How to work efficiently from home
The transition from work-life to home-life is relaxing in many aspects but focusing on work has become harder than ever. Unlike in our work environments, there are many distractions ranging from being able to access our phones to having to work in the same place as your spouse, children or flatmates. These distractions leave us to procrastinate and lose both focus and motivation. In this blog post, we discuss two ways in which you can improve your workflow.
Structure within the Chaos
Having a routine is vital for your workflow and should not just be implemented whilst you are working at home but also when you return to your place of work. Having a routine massively boosts both your motivation and your productivity as your brain will have a linear
structure, allowing it to use full processing power rather than attempting to figure out what you should do next.
Having a routine won’t just help in this aspect but it will also help improve and maintain positive mental health which is vital when doing your work. Having a proper structure within your routine places a sense of meaning into the hours that lay ahead of you. A study that was published by The Lancet Psychiatry stated that people who have a daytime routine often had better sleep schedules and, in turn, more positive mental health. With improved mental health comes improved motivation thus improved workflow.
Implementing and maintaining a routine throughout your days and weeks working at home and when you go back to your working environments may seem daunting at first, but they are surprisingly easy to implement. Every night, before you go to sleep, set a goal that you want to complete by the end of the next day and then build your routine around that. Say your goal is to finish the two essays that you have been working on, set a routine that looks as follows. (NOTE: You will want to break your working time in 25-minute increments taking a 5-minute break as this is the optimised working time for your brain)
8:00- Wake up
8:15- Have Breakfast
8:30- Take a Shower
9:00- Start First Essay
9:25-30- Break
9:30- Continue Essay
9:55-10:00- Break
Etc.
Having a structure will greatly improve your efficiency and make you extremely motivated to work allowing the transition to be seamless and engaging.
Short-term and Long-term Goals
Whilst short-term and long-term goals are fairly self-explanatory, the premise is embedded deep into the minds of successful and hard-working individuals. We all have a goal that we seek to achieve, and this is what we call the Golden Goal, the place we strive to be and the paths we put ourselves on aim us in that direction. But “that direction” is simply too vague as we cannot base our decisions on a hope that they will take us to our Golden Goal. This is where our short- and long-term goals come into play.
Our long-term goals are the things we strive to achieve in the next year to two years and must be refreshed and reviewed at the end of each year. These long-term goals are the markers and waypoints that guide us to our Golden Goal. Long-term goals are what we base our decisions upon because our Golden Goal is simply too far away to base our decisions on. This allows us to constantly see progress and self-improvement ensuring that we stay motivated and are on the right path.
On the other hand, we have short-term goals, and these are things that we are able to achieve within the next month. These goals act as checkpoints along with the larger path/goal that is our long-term goals. Short-term goals are a frequent check and thing we strive to achieve that helps us break down and digest the massive goal we have set in front of us.
In summary of the Golden Goal Theory, we all have a goal, a dream that we aspire to achieve but never get to fulfil but by breaking it down into sizable chunks that act as waypoints and checkpoints we are able to follow and build our own paths and bridges to our Golden Goal.
In conclusion, the transition from work-life to working from home can be difficult but by implementing a structure we can maintain motivation, and by setting a Golden Goal full of short- and long-term goals we can ensure productivity is maximised and that our home lives don’t disrupt nor hinder our working selves.
