Running your own business takes a lot of time and dedication. You have a lot to stay on top of, and it may be difficult to take time off when you need to. It’s imperative that you make the most of your working hours so you won’t get overwhelmed. While working from home can make things a little easier by sparing you from a commute or being in an office environment all day, it also presents its own set of unique challenges. Here are some strategies for working efficiently from home.
Simplify Your Phone Service
While you’re working at home, you want to be accessible by phone to all of your regular business contacts, but you may not necessarily want to give out your home phone number or personal cell phone number. The best solution is to get a business phone number that will work on your cell phone. Ninja number will send your calls to an app on your phone, so it will be easy to keep your business calls and your personal calls separate. If you have to go out anywhere for work or you just want to get out for a while to take a break or run personal errands, you won’t miss any of your important calls. When you don’t want to receive work calls, you can silence your notifications without silencing your calls that aren’t work-related.
Improve Your Internet Quality
Your productivity could be limited by your internet speed. You need to be able to navigate sites quickly and access vital information as quickly as possible. If you’ll be meeting with people over video-conferencing platforms, poor internet could be serious cause for embarrassment. If your connection is slow, you’ll appear pixelated and it won’t make a good impression. Moreover, you may even freeze up altogether right when you’re conveying something important or answering a question. You don’t want to be the laughing stock of a Zoom or Google Meeting call, so make sure your internet is up to par. Get an enhanced speed from your internet provider. If necessary, replace your router or get a signal repeater so that the area where you’ll be working will have service that works just as well as the other areas in your home.
Create Reasonable To-Do Lists
You have to set a reasonable schedule for yourself similar to how you would as if you weren’t working for home. You wouldn’t try to stay at the office for fifteen hours on an average work day, and you shouldn’t try to work fifteen hours straight from home either. If you push yourself to overdo it, you won’t end up producing your best work, and you may burn out quickly. Moreover, failing to meet unreasonable expectations that you make yourself may cause you to feel as though you’ve failed when in fact you’ve achieved a lot over the course of a day. Pace yourself by setting a time when you’ll stop working and take some personal time for yourself. Even when your work and homelife tend to overlap simply because you’re working from home, you need to make a concerted effort to strike a good balance between your work life and your homelife.
Assign Time Limits to Certain Tasks
When you’re in charge of your working environment and not being influenced by the pressures of supervisors’ demands in an office setting, you may find yourself spending too much time on some tasks and thereby putting yourself in the position of not being able to spend enough time on others. You can get fixated on the minutiae of a task that’s not particularly important or end up taking too many breaks mid-task and inadvertently stretching out the time that you’re working on them. You have to be careful about your time management by creating to-do-lists with approximations of how much time you should allocate to individual items. While some minor readjustments may be required occasionally, you have to stick with your planned schedule as best you can.
Staying organized, using your time well, and giving yourself the tools that you need to be productive will help you stay efficient while working from home. When you work more efficiently, you can spend more time enjoying your time at home to yourself and produce better quality work.
