Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us got our first taste of working from home. If your experience is anything like mine, then I think there is good reason to be cautious about the benefits of working from home. One of the things that makes the office more productive is peer pressure. It forces you to show up on time and leave on time. Moreover, in the office, you are in a competitive environment and the social pressure for performance is immense. Without that social pressure, your productivity may now seem to depend on an almost inhuman level of self-discipline.
To be productive at home, you need something else in addition to self-discipline to keep you working. For me, I’ve found it helps to get into the flow state. This is the state of mind where you happily work for hours seemingly unaware of your surroundings. Getting into – and staying in – the flow state is the principle behind all my specific suggestions for improving your home office productivity.
If you follow these suggestions, there is an excellent chance that you may be more productive than you would normally be in an office.
- Set aside special times for phone calls, writing, reading, and other work-related activities. It is more efficient to batch these activities than to mix them up. Remember, the key thing is to get into the unconscious workflow state. If you establish the habit of doing certain activities on certain days at certain times of the day, then you will be more disciplined about following through. For example, at Drew & Associates, I set aside specific times each week for introducing myself to new potential clients. Every Thursday between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. that is what I’m doing.
- Never rewrite anything the same day you write it. This is a huge productivity advantage. Too many people stress like a tall palm in a Florida hurricane when they are writing and rewriting the same sentence over and over again until it is perfect. You cannot write and edit at the same time and expect to be successful. Instead, write without rewriting whenever you do a first draft. Then only review it the next day when your mind is fresh. Sometimes you will find that the material you were agonizing over what actually pretty good. You were just being hypercritical during the drafting process.
- Make sure you have music in the background. It seems especially helpful to have familiar music which keeps part of your mind distracted while your higher mind focuses on getting the real work done. I have my own mix that I sued which you can see on YouTube. Using music to distract your wandering mind leaves the rest of your brain the space it needs to concentrate.
- I like having a beverage on my desk, usually coffee, often a Diet Coke. Getting up for a drink breaks the flow state that is the key to home office productivity. This means anything that keeps you in your seat longer is good for you. This means moving the coffee pot close to your desk, keeping a refrigerator in your office, or making sure you have a beverage whenever you sit down before your keyboard.
- Go through everything in your office and reorganize it. Make sure the things you use the most are in the drawers or shelves closest to you. Things you use infrequently should be further away physically. It sometimes helps to have an outsider help you decide which objects and which files should be closer or farther away.
- Create a tight, brilliant filing plan. Be consistent in the labeling and organization of your file folders. I was reminded of the importance of internal organization when we helped charities apply for Paycheck Protection Program loans a few years ago. I was under stress and moving quickly. I saved a lot of time by setting up a system beforehand which put the key information I needed for a loan application all in one place. In a sense, orderly files are more important than brains.
- Make sure you are happy at work. If you are feeling unhappy it is probably because you are doing something you do not need to do. Your subconscious will warn you. Your level of happiness is also a key indicator of whether or not you are in the flow state. Changing the task so that you remain happy is one of the secrets of staying in the productive flow state.
- Use fans, air-conditioning, and/or space heaters to maintain a consistent temperature. If you work at home you absolutely need to pay attention to your environment. Anything which makes you too hot or too cold will now be more likely to knock you out of the flow state. Ideally, your environmental temperature and humidity, if you can control it, should be perfectly consistent in your home workspace. You need a stable environment if you want to be able to focus 100% on your work.
If you rely on the same techniques which worked at your regular office, you most likely will fail at working from home. This is what a lot of people advise, however. This is why they say you need to dress up for work, maintain consistent hours, and check in with other people to be accountable. You are better off, in my view, taking a completely different tact and concentrating instead on doing something you could never be doing at the office – maintaining a clean, consistent, uninterrupted state of productive focus. If you are having fun, in the flow state, then your home office is really working for you.
