Working from home always sounded like a dream. For many, all it means is that it’s four in the afternoon; you’ve had your ninth bowl of cereal and still haven’t done any work.
But you’ll get to it later, you tell yourself. Maybe. Or maybe you’ll start watching YouTube and three hours later start joining a conspiracy theory group because you watched nineteen UFO videos in a row. That’s not going to get your client’s project any closer to reality.
Working from home can be challenging. You need to make sure that you have all the tools that you need to get the job done, literally. It starts with space.
You don’t need to have an entire home office, complete with a water cooler and a guy you hired to talk about the game last night in front of it. Let that guy get a real job. Your workspace can be the kitchen counter or a study, and it doesn’t matter, but you have to declare that it is a workspace.
The only thing you do in that space during work hours is work. You can’t work in the lounge room where the TV is, because the TV is there. The urge to watch is too much. It would be best if you had a place where you work when you are in there.
You also need to set your hours. The great appeal of working from home is the flexibility of the hours. But what you need to do is make sure that you set your work hours to get things done. It’s not a “when you feel like it” sort of thing, or you’ll never get it done.
When people hear that I work from home, they ask if I lounge around in my PJs all day. No. I get dressed for work, sure the standards are casual, but I still get dressed for work because training the mind to make it a workplace makes it so.
Get it done.
