Home-based workers have a myriad of distractions to deal with. From the television showing new episodes of “Judge Rinder”; to the four month old child crying down the baby monitor at ten minute intervals; to the fact that your comfortable king size bed is sitting waiting for you at the top of the stairs. There are a million and one reasons to not do work while you are at home.
However, there are a number of ways in which you can attempt to block out these distractions and remain productive without an employer bearing down on you.
Below is a list of ways in which you can ensure productivity while you are working from home.
Wake-up early and work office hours
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You need to train yourself to wake up and get ready before nine in the morning, and try your best to power through until five in the evening. It can be difficult to get into this habit when you have no commute to make in the morning, but is essential that you discipline yourself to do this. Working Monday to Friday, nine to five, will give you the same schedule as someone who works on site; therefore making you feel that you are not at home, but in the workplace.
Create a timetable
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Without an employer looking over your shoulder and constantly assigning you tasks, personal performance management becomes extremely important. The best way to ensure that you are keeping yourself constantly busy and consistently productive is to create a daily timetable to abide by. Set tasks for each hour of every working day and do your utmost to stick to your scheduling. Coupled with the creation of a timetable, create personal goals to meet each or month. Becoming a goal orientated home based worker will mean that you have incentives to work.
Turn off all electrical appliances you do not need
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The television, the radio, the gaming console, the iPad, and the Kindle are all distractions which will prevent you from achieving your maximum productivity levels while you are working from home. Your best course of action in order to ensure that there is nothing that can distract you from your work, is to simply turn all of these entertainment appliances off. Simply pull out the plug, and ignore them. Also, find a room in your home or apartment in which you can work from in a quiet environment.
Keep in contact with your employer throughout the day
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One of the key problems that home based workers face is the feeling of detachment from the rest of the workforce. Without regular in-office meetings, face-to-face conversations and water cooler banter, it can be hard to feel that you are actually at work and have an employer to answer to. By keeping regular contact with your employer through instant messaging applications such as Google Hangouts, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, or conduct video calls through FaceTime and Skype on a daily basis; you will undoubtedly feel like a more valuable part of the work force.
