For many people, myself included, working from home is the holy grail. Some have responsibilities that are eased considerably when they’re able to work from home. Whether that’s helping the kids with their homework, being able to work more flexible hours. Or just not having to deal with the stressful commute in to a big city. Flexible working means you can have a much better work – life balance.
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Whatever your reason for wanting to work from home. The key is to make sure you stay productive. If you strike a bargain with your boss to work from home but your productivity drops to near zero, that bargain will be walked back pretty quickly, but if you can maintain or even improve your output, you’ll be onto a permanent arrangement, so that’s what we’re looking at today.
Experience
Hopefully, to be able to do your dream job from home, you will have the experience under your belt already and be a bit of an expert in your field. However, if you don’t, and this is an entirely new venture, then perhaps doing a course of some kind to give you that extra bit of experience would be a great option.
For example, I have been working for myself for about 5 years now (can’t believe how fast the time has gone by), and I do a lot of work within digital marketing and the ever changing world of SEO so a great course for me to do would be a course in Search Engine Optimisation or something similar in digital marketing. Even if you are a pro in your field, as things change so much and so quickly these days, by doing a course like this every now and then would ensure you are up to date with any new changes.
What I loved about this course in particular was that it is only a 2 day course so it won’t take you away from your work for too long and it goes through everything to help boost your website ranking. From the very basics to the nitty-gritty in-depth stuff too. Oh, and they also guarantee the course will boost visits to your website – what’s not to love about that!
Have Somewhere To Work
The most important thing to do is to establish a good working environment. This helps you focus, and, by separating where you work from where you relax, also helps you draw boundaries and switch off at the end of the day.
The ideal solution is to clear out your spare room and turn it into an office, but not every has the luxury of that space. If that’s the case, you’ll need to create a work environment in another way. Avoiding a room with a television is best to avoid distraction – the kitchen table works for many, then find a radio station to tune to that lets you concentrate without distracting. It might be classic FM, it might be Magic, it might be speech radio. Turning the radio off at the end of the day is a good ritual to tell your brain it’s no longer at work and it’s time to relax.
Setting Daily Targets
Without a boss breathing down their neck, some people lose their motivation. If you’re going to make working from home work for you, you need to be able to motivate yourself. Make sure you have the means available to track the amount of work you’re accomplishing day by day, if not hour by hour! If your deadlines begin to slip you could find yourself in real trouble, so try to catch any problems early and rectify them.
If your work is easily quantifiable the task is easier, but if you perform lots of different functions, you might need to do a little work here. Try to break each task down into a reasonable estimate of how much time it takes to complete. You can then compare hours of work to do vs. hours remaining until deadline, and calculate your progress more efficiently.
This will let you not just show off your achievements when deadlines fall due, but demonstrate to your manager that you’re getting work done every day!
How motivated would you be working from home?
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