4+ Tips For Working From Home

For many, the possibility of working from home is enticing: no frustrating commute, no awful coworkers and no overbearing boss. In fact, working from home has many benefits, including more time to work and more opportunity in structuring your working day. At the same time, telecommuting has its challenges. Unless you have a company phone and laptop, leaving the office provides you with an ability to sever your home life from your work life. This is one of the most critical aspects of successfully achieving work-life balance. However, if your home space becomes your office space, it is easier to find yourself responding to that email request or putting the finishing touches on a presentation after work hours.

We’ve compiled eight tips to successfully work from home while maintaining a balance in your professional life and personal life. The key is appropriately identifying what works for you and maintaining boundaries between the different aspects of your life. Every person has their unique circumstances at home and each works and learns differently; however, knowing how and more importantly, when to separate your’ two lives’ will allow you to be more productive at work and more content at home.

1. Establish a routine or a schedule that works for you
At work, you follow a schedule. If you are a teacher, you have assigned breaks. If you work in construction, the crew has a designated time for lunch. Therefore, when working from home, you should establish a similar work schedule. That means starting and finish the day at the expected time and scheduling breaks and your lunch at the appropriate time during the day. Normally, if you don’t bring work home, then why are you doing work off-hours? Stick to a similar work schedule and don’t feel the need to do work at home if usually you are not expected to bring work home.

Likewise, it is essential to also get into a routine at home. When you wake up, start your work computer and take a look at your calendar. Block time in your day planner for breaks and lunch. Once that is done, get ready for work as you would if you were going into the office. Take a shower, change, eat breakfast and perhaps take the dog for a walk. The key is to know what your day looks like, and mentally prepare for your job.

2. Create a workspace dedicated to doing your job
One of the benefits of working from home is your ability to create a workspace catered to your needs. While at work, you may share a cubicle space with your colleagues, or you may have an office that looks like it was pulled out of a Soviet-era catalog on interior office design. But, at home, you can build a space that works for your work life and your personal life.

Consider, for a moment, what your workspace looks resemble?

• Is there a lot of natural light?

• Is there a lot of noise or foot traffic?

• Do you need a big table or a small table?

• Are you on a couch or a comfy chair working on a laptop?

• Are you outside sitting at a coffee shop or working from your patio?

Every person’s ideal workspace varies based on an individual’s personality and work requirements. Reflect on the space that is available to you and that you need to do your best work. When setting up your at-home office:

• It helps to separate your workspace from your bedroom. If you have access to an unused bedroom, then that can couple as your home office. If you don’t have access to another room, it is preferable to work at a kitchen bar or table rather than in your bedroom.

• If your only option is to work from your bedroom, turn a little nook into your office space. If possible, put the desk parallel to the  bed and place the chair between the bed and the desk. This way, when you are working at the desk, you can’t see the bed. Better yet, put the desk by a window so that you can occasionally relax your eyes by gazing outside. Setting up your workstation in this manner will give you the illusion that you are not in your bedroom.

If both options are not available to you, and you need to work from your bed, then the consider having a box or a side table where you can store your laptop, work phone, books and office supplies for the evening once you are finished work for the day. This way, your work supplies are separate from your personal items.

3. Communicate often with coworkers and supervisors
When working from home, it is necessary to ensure the lines of communication between you, your supervisor and your colleagues are open. One of the markers of success is teamwork and effective teamwork only happens if there is established trust and respective communication between workers. Working remotely creates difficulty for a variety of reasons. At the office:

• you can demonstrate your presence on the job.

• you can knock on your supervisor’s door and have a quick one-on-one discussion on your assignment and your accomplishments.

• your supervisor can easily recognize your contribution and assess your future on a project or company.

With the inability to work so closely with your supervisor and colleagues, workers need to spend more time ensuring they communicate their accomplishments professionally. Therefore, what should you communicate to your supervisor and colleagues when working from home?

• Ensure you indicate when your breaks and lunchtimes are to ensure that your position is covered during those times.

• Suggest to your supervisor that the team has weekly team meetings to update each other on what everyone is working on, how the workweek is progressing and the challenges team members are facing while working from home, for example, technology issues.

• Ensure that you have a secondary means of communicating in the event your primary means is not working. Have a telephone number where you can be reached during the workday, or an alternative email address.

• Consider using a video chat service (e.g., Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom, WebEx or FaceTime) to have your team meetings.

There is a famous adage that most communication is non-verbal. It is in a person’s gestures or eyes that a person communicates her or his thoughts. Therefore, working from homes does have its challenges, but there are many tools at your disposal to bridge the ‘communication divide’.

4. Prioritize your mental and physical health
Having a daily commute from your home to your workplace and being able to get outside and take a walk around the block contributes to a healthy lifestyle. This can be challenging when working from home and when you may not have access to a home fitness gym. That just means that establishing a schedule, where you carve out time for your health, is essential to successfully working from home. There are many resources to incorporating exercise into your day-to-day routine. Some fitness resources include:

• Fitness Blender offers users the ability to search for workout videos using a variety of filters, such as difficulty level and training type.

• Do Yoga With Me offers hundreds of yoga videos that users can filter according to difficulty level, body focus, and class length,  among others.

• The Fitness Marshall offers workout dance videos set to hit songs.

Another aspect of improving your mental and physical health includes getting sufficient sleep to be at your best the next day. Your evenings belong to you and therefore, you should be doing tasks that relax you and prepares you for tomorrow. That means:

• Turning on your computer’s and phone’s night light settings, which will reduce the blue light.

• Reducing how much TV you watch before going to bed or reducing your time on your computer
or phone before bed.

• Investing in colored light bulbs or smart light bulbs allows you to dim your bedroom light brightness and turn it to brown, orange or other warm colors.

• Playing some meditation or relaxing music on low.

Another aspect of being healthy is eating well and staying hydrated. At work, some people tend to eat at their desks, or when they are not in meetings. But, when working from home, you do not have the same workplace limitations on when to and not to eat. Some easy ways to ensure that you are eating healthy includes:

• Spending the time to cut and peel vegetable sticks so that they are readily available in your fridge.

• Creating your dip using herbs, Greek yogurt, avocado and some species.

• Peeling and cutting a few vegetables or fruits for your version of flavored water.

• Baking some low sugar sweets, such as cookies or cakes, putting them in your freezer so that you can grab a sweet when you need one during the day.

On a personal note: When I first started working from home, my colleagues told me it’s important to dress as if you were going into the office. When you wear your workplace attire, this helps put you in the right frame of mind. In fact, I shortly discovered a lot of blogs had stressed the importance of putting on that suit when at your computer while working from home.

In my experience, I don’t think dressing for work at home is particularly necessary, unless you will be on a work video call with your colleagues. Nobody wants to get up from their chair, while on a video call, and show to the world your ‘comfortable attire’. Rather, the most important thing is separating your ‘bed state’ from your ‘day state’. In other words, take off the PJs and put on something different. For those individuals who prefer to go to bed in the raw, then well, just put something on, even if that something is your never used PJs.

Therefore, if you are on a video call, dress as if you were being interviewed for that job. If you are not on a video call, wear clothing that will help get you into the work mindset, that is different from your bed state, and that you still feel comfortable wearing all day long.