9 Tips on How to Work from Home Effectively

Whether you are looking for best ways to work from home or just looking to level up your productivity, these tips to work from home will be helpful for you.

Most companies have moved to work from home permanently because of the COVID-19 pandemic. What started as a temporary solution has grown to become more permanent for a lot of companies.

While it may sound appealing to a few, a lot of people might find it difficult to stay productive. Working at home can also get monotonous and stressful in a very short time. Therefore, it becomes very important to change your lifestyle and routine to ensure maximum productivity while working remote. It is crucial for employees to figure out things like where to work, when to work and how to create boundaries between work and personal life. There are a lot of ways on how to work from home effectively and still get your job done.

Table of Contents

  1. Have scheduled work hours
  2. Prepare physically and mentally for your work day
  3. Create a routine
  4. Setup your workspace
  5. Get the best hardware
  6. Sleep well
  7. Schedule your tasks
  8. Get some Exercise
  9. Take sufficient breaks

Here are 9 tips that will help you stay on track while working from home:

1. Have scheduled work hours

If you want to be successful at working from home, you will have to follow some rules and strict time management. There is no particular formula that works for everybody, but there are certain guidelines that you can follow. What matters in the end is respecting the clock, planning everything in advance and scheduling your work. 

If you respect your own time and that of your family, then you will be working from home with success. To start off with, have a starting time and cut off time, beyond which you won't let work creep into your personal time. If having flexible hours works better for your productivity and routine, then you can tweak your schedule accordingly. Clearly communicate the specific timing to your colleagues and family members.

2. Prepare physically and mentally for your work day

Lack of structure leads to lack of focus and productivity. Preparing yourself physically and mentally before hitting the home office can help immensely in achieving that productivity. This can literally mean preparing a lunch beforehand, having organized materials, or setting up a system for handling emails. If you follow these steps, you will be much more productive and it won't feel like a job you need to escape from.

Make sure that you don’t schedule meetings during your productive hours and resort to quick daily standups to start your day.

3. Create a routine

Creating a routine in Work Week 2022 is very important if you want to start your day in a calm and composed manner. It is crucial to not jump into work or meetings as soon as you wake up but have a morning routine that involves some personal time. Small things like reading, working out or meditating can help you feel accomplished at the start of the day.

You should know exactly what your plan for the day is to maximize your productivity and prepare for the day. If you're working from home and have no clear routine, you will fall prey to procrastination. Create a schedule by defining specific time slots for the most essential things: answering e-mails, working on your project plan etc. And don’t forget to schedule some time for yourself, too.

4. Setup your workspace

Having a dedicated workspace for your work is essential for keeping you focussed and on track. A space solely dedicated to your work at home means that you don’t have to worry about taking work issues to your personal safe spaces. It is also a great way to keep the kids, toys and other distractions separate from your work. 

Your dedicated workspace must be ergonomic,  comfortable and you must have the tools you intend to use easily available there. In the end, all these elements are the basics that you need to be comfortable and work from home successfully.

5. Get the best hardware

You can have a well-furnished ergonomic workspace that would boost your work productivity and make your work station look more aesthetically pleasing. Besides investing in office accessories, invest money on other things to make yourself productive like a good internet connection, Wi-Fi routers, printer, headphones, keyboards of your choice. A basic headset or connection can be okay for a video call meeting here or there, but will struggle to keep you up with the workflow of a remote worker. 

6. Sleep well

Getting enough sleep ensures you're functioning at the optimum brain function and physical well-being. Working from home enables you to live a life that you want but with full-time job, having a family and getting tremendous work achieved is difficult if you are sleep-deprived. It’s extremely important to focus on creating good sleep habits and rituals, so that you feel well-rested and ready to tackle any challenges your days throws at you.

7. Schedule your tasks

Schedule your tasks and make a to-do list every single day. The bottom line is that when you work from home, it's much easier for tasks to slip through the cracks. A well-designed planner can cut down the time it takes to achieve your goals, pushing your productivity to new limits, having productive standup meetings and ensuring that even the most ambitious projects will be completed on time.

Don't waste time reinventing the wheel. Remember to keep it simple and use a simple planner for working from home. Ricotta has built exactly this, check out our Slack to-do app to supercharge your work from home productivity while not overcomplicating things.

8. Get some Exercise

If you spend many hours working on the computer, you need to take care of your physical health. Exercising and stretching will help you feel more active and energized. Perhaps this is one of the joys of a work-from-home cubicle: no dress code, no rush hour traffic, and plenty of telecommuting time. But if you’re slouching in your chair without any activity, that particular work-from-cubicle perk could easily turn into a pain in the neck.

9. Take sufficient breaks

Taking enough breaks during your time from work is also important to maintain productivity for longer periods of time. In other words, it’s easy to get burnt out quickly when working from home. If this happens, your efficiency will plummet and your creativity will disappear. If you maintain solid breaks during your work days, you can maintain fuel in your tank and continue working at a high level each day.

Conclusion

While not all of these tips will directly apply to you, working from home does present its own set of challenges and possibilities. You might find the ideas listed here to be helpful for both your work and personal life. Whether you are a freelancer or someone who works from home office full time, these suggestions should prove valuable in avoiding potential pitfalls and not make you miss going back to work.

After all, when working from home it is very easy to lose yourself in your tasks – so make sure that you don’t succumb to this temptation. Don’t forget to have fun at work from time to time. Hopefully you can use these tips to help get the most from your work from home experience. 

FAQs

Is working from home beneficial?

Unless your work involves a lot of meetings or you are constantly collaborating with your teams, working from home should be a great experience. This is because you will not have to worry about rush-hour traffic, the weather conditions, the burden of dressing up and carrying your gym shoes just in case you want to hit the cross-trainer after work. Working from home comes with its own share of problems but they are far less challenging than commuting to and from an office.

What are the best 2 days to work from home?

This is more of a slotting problem and there are two ways to look at it.

Even Slots: Tuesday and Thursday would ensure that you travel and get a break from travel alternatively and there would be sufficient space between office and work from home.

The long weekend: Picking Monday and Friday would result in a single window of 3 days travel and no other interruption.

What are the disadvantages of working from home?

It's as simple as this. The biggest disadvantage of working from home is that you may feel isolated and burnt out at times. Moreover, you can quickly lose the concept of time during which you should be productive. In many cases, working from home is easier just because it doesn't have the same time structure as working in an office.

Is work from home the future?

Work from home jobs are only getting more popular, and there will likely be plenty of opportunity for these positions in the years to come. With Big companies like Twitter, Shopify, Coinbase going remote, It certainly looks like we are in the early stage of adaption!

Which companies work from home permanently?

Buildremote has a great list of companies that are either going remote or hybrid.

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