Structure your day and take time off
The way that you structure your day when working from home can make a huge difference to your ability to get work done. The danger is that when you don't have the structure of a formal office environment, you might find that you allow yourself a little extra luxury and time. That in turn could mean you end up procrastinating to the point where you fall behind before you’ve even started!
The solution is to introduce some simple rules that work for you.
These might seem somewhat arbitrary, but we’ll see that they can provide a structure and discipline that will help you to accomplish MUCH more. Just mix and match to make sure you get the most out of your time at home.
Don’t just do the easy stuff and forget that you do need to be productive. Imagine a life where for every productive hour you put 100 dollars in your bank, how about a 1,000 or more if you were more structured? Would you structure your day if this were the case? Well it is!
And you don't need to just transfer your current job to home - you could start your own home business to work on at weekends. There are plenty of us working from home as our lifestyle and earning very good money.
So here are a few mix and match options to get you thinking about how to structure your work day.
Eating the whole frog
The first one that we’re going to address is something called “Eating the Whole Frog.” This comes from a quote by Mark Twain that says:
“If your job is to eat a frog, then you should do that first thing in the morning. If your job is to eat two frogs, then you should eat the biggest and ugliest one first.”
(By the way, you should also change your job, unless you enjoy eating frogs 😉 )
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series of articles, I suggest you have a Today List (TDL), so let's link these two concepts together.
Basically, once you've written your TDL, you should do the biggest and ugliest task on tha tlist first and get it out of the way. If you have it hanging over your head while doing other things, then you will not concentrate. If, like me, you tend to procrastinate, then you may not even get to the big ugly frog at all – I’m assuming you have prioritized this ugly task so it is part of your TDL.
If you structure your TDL and prioritize doing the most difficult or tricky task first, you will find that you power through the day more easily. After all, once you've downed the big ugly frog first, the rest of the tasks will feel like a breeze! Then you can finish more quickly and take the rest of the day off. The last thing you want is to plow through the simple stuff first to find that after lunch you have a 2-hour "big ugly frog" task that you really don’t want to do and which will therefore probably take at least twice that time with frequent breaks and continued procrastination!
So instead of putting off the ugly task, just do it first and get it out of the way! This also works as great training: it builds good habits and these tend to be like muscles, because the more you use them, and repeat and exercise, the easier it gets.
The simple TDL will allow you to be as productive as possible and have great satisfaction when the list is complete. The sense of achievement and control will help to stop you becoming a workaholic, never spending time with your family and becoming dissatisfied with working from home.
As always, there are exceptions. Small urgent and important things crop up, that can be easily completed - plus you need to find time in your day to get the little things done. So there is also the one minute rule: if a task is important and can be completed in 1 minute, then do it.
BUT don’t use this rule as an excuse not to start the big ugly job. Maybe use those small tasks to warm up for a couple of minutes or take a break for a minute from the big job – but NEVER do easy and unimportant 1 minute tasks. Make sure you are in the habit of picking only important ones that move the job or your life forward.
Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Day Work Week, calls these small tasks that play on your mind “open loops.”
For instance, you might have an email that you need to answer that you are putting off - you know, the one you're not sure how to start - or you might have something that must be fixed on your website.
These jobs are urgent and important and take one minute or less, but you put them off because:
a) You have that other big pressing task to take care of today
b) They might be emotionally stressful – so you would rather bury your head in the sand and see if they go away or you run out of time. Do this and at best you won’t sleep well, and at worst you will be totally distracted so you do everything badly and then not sleep well.
Research by Gloria Mark from the University of California has shown that when you are distracted by another task, it can take you around 23 minutes and 15 seconds to refocus back on the original job. In other words our brains are not physically capable of multitasking, and instead they work by switching between tasks.
Time and task management (or "you management")
Don’t panic, this is not the session where I say get out your old time manager and start spending 2 hours a day scheduling your 4 hour work day!
However it’s very common for people who work from home to find themselves becoming overwhelmed and exhausted. While there are several reasons for this, one of the biggest is just simply managing their time and tasks.
Your tasks will not go away, but prioritizing on the fly and switching tasks often can chew a great hole in your day, as the research mentioned shows. So, you have a dilemma: the tasks aren’t going away, and the longer they hang over you, the more they are going to cause you stress and anxiety, and the more task-swapping you will do.
