Remote Work vs Office

Remote Work vs Office – Like countless other people in the world, you may currently find yourself working from home.

While not always an ideal situation, working at home does offer unique challenges that you never experienced when leaving home every day to go to work.

You have two options when it comes to working at home: you can be a slacker. or you can be productive.

Slacking

Most people start off working at home with high hopes. However, reality sets in and you’ll find yourself procrastinating each day. By the end of your workday you have not accomplished all you wanted to do that day. You either work late into the night, or leave the work until morning.

Going to bed with work undone not only puts you behind, but can also be a major source of stress. The next day you might just get up and start working in your pajamas.

You Are The Boss

Since you are the boss, you decide to start your day with coffee and emails. You then move on to Facebook and all your social media sites. Before you know it, lunch time is upon you, and you have done nothing productive. It feels great not getting dressed and rushing off to work, but it bothers you that you don’t get much done.

While it might feel good to goof off, without structure you will only spend about half the day doing constructive work. No matter which room you work from, you are still a part of the household. It can be stressful trying to maintain a separation of home life and work life when you are always home. Your productivity goes down and your personal life gets more hectic than normal. Slacking off is not the best way to work.

Remote Work vs Office – Which is Most Productive

Instead, choose to be productive and embrace your current situation with open arms. If you have to work from home, use strategy, discipline and the proper mindset to tackle your day to day work habits.

With discipline you will finish your work day hours before you would have at ‘the office’. First of all you won’t have the commute to and from work everyday, saving you time. You also won’t have the distraction of talking to co-workers throughout the day. These two time-wasters will now free up a few hours of your day.

Your Home Office

Take the time to set up a comfortable home office. An organized and tidy area will allow you to be more productive than a clutter filled area. A dedicated work space will also allow you to leave the area and unwind with your family at night.

Being your own boss means you also get to set your own work schedule. Do you want to get outdoors in the morning before working? Do so. If you decide you want to work extra hard all week in order to take a long 3 day weekend, then go for it. Set up realistic times when you feel you will be most productive.

One fringe benefit of working from home is the ability to schedule appointments with your doctor or hairdresser during the week. You can also shop stores and businesses that are only opened during the work week.

Leave Home

Working from home does not mean that you need to be stuck in your home office for hours every single work day. If you can work from your phone or a laptop, then you can work anywhere.

Just go outside in your own backyard and enjoy the warm sun when you can. Breathe the fresh air and rejuvenate your mind and body as you work.

Pack up your work supplies and head down to the neighborhood hangout. Or visit a national park and enjoy the wonders of the world while you work.

Whether you work for a large corporation or are a free lance writer, you can choose to work wherever you want. With the right mindset, you can work productively anywhere.

Remote Work vs Office – The Power of Mindset

Having the right mindset and learning to work when there is nobody telling you what to do is a hard task. However, choosing productivity over slacking will leave you with more spare time to pursue your hobbies and outside adventures.

Structuring Your Way to a Productive Work Day

Having structure in your work at home life will make your life so much easier. Structure keeps you from procrastinating over the smallest job that needs to be done. Done well, your structured day will lead to more productivity and more accomplished in a day than you could imagine. The simple trick is establishing rules.

Start Big

Someone once said that if you have to eat a frog, then you should eat it for breakfast. He also said that if you have to eat two frogs, then eat the biggest one first.

Applying this to your work day, you should schedule the biggest jobs at the beginning of your work day. If you have a long article to research and write, then get right to it as soon as you start working. Don’t check your social media groups or emails, just sit down and get to work.

Biggest Payout

The biggest jobs often have the biggest payouts. Getting these done right away is also a good way to get brownie points from certain clients. Once these bigger jobs are done, they are no longer sitting there waiting for you.

At the end of the day, while you might not have finished everything on your ‘to do’ list, you will find it easier to do one of those smaller projects that you are just itching to get to. It is easier to do a smaller project that you want to do than try to finish a larger one you really would rather not do at all.

Starting big is a great training exercise: the more you do it, the easier it becomes and the better you get. It is a simple way of building great work habits.

Interruptions

There is nothing more annoying than a client that wants to send repeated emails and change the goalpost every day. It makes it hard to get things done when constant interruptions break your concentration. Clients need to remember that they are paying you to do a job and they should leave you alone to get it done. Your productivity depends upon this simple rule being followed: no interruptions during the workday.

One Minute

There are exceptions to doing the biggest job first. If you know you can finish something in a minute or so, then start with those little tasks. Many times it is these little jobs that weigh the heaviest on our mind: we know they need to be done, but keeping putting them on hold.

These ‘open loops’ are things like getting that email off to a client that is waiting for an answer, or fixing something on your computer or website.

While it may only take a minute or so to complete these tasks, you keep putting them of because you have bigger jobs to do, and/or you find these jobs tedious, stressful or emotionally draining. It is easier to ignore the small stuff.

Vanish Procrastination

Procrastination gets you nowhere. The small things won’t go away and will continue to bother you, causing unwanted and unneeded stress and anxiety.

These are the type of jobs and tasks you may want to complete first thing in the morning. If they are going to bother you all day, you are better off completing them and moving on towards a productive day. Once done with these jobs, your mind is more open to focus on the rest of your work load.

Applying It To Life

Starting with the smaller tasks is also something you can carry over into your daily life at home.

Instead of cleaning the whole kitchen after breakfast, rinse your dishes in the sink and leave them there until later. You won’t leave a big mess and have accomplished that one small task in your clean-up routine.

The exception to this one minute rule is if you are working hard to complete a specific job that is taking you days to finish. Stick to this large job and don’t let emails or other distractions bother you.

Stay On Track

Did you know that when you get off track it can take over 23 minutes to refocus your attention back to your original job? The human brain is not capable of multi-tasking without considerable training. Instead, we work by switching back and forth between tasks.

When you start your day working on that big project, but get sidetracked by answering emails or writing a smaller article, your focus has been misdirected. You will waste over 23 minutes getting back on task.

Remote Work vs Office – Final Advice

To tackle those big jobs first, shut yourself in, cancel notifications and ignore all incoming emails. If there is no need to practice the one minute rule, then ignore the small stuff and complete the current big job. Those small one minute tasks will be waiting until you are ready to get to them.