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For many of us, working from home has become a normality and our professional lives seem to have changed for the foreseeable future.
There are many benefits to this: avoiding the daily commute, escaping a hectic office environment, and having more time for our friends and families.
However, it’s a double-edged sword, and the pressures of home-working can lead to an increase in stress, anxiety, and boredom.
You can find out more about stress, your mental health and working from home good practice here.
The four walls around us can start feeling like a prison, and the places we used to feel most relaxed are now contaminated with the sound of constant phone calls and endless email notifications.
We have, quite literally, had to take our jobs home with us. Yet, it is vital we keep our personal and professional lives separate so that we maintain a good work-life balance and look after our mental health.
There are some easy and effective ways you can make working from home more enjoyable and more productive.
Here’s a list of our top 7 working from home tips.
1) Create a working from home routine and stick to it
It’s important to create a solid routine that you always stick to – this includes from the very moment you wake up, what you do during work hours, and how you end the day.
This will help you maintain a structure and allow you to enjoy your downtime, instead of just working through breaks to get things done.
Give yourself specific times for breakfast and lunch to help separate the day and help you to keep your focus. Try not to skip meals or just snack from the kitchen, even if you’re especially busy – it can make you feel tired and restless into the afternoon.
You’ll be saving time not having to commute, but don’t waste it! Use the time wisely by arranging your work calendar or going for a walk. If you slide out of bed and start working immediately, the week will start to feel like a continuous loop, and your home will start to feel like a 4-walled prison.
Similarly, you should always aim to finish at the same time, and don’t work beyond your normal hours. If you wouldn’t work late back at the office, don’t do it at home – it’s important you allow yourself to switch off.
Your brain is a muscle. Not having a break is like running a marathon every day without rest – it’s unsustainable.
Try out some automatic time-tracking apps to help you stick to your schedule, including RescueTime and Toggl. These apps have some really useful working from home tips to help you stay on track during the day!
2) Make a separate workspace when working from home
Too often, we take our worries home with us, which then play on our minds and ruin our chance of a relaxing evening and a good sleep.
Working from home means you never get that satisfying feeling of walking in after a long day and collapsing on the couch. Creating a separate workspace keeps you focussed, and you’ll be able to enjoy the couch much more after work, as you won’t have been sitting on it all day.
Always avoid working in bed
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- You need to create a boundary between work and rest.
- People associate beds with sleeping and relaxation. If you work there all day, it can start to remind you about meetings and presentations.
- Sleeping well can reduce stress and improve your mental health, so give yourself every opportunity to make the most of it!
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Learn about the benefits of a good nights sleep here.
(This is one of the best working from home tips out there, but it’s also useful advice in general!)
Try to be creative, whether you have a small office or just a corner of your living space. Rearrange some furniture or even make a physical barrier for yourself using a desk. This will also help you to mentally detach from work at the end of the day. When you leave this area, you should also be leaving behind all the stresses and anxieties associated with your job.
If possible, move next to a window so you get plenty of natural light. This is good for your mood and intake of vitamin D.
Make it a nice place to work. Growing house plants provide a bit of color and help us to feel calm, but they also oxygenate the room, which can increase your concentration and productivity.
3) Improve your posture
You may think this is trivial, but don’t underestimate the importance of posture.
Bad posture can have both physical and mental implications, including muscle fatigue,
back or neck pain, headaches, poor sleep, and a lack of motivation.
You could be sat in the same position for hours and be too busy with work to notice the effect it’s having on you – just think what this is doing to your muscles, neck, and spine!
Listen to your body; it will tell you when you are not sitting correctly. Perhaps you will feel restless and uncomfortable, or feel a nasty twinge when you stand up after a while.
Useful working from home tips for posture:
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- Sit back with an inward curve in your lower back – avoid a C-shaped hunch.
- Raise your screen higher using some books or boxes (you almost won’t believe how much better this feels!) It helps keep your head up straight and your spine in a good position.
- Don’t cross your legs (this can encourage slouching)
- Avoid soft seats like the couch or the bed – these are not good for you in the long term.
- Try working while standing up to exercise different muscles during the day.
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Make sure you’re comfortable and consider investing in a chair that helps your posture. Maybe arrange some cushions on a kitchen chair to help support the inward curve in your spine. It doesn’t need to be expensive – a small investment can go a long way.
You can find more working from home tips here about sitting correctly.
4) Get outside
It’s easy to become so exhausted after work that you have no motivation to leave your house or flat, even if you’ve been stuck inside all day.
However, repeatedly putting it off can leave you stuck in an inescapable cycle where you begin to dread the feeling of being at home.
Also, you will miss out on a variety of benefits that come with being outside, including:
- Sunlight
Natural light helps our brains to produce serotonin, the hormone which helps regulate our mood and levels of happiness. A lack of serotonin is linked to depression and anxiety, so just being outside for a short while can help with your mental health.
- Exercise
Even a small amount of exercise will release endorphins that make you feel good, boost your mood, and also sleep much better. This can help relieve stress, especially if you have any built-up frustration that you can release with a fast walk or more strenuous exercise.
