For years, people have asked me what it is like to work from home. Now, with the Covid-19 pandemic and so many people on lockdown, I get that question even more frequently.
The first thing is that to work from home effectively, you MUST have a lot of discipline. If you don’t, rather than working and staying ahead of the mountain of personal and business tasks that pile up, you’ll find yourself doing mindless activities such as searching the web or watching TV.
Fortunately from my perspective, I usually have a very high level of discipline, most every day. If that’s not you, and you know who you are — be honest — then you need to find ways to encourage the correct behavior from yourself as much of the day as possible. This will typically involve setting goals, creating detailed task lists, and if those basic steps don’t work, seeking out one or several accountability partners.
The next thing I will say is that when you work from home, you have to be careful that work doesn’t consume your life. This point is for those who, like me, don’t lack the discipline to get the work done, but have to be very deliberate about making sure they allow themselves time to relax and regenerate. In my experience, this is about setting hard and fast rules about when you will and will not work during the day, especially on weekends. Again, an accountability partner will come in handy to keep you honest about not sneaking in work when you should be taking a break.
Beyond committing yourself to rules about when you can and cannot work at home, I’ve found that it is very helpful to have a few, but at least one, go-to activities that you enjoy enough that you don’t have to convince yourself to do them. It’s an added bonus if those are activities that also help with stress relief. We spend a lot of time in the mountains, so in my case go-to activities include trail running, hiking, mountain biking, skiing, etc. Whatever yours are, make sure you do them enough to keep your sanity and refresh your mind and body. You will find that not only will you feel better, but your productivity will be significantly increased as well.
The final thing I will discuss here about working from home is that it is absolutely vital that you have the correct technology for whatever you do and that you use it to the fullest extent possible. If you are running your business or doing your job in someone else’s business from your house, it is worth the time, money and effort to make sure you have the best technology available, including, and especially depending what you do, as much bandwidth as possible to connect to the internet. Between competing uses (other people and devices) and the increasing propensity to move many work from home communication activities to video rather than just voice or text, you will need all the bandwidth you can get. Spend the money on the best hardware, productivity software and connectivity. You won’t regret it.
If you decide to work from home, or you are forced to by a pandemic, as many around the world have been in recent months, you will find that it can be your best friend or your worst enemy. The good news is that most of what will determine your work at home effectiveness is under your control. Work on your discipline, make sure you take breaks and avoid workaholic tendencies, and set yourself up with the best technology possible, and you will increase the odds that you may decide to work from home even when you’re not forced to by a pandemic or other circumstances.
Image by Markus Spiske from Pixabay
