You thought work from home would be easy, didn’t you? You’d wake up on time, maybe workout a little and then have a healthy breakfast before stepping in to your home office.
A month in to work from home and your motivation is going down the drain. You thought you were lazy at work. But now you’re just being paid to sit on your own furniture in random positions until the clock chimes 7.
Work from home during quarantine can be turned in to the most productive time in recent years. Everything is available all around you. There are numerous chances for self-improvement and to learn things that will pay off in the long run.
This is a list of hacks to keep you productive during work from home.
Jump To
Set A Goal For Work From Home
Before you can get back on the productivity train, what are you hoping to accomplish? Having goals are essential to wiring your brain to be productive. Without a goal, your brain doesn’t feel the need to exert so much energy. To understand why you are being so lazy, you have to understand why you refuse to work.
Feeling fearful, anxious and concerned about the current state of the world, leads to a sense of impending doom. This coupled with the hundreds of distractions and easy activities at home that make you feel good, can throw you in a vicious cycle.
In short, you have to analyze your feelings and your environment. You current surroundings at home are made to feel you relaxed and calm, the exact opposite of your workplace.
Becoming aware about the current predicament you are in is the pre-requisite for these hacks to work. Apply these hacks to your work from home routine to see a major boost in your at-home career.
Dress To Work From Home, Not To Chill At Home
Enclothed cognition is a term used by researched to describe the behavioral effects we have when we wear different clothes. A study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that participants who wore a white colored laboratory coat during attention tests performed better.
If you wore certain kinds of shirts at work, then you should wear them at home too. You have to feel like you’re going to work. This same concept works when working out. If you feel demotivated to get into shape at home even with this ample time, try getting into some proper gym-wear.
Squat Wolf has an amazing collection of high quality gym-wear that keeps you comfortable throughout your workout and keeps you in the mood to go longer. Check out our Meta Seamless collection that is designed to boost your confidence and performance during workouts.
Have A Proper Sleep Schedule
Start off by sleeping early even though you don’t have to show up anywhere early in the morning. Oversleeping or sleep deprivation are both cognition killers. Researchers at Canada’s Western University said that getting too much or too less sleep can worsen your cognitive functioning.
Holding your phone when its time for bed, is one of the worst things you can do before going to bed. The white light from your phone kills the melatonin being produced. This chemical is crucial for regulating body functioning and healing your muscles.
Make sure you don’t use your phone prior to 45 minutes before sleeping. Not only is it harmful for your eyes, but our endless scrolling patterns are messing up with our sleep patterns. Every scientist can emphasis about the importance of sleep and its relationship with being productive and active.
Protect Your Mental Health
It is safe to say that this quarantine is getting to all of us. There is a rise in anxiety and depression among so many people. It is hard shifting from being outside 80% of the time to being quarantined at home.
This greatly effects work from home. It’s apparent that if something is constantly eating you out on the inside, the harder is it focus on productive activities.
A report from UN in 2017 stated that people who work from home are likely to have higher levels of stress than office workers. So, not only is quarantine getting the best of our mental health, work from home is also contributing to higher levels of stress.
The viscous cycles come back here. We realize we need to get work done but feel out of sync and that makes us feel even worse, and this process just keeps on repeating. You have to break this vicious cycle. You are your greatest savior after all. There are numerous ways to combat these adverse effects.
Catharsis, a proper schedule, working out, eating healthy and pacing yourselves can greatly help. Remember to talk to yourself, be your own counselor. With a positive tone, you can talk yourself out of anything.
This in-depth guide to protect your mental health during lockdown is detailed with helpful steps to rewire your mindset.
Sit Nearby A Window During Work From Home
This is another brain hack right out of psychology. Where you sit at home and your work surroundings greatly helps improve your mood. Refuge and prospect is a concept that says humans are more comfortable when they are sitting back against a wall and viewing a window or a door in front of them.
The reasoning behind it has to do with evolutionary psychology and we won’t delve in to the details. “If you can find a room with a view of any kind of nature then this has the ability to reduce blood pressure and the circulation of stress hormones, and it increases the capacity for directed attention, which is the ability to focus,” says Lily Bernheimer, who is a director of Space Works Consulting. Even a simple view or a picture of a scenery can help improve your outlook.
Workout From Home
I have talked about the extensive benefits of working out over and over again. When you start working out, completing one movement after the other, pushing your body to its limits; you are essentially training yourself to be productive despite the pain. Working with physical pain to train your mind to keep on going, helps you develop a mindset that loves taking on challenges and finishing them.
Usually, people think hacks are overnight things they have to do and boom, life is changed by the morning. This isn’t GTA, where a few lines of code turns you in to an Apache helicopter at war with half of the city. Hacking your mind is about being persistent because the brain is resistant to change.
Start building discipline in your life and a healthy mindset just with working out. Being stuck at home and with so much free time, is the perfect time for you to start getting in shape at home. You don’t need equipment to work out at home to build a godly chest or start burning fat with a full body workout. You’ll start to feel better with just a few workouts.
Learn New Things During Quarantine
Keep yourself cognitively active to live an enriched and healthier life. Your brain is a like machine that can either produce quality work daily or negative thoughts that can dampen your outlook. Learning new things and skills keeps this machine in its prime. During this time you can learn a language, do an IT course or even learn how to paint.
Learning new skills will automatically contributes to your wealth in one way or another. Either it will you in your career or open up new opportunities for you to earn. More wealth is definitely a strong motivator to keep churning out quality work. Lifelong learning is seen to boost happiness, memory and self-esteem.
The more you start accomplishing tasks, the more confident your brain feels to get things done. A major contributor to procrastination is the feeling of not possessing the capabilities to get the task done to proficiency.
Talk To Yourself
Who knows your weaknesses and problems better than you? Start talking to yourself in a motivating tone. The way you currently talk to yourself with the negativity, the blame and low self-image; ask yourself, would you ever keep a friend like that around?
Delve deeper in to your personality and thought by questioning yourself about how you feel. Talk to your inner-self and ask what’s gotten you feeling down and what you want. In the end, our subconscious does play a major role in our mental health and outlook. This then determines our motivation in life and productivity.
By using positive words and constant motivation, you can remove all the mental roadblocks that come. Another way you get in touch with your inner-self is by doing meditation. Meditation itself has a lot of health benefits. Mediation and talking to yourself helps provide a sense of clarity.
Create A Schedule For Work From Home
In the beginning of this blog, we talked about the importance of setting goals during work from home. Setting goals is a mental reminder that constantly bugs you to get things done. Combine all of the hacks that we have talked about in this blog and start incorporating them in to your life.
After you are done setting goals. The next step is to talk and convince yourself of what needs to be done. This process will help you make a strong and productive mindset. Finally, incorporate the other hacks mentioned in blog to bolster this positive change.
Creating a schedule with above-mentioned activities should help keep your work from home productive.
Key Takeaway To Stay Productive During Work From Home
Work from home seemed like a piece of cake. You’d get up when you want to and from the comfort of your home. However, a month in to work from home and you’re already wishing you could go back to work. We are seeing a decline in productivity levels around the globe.
This is because of what is going on and that we aren’t used to working from home. Using this guide, you can reset your mindset to starting productive while you work at home.
