When it comes to effective time management, working from home sounds like a good idea. After all, there’s no commute, no distracting colleagues, no endless ad hoc meetings with the boss… However, working from home can bring its own time management issues, from housework to chatty family members.
In this article, we run through a few tried-and-tested working-from-home tips for greater productivity – and enjoyment.
How to be productive working from home
New to working from home? Balancing your work and domestic lives can feel a bit complicated at first, so we’ve pulled together a few time management tips for remote workers.
1. Make a workspace
As many of us found during the COVID pandemic, our homes are not generally designed for formal working – having to set up and then dismantle an office on the kitchen table every day quickly became a chore. So, if you can, set up a dedicated workspace. Not only will this save you time every day, but it will be more comfortable. It’s worth investing time in this, as you have the opportunity to create a workstation that’s perfectly suited to you. Here are a few suggestions for home office locations:
- Kitchen – your table can be a great place to setup a workstation, giving enough space and room to place your devices.
- Spare room – it’s a little-used space, so is ideal for a permanent desk.
- Landing – if you don’t mind a bit of passing traffic, a nook on the landing or in the hallway can be an excellent use of space.
- Under the stairs – this can be an especially pleasing place for a home office if you can add built-in shelves and lighting. You really can have your own little world under the stairs.
- Outbuilding – the gold standard of home working. If you plan on making your home your permanent workplace and you have both the garden space and budget, a dedicated studio is an excellent option. You can buy a complete work “pod” or give a garden shed a glow-up (note: get a professional in if electrics are involved).
The main things to remember when setting up your home office are to make sure it’s comfortable, is as separate from your domestic life as possible and doesn’t need to be packed away at five each day. Ideally, don’t use your own bedroom, as this makes it harder to switch off at bedtime and get a good night’s sleep.
2. Create a routine
Without a schedule, home working easily loses its balance and can drift in either direction. Aim to have regular working hours, including break times (more about these later), which is especially important if you share your home with a partner, family or housemates.
Home working does give you one great advantage: within reason, you can follow your own rhythms. So, if you’re a morning person, set up a routine with the biggest blocks of work earlier in the day when you’re at your most creative and therefore productive. If you’re not a morning person, can you shift your day by a couple of hours?
Whether it’s at eight a.m. or midday, one of the trickiest parts of working from home is getting started. It’s harder to feel motivated when your morning commute is just ten paces. Establish a pre-work ritual as well as a working schedule, which could involve going for a walk or run, reading the papers over breakfast or perhaps writing your morning pages journal to clear your head.
3. Dress for work
Dressing the part, even when you’re simply spending the day in your guest bedroom, is a really important part of working from home. Not only does dressing appropriately put you in the right professional mindset, it also helps you manage your time. Getting dressed for work and then being back in your sweatpants by suppertime helps you stick to your routine.
As an extra time-saving bonus, you’re always Zoom-ready: you’ll never have to run back upstairs for a quick change. Your dress code also helps to delineate work and non-work time in your mind – and acts as a signal for your family or housemates.
4. Manage distractions
Many of us struggle with managing distractions while we’re working from home. While it might seem a handy use of our time to have the laundry going on in the background, it actually means that we’re not as focused on our work as we could be, and can ultimately slow us down. Writer and time management expert Oliver Burkeman describes distraction as “an almost universal problem” and looks into the psychology of task avoidance.
He explains how essential and sometimes difficult tasks (such as writing a report for work) can take us out of our comfort zones, leading us to become easily diverted by “lower stakes” activities. Rather than setting strict to-do lists or attempting to remove obvious distractions (impossible in the home environment), Oliver Burkeman advises to lean into what causes us to feel uncomfortable (in this case, stretching our skills to write that tricky report) rather than avoiding it.
“The effective way to deal with distraction in the long term, then, is to become familiar with those feelings of discomfort. To understand that, actually, if what you want to do is to achieve meaningful, impressive things with your finite time, all you need to do is get a little bit better at staying with those feelings.”
