport, spend time with family ... in short, do things to maintain relationships with others. Because what’s good in working from home if it isolates us from the entire world?