While there are a tremendous number of benefits you can reap when you decide to Work From Home, there can also be certain drawbacks – namely, how it may not feel immediately natural to work from home. Here are a few helpful tips to get your mind clear and help you maximize efficiency when you work from home!

Work from Home Tip #1: Eliminate Distractions

It’s easy to fall into the trap created by simple distractions when you work from home, such as television and tending to personal tasks (Tip #3). The best way to avoid these distractions is to remove them from your presence. Don’t work in front of the television, and try and avoid distractions on your computer as well (assuming that’s where your work is taking place). These is best done by adhering to our next tip.

Work from Home Tip #2: Create a Home Office

It may sound simple to eliminate all the distractions that surround you every day, but we may not realize just how many there really are. To best accomplish Tip #1, a good idea might be to create a home office, separate from personal life. This space allows you to maintain focus on the tasks at hand and not get sidetracked by everything else we have going on in our lives. This also helps maintain organization among our work-related documents and files.

Work from Home Tip #3: Set Personal Tasks for Personal Time

When we work from home, it is easy for our personal and professional lives to crossover. The result is trying to multi-task among business and personal items, and possibly missing out on an opportunity or not completing a task to the best of our ability. An easy way to avoid this pitfall is to separate personal and professional tasks for designated times. By doing this, we can assure ourselves that everything we need taken care of will get done, and we will be able to give ourselves entirely to whatever task we have at hand.

Work from Home Tip #4: Schedule Your Day

A schedule is important to any type of business, particularly when you work from home. When we are able to see what our assigned tasks are and the time we have allotted ourselves over the course of the day to tackle said tasks, we can be much more efficient. With a physical document that allows us to see exactly what it is we need to accomplish, we can thoughtfully plan each task so that we reach every goal in the time we have designated to do it.

Work from Home Tip #5: Take Breaks

Just as you would if you were working in a conventional office setting, it is important to take breaks when you work from home. It is easy to spend the entire day in front of your computer and on the phone, getting as much done as you possibly can, but this is not a recipe for optimal success. Taking a few minutes every hour to back away from the computer, step outside, or catch up on the morning’s newspaper allows us to relax, regroup and refresh so that we are able to return to work full of energy. These are just a few tips that we think might be helpful when deciding to work from home. Do you think there are any others? We would love to hear about them! Feel free to write them into the comments section below.