He recommends five minutes a day of “Do Nothing” meditation. Set a timer, sit comfortably and simply follow your breath for five minutes. It’s actually hard to do nothing for five minutes, and you’ll have to keep consciously coming back to the meditation. However, as Oliver says, it’s “an incredibly powerful way of training yourself to be present with whatever emotions are arising in a moment, even if they are uncomfortable ones.” Rather than attempting to remove all distractions, look into the emotional reasons behind why you’re distracted, and learn to manage these instead.
Oliver Burkeman applies a similar approach to procrastination: don’t try to eradicate it, just get better at it! Positive procrastination is actually about decision making and prioritisation, and you can make a conscious choice about what to put off.
5. Set boundaries
When you realise that distraction management is about your mindset rather than physical tasks, it becomes easier to create boundaries. For example, laundry is something that happens before nine and after six, and you never run a quick load in between work calls. However, the trickiest boundaries are those that involve managing human expectations, including your own.
- Personal boundaries: you’ll work in your designated workspace, between certain hours and you won’t engage in any domestic activities during this time.
- Family and friend boundaries: just because you’re present, it doesn’t mean that you’re available! Explain your work hours and workspace, and again, dressing for work can send a helpful signal. Some working-from-home couples and families share a calendar so everyone knows when people are off-limits.
- Colleague or client boundaries: just because your work laptop is in your living room, it doesn’t mean that you’re in work mode 24/7. Again, be clear about your working hours.
- Pets: forget it. They don’t do boundaries.
Oliver Burkeman comments:
“…technology has caused the boundaries between work and time off to smear, so that you can do work at any time of day – which means you’re never fully free from it.”
The home worker has to be really careful to avoid this, so setting clear boundaries for work time and down time is essential.
6. Take breaks
In the workplace, you’d take regular breaks – even those watercooler moments give your brain a rest from work for a few minutes. Build breaks into your regular schedule, and if you can, use them as a chance to get a change of scene. Leave the “office” to take the dog for a walk, or even spend your lunchbreak at the gym or in the park. If you have friends working locally, meet up for lunch. Without colleagues to help reinforce time-out, it becomes easier to avoid it. You won’t work more efficiently without a break – you’ll just start to feel more tired.
7. Keep connected
Moving from a conventional workplace into a home office can be a tricky transition, and while it might be a more efficient way of working, is it mentally healthy? Oliver Burkeman warns of the social drop-off caused by “the quest for making life more convenient”.
“…we’ve evolved to benefit from human contact, and from putting effort into things, and the more that we pursue an exclusively convenient life, the more we find ourselves lonely and unhappy. Even just walking to the shop or calling someone on the phone can make an appreciable difference to your mood if, say, you’re otherwise working from home in a solitary fashion.”
Social interaction does need more of a conscious effort when you’re working from home. Keep in touch with your team via video and phone calls, and you could even schedule virtual coffee breaks. Getting out of the house every day will prevent feelings of isolation from building up.
However, we’re meant to be looking at time management: how does scheduling in coffee breaks or chatty phone calls help us to be productive? Again, it’s down to feeling healthy and happy during the working day. Regular breaks and social interaction give our minds those much-needed rests, keeping us alert and helping us stay focused during the periods of work.
8. Not working out? Move out.
A mistake many of us make is to conflate “remote working” with “home working”. If we’re freelance or our job specifies “hybrid/remote”, there is the option to work from a shared workspace. If you’re struggling to stick to a schedule or boundaries while working from home, actively leaving the house and going to a shared workspace can be a better way to manage your time.
Many towns now have these spaces where you can hire a desk, and if you’re missing the atmosphere of a proper office, this could be the compromise you need. Workspaces often come with facilities such as bookable meeting rooms, booths for online meetings or calls and fast broadband speeds. They can also be great places to network or collaborate informally.
There’s more to working from home than simply opening your laptop. However, with some thought and planning, it can be a really effective and rewarding way of working. For more insights on how to manage time working from home, check out writer Oliver Burkeman’s BBC Maestro course about Time Management.