So, hence my To Do list vs TDL. Yes you still have an overall, prioritized To Do list, however you choose the top priority tasks from your To Do list and put them on your TDL. You focus on the smaller, high priority TDL until it's complete and then you finish for the day. Maybe you review your To Do list, add to it anything that has come up while you were working and prioritize this list to create tomorrow’s TDL. I guarantee you will sleep better and be less stressed, as you'll know exactly what you need to do the next day.
One trick is to email your TDL to yourself at the start of the day and this is all you focus on.
So, let me try and bring this all together in what I suggest is one of the best solutions to organizing your day and tasks to make them effective and fun.
The 50-minute hour
There is some research that says, to be effective, you should take a 10 minute break every 50 minutes. This is NOT time to stay at your desk and read Facebook or Pinterest. This is time to take a short walk, make a coffee, get some sunshine, play with your child/dog/cat, get up and do something else. So, this is not an excuse for taking time off and it does take discipline.
Here's how this works...
Choose one, and only one, of your main Today List items. Now, for the next 50 minutes, work as hard as you can on that task.
You may find it helpful (and stop you clock-watching) if you use a timer, maybe a timer on your phone or computer, or a cheap kitchen timer, it doesn't matter. The reason for this is so you are not distracted by constantly wondering, “how much longer have I got to go?” You can just put your head down and work away on your task until the timer alarm goes off.
So that's the secret: stay on task until the timer rings. You’ll be amazed at how much you get done in those 50-minute sprints. The beauty of this, is that doing 50 minutes rather than 1 hour tricks your brain into refraining from thinking about the time, which ironically is an enormous source of wasted mental energy!
To positively reinforce the technique, once you’re finished with a 50-minute work session, take 5 minutes or so to look back at what you were able to do. Feel the sense of accomplishment. Treat yourself to a soda or coffee, take a walk over to the window and look at the sun outside, do any small thing that will create a sense of joy/relaxation/peace. This will, over time, help you stay on task and look forward to your 50-minute work segments.
If you have NOT finished one task in the 50-minute sprint, then get back to it after your break. If, however, you would normally move onto a new task, one improvement is to “cleanse” your mind and add some of the smaller tasks on your Today List or some short reactive tasks that may play on your mind if not done now.
Take 20 minutes (yes, set the timer!) to do some of this reactive work. But once that 20-minute period is done, it’s done. Go back to the 50-minute rule on your next task, so set your timer and go.
It seems to vary a bit, but many experts say it takes 21-30 days of repeating an action to make it a habit. So use the 50-minute rule whenever possible, and then let yourself be amazed and happy at your new level of productivity.
This may seem at odds to the other research and things I have said but believe me it will work as it is structured, rather than the normal, random way that we all go about the typical to do list.
…..How real does this sound? - “what have I got on my to do list, email comes in, you attend to that, back to the list, start something, phone rings so it must be important, back to your task, what was I doing, OK I remember, 5 mins later, ping, new email, might be important…… etc, etc, etc. At the end of the day you are tired, frazzled, the to do list is longer and you don’t seem to have got anything done, BUT you have been busy all day.
My advice is that you turn off all notifications, shut your doors, and put on noise-cancelling headphones - not the ones that cut out the timer though!
The little to-dos
A bit like the 1-minute rule when following the 50-minute hour method. Use the 20 minutes between main tasks to get to the urgent little things that need to be done. If however your tasks fit exactly into the 50-minute sprint, then take 20 mins at the end of your Today List to get through these tasks, or maybe add just one more 50-minute hour to your day to get through ALL of them.
This means you will be more productive, your Today List will always be completed in a day, your main To Do list will never blow out and the little things will never pile up and become overwhelming. You will wonder why you never worked from home before, it is so much FUN and you get SO MUCH done.
Of course, these rules are not set in stone. Different people work differently, and the best strategy for you may depend on the type of work you prefer.
But my recommendation is that you try these techniques for 21 days, then maybe adapt them to fit in with your work pattern and when you are naturally most productive. For me it is the morning, whereas my wife is a night owl so we work very differently.
The key take-home is self-discipline, plus a simple system that works for you, and avoid letting your work spill over into your downtime. That can be both game and life-changing.
There will be more work-from-home tips coming, so if you're not already a subscriber, sign up now to get notified when we publish the next article in this series.
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