How to Stay Focused Doing Work and Study From Home

It can be a struggle to maintain focus and productivity when you’re working or studying from home. Home is usually the place you go to at the end of a long day to unwind and relax. Now with the current lock-down situation affecting much of the world’s population, this is no longer the case. Our place of leisure and work have become intertwined; as such, people are struggling to maintain focus and productivity.

The following tips outlined are just some of the ways you can re-establish that boundary between work and play, even if you’re doing both in the same space and without the social pressure brought upon by a workplace or library.

Maintain your workday routine

Yes. You have the time to sleep in now that you don’t need to travel. Yes. You can work without wearing pants. But how does this make you feel? Lazy, most likely. And what do people that feel lazy do? Nothing.

Treating each day as a standard working day, by including your regular morning routine of personal hygiene, waking up at a consistent time, starting work at the same time each day and wearing clothes you would wear in public, will go a long way to forcing your other, more productive work habits to fall into place.

Have a to-do list, then calendarize tasks

When you’re at home, it’s easy to forget what needs doing, and the time restrictions those tasks fall under. Because no one’s over your shoulder to keep you on track, it is up to you to be this person. The temptation is all too strong to respond to Facebook messages or check Instagram when no one’s looking, but all that does is harm you. Creating a list of to-dos, either for your work, personal or social lives, will help you group those tasks into their respective parts of your life.
Executing them by calendarizing and blocking out time for their completion on a calendar will help you knock them out of the park on time. It will also keep work separated from the other aspects of your life. Of course, you can have some flexibility around this. You might need to get some fresh air halfway through your workday, and so scheduling a walk will do great things for your mental and physical state.

Use the Pomodoro Technique

If you struggle to maintain focus while working in an unregulated environment such as your home, you may need to engage in the Pomodoro technique. This technique involves working on a sustained and uninterrupted task for around 25 minutes, before taking a short break and repeating the process.
This encourages productive working as you aren’t working beyond the point of diminishing returns whereby you are too tired to work to a high standard, due to working too long in a row. There are many apps and timers out there to help you with this. A quick search in the app store of “Pomodoro” will reveal the best ones to use.

Set Restrictions to Phone Usage

Have you ever looked at the scary statistics your phone records of how much time you spend on it? It’s a built-in feature on some of the most popular phones now, and if it’s not built-in, there are third-party apps that also track usage. These apps can also let you set restrictions on certain apps you spend too much time on, as well as usage.
To avoid distractions during work and other activities that require sustained focus, turn your phone on airplane mode to ensure no one’s messages derail your train of thought and productive session of work.
Look at how much time you spent on your phone at the end of the day, and ask yourself some of the following questions; how could I have better spent my time? How much money is that time worth to me? What did I gain from being on social media for that long? Reflecting with these confronting questions will help you regain control of your time slowly.

Work in a Productive Environment

As mentioned before, the key reason we struggle to work productively at home is because the purpose it serves conflicts with what we want to do. The home is supposed to be the place we relax, but this is no longer the case.
You can, however, make physical and mental divisions to aid your productivity. This involves creating a set space for work and work alone, and likewise, a set space for relaxation. If you have the space, work outside of your bedroom, lounge or dining room, or if this is not possible, set up a desk that invokes feelings of work and productivity. Working in the same place you watch Netflix or play videogames all but guarantees that you will be distracted, so don’t tempt yourself.

Final Thoughts

To summarise most of this post, I would say the key to staying productive at home is to treat it like you’re not working from home. Get dressed for work, tend to personal hygiene in your normal way, work at a desk that looks like a place of work and hold yourself accountable to your tasks even though no-ones watching you. Keep the time you tend to your work life, separate to your other life tasks, just as you would in a regular working day.

Staying productive when working at home is one of the key’s to happiness during the lock-down period. There’s no worse feeling than wasting a day to mindless consumption of social media and entertainment, especially if that drags out for a few weeks. Of course, everything in moderation is fine, but keep your consumption of entertainment to similar levels to your pre-lock-down life, and keep working hard on what’s important to you and your loved ones.

Originally published at http://mitchellcarlyle.wordpress.com on April 2, 2020.