If you work from home, you should know the mistakes to avoid if you want a productive workday. Working from home gives you plenty of flexibility, but you need quite a bit of discipline!
Working from home gives you the flexibility to set your own schedule and to take ownership of your working hours. The freedom that comes with working from home is great – you can pop out to collect your kids from school or go for a midday coffee date with a friend. But you want to be careful of becoming too relaxed about your tasks and work schedule if you work from home.
Because there are plenty of jobs where you can work from home, it is important to talk about the mistakes that some of us have made and the lessons that we have learned.
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Working from home jobs can be great, but watch out for this:
Not having a designated workspace
Working in bed is great, but its comforts won’t last long. Having a designated workspace means you can separate work from the rest of your home. It also helps you focus and is a practical solution to keep all your job-related things together – stationery, notebooks, printers – the whole lot.
Sleeping late…all the time
Because of the flexibility of home-based jobs, many of us are not super strict with the time we clock in. But this can become a problem very quickly – if you work from home you need discipline. If you start your workday at 1 PM every day, you might be working well into the night to catch up on your to-do list. So stick to relatively normal working hours, for example, start working at 9 AM and clock out at 5 PM.
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Distractions everywhere
When you work from home, you have to manage your distractions. You can be working one moment and go online to find an email address. The next minute, you are searching for holiday destinations or the best free 5 no deposit casino games. Or your friends are texting you during your working, and you respond- leading to a text exchange of 2 hours.
Manage distractions by not responding to personal messages during work hours and not browsing online unless you need to do so for work. Stay away from your social media accounts during your office hours!
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Working day and night
Just because you want to earn money from home does not mean that you have to work all the time. You do not have to be available to clients or managers around the clock, and you need to set dedicated work hours within which people can contact you for work-related queries. If you get work emails when your workday is done for the day, respond to it the following day.
That way, your clients will know to respect your working hours. If you are working day and night – it could just be a time management issue.
Not getting out enough
If you want to make money from home, you have your work cut out for you. When you work from home, you might be stuck indoors for hours on end and get caught up in your deadlines. But you have to make time to leave your home office and get some fresh air – take a walk, go for a drive or a coffee to clear your mind.
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Working from home is all about time management and sticking to a defined work schedule. It definitely has its perks, but it requires some discipline! With practice, you can avoid these common mistakes.
What mistakes have you made working from home? Let’s talk about it in the comments!
Author’s Bio:
Ellen Royce is a writer that loves experimenting with time management. Whenever she gets some free time, she likes to make trips to the mountainside and enjoy the fresh air and the quietness of nature.