- Social Interaction
Going out is a good opportunity to meet friends or family and take your mind away from home-working. Whether it’s a quick drink or a stroll, make sure you schedule some things to look forward to.
You need to give your brain a break from both work and errands (so going out grocery shopping doesn’t count!)
This is all about making time for yourself, plus the change of scenery will help you to better appreciate home when you return. You can also multitask by listening to music or a podcast, watching a video, or making a phone call.
You may think you don’t have enough time, but even as little as 15 minutes a day can make a difference and help you establish a routine.
Think of it as investing in yourself – you will be more productive and energized at work, so it’s definitely worth doing.
5) Get rid of other distractions
Working from home means it’s really easy to slip into certain habits that wouldn’t exist if you were in the office.
This includes repeatedly making visits to the kitchen as well as more obvious distractions, like having the TV on in the background. This can make your mind restless and have a negative impact on your work.
The simplest way to tackle this is to make sure your workspace is distraction-free. Put any devices or remotes in another room. You’ll feel much more guilty scrolling on your phone if you’ve specifically gone to fetch it, compared to having a quick look when it’s just beside you.
If you need it for work but feel the need to check social media every 15 minutes, consider using apps that temporarily lock you out.
‘Offtime’ blocks you out of certain apps while still allowing access to things you need. ‘Moment’ lets you set daily limits and floods your phone with alerts when you exceed them.
Screen addiction is a genuine issue because it releases dopamine, which affects your impulse control. This means you can easily get stuck in a ‘pleasure cycle’ as you constantly scroll to chase satisfying rewards.
(If you like working in silence, a good working from home tip is to use some noise-canceling headphones to block out any background sounds, even if there’s no music playing.)
6) Get the right equipment for working from home
Whether it’s a slow internet connection or a device that keeps crashing, there is nothing worse than being held back by technology.
You can put 100% of your effort into your job but only get half as much done due to the limitations of your tech, not to mention getting infinitely frustrated in the process.
There are several tips you can use to make your life easier and speed up your machine:
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- Buy an ethernet cable or dongle
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Ethernet cables plug directly into your Wi-Fi router to give you a strong internet signal. This is a big advantage even if it means having an extra cable lying around. Dongles are wireless and work in a similar way by plugging into your USB port.
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- Use an external hard drive
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You can free up space on your device by transferring files onto an external hard drive. Computers and laptops run much slower if their memory is nearly full, so this is one of the best ways to make it run smoothly (the same is also true for phones.) Pictures and videos often take up the largest amount of space, so move these across to free up space.
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- Clean up your device
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Keeping files and folders on your desktop can also make it run slower. You can improve performance by changing them into ‘aliases’, which are like shortcuts. Just right-click on a folder and select ‘create alias.’ Another useful tip is to use the ‘clean up’ function of your anti-virus software, which does a full system scan to look for any issues and then fix them.
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- Ask work for a device
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The best way is to ask your employer for a laptop or a work phone so yours doesn’t get clogged up.
Many employers are willing to provide a device so you can work effectively from home, but if this is not the case, you should schedule a meeting or a call to discuss the impact it’s having on you.
Perhaps explain that your own devices are becoming slow or running out of memory and that you would be able to work more efficiently with an equivalent from work.
It’s in the company’s interest to invest so that you can get more done during working hours. They might even acknowledge your initiative in bringing up an issue that affects other employees.
Working from home top tip:
Remember, employers are often too busy to know exactly what’s going on in your mind, especially when working from home. Don’t assume they know you are having trouble. You need to be the person to tell them, otherwise, they might not know the extent of the problem!
7) Working from home does have some positives – try to enjoy them wherever possible!
It may seem difficult at times, but there are perks to not being in the office.
Even if it’s driving you crazy, try to focus on the good bits: being in the comfort of your own home, away from distractions, or people coming to your desk to ask favors.
Although you are working, you will be more present at home near your friends and family. You avoid the daily commute, and may even be able to finish the day at 5:01 pm, on the couch with a glass of wine already poured – instead of trundling home through rush hour traffic or getting caught in the rain.
As we’ve adapted to life in the pandemic, it may be the case that home-working becomes a more regular occurrence in our working week.
For many people though, it’s a temporary solution. Whether you enjoy it or not, take note of these working from home tips and try to make the most before things go back to normal.
References
https://www.hseni.gov.uk/articles/stress-and-mental-health-work-and-home-good-practice
https://www.bupa.co.uk/newsroom/ourviews/nine-benefits-good-night-sleep
https://www.healthline.com/health/natural-light-benefits#benefits
https://integrehab.com/blog/back-pain/6-effects-poor-posture/
https://mstrust.org.uk/a-z/understanding-and-improving-your-posture/good-and-bad-posture
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/how-to-sit-correctly/
https://offtime.app/the-app.php
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moment-cut-screen-time/id771541926
https://medlineplus.gov/benefitsofexercise.html
https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/coronavirus/simple-tips-to-tackle-working-from-home/
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/how-to-sit-correctly/
