We all are aware that there has been a significant shift from working from the office to working from home. As plenty of employees seek flexibility in their work hours, the companies also get benefits because they can cut office space costs.
Although working from home has many advantages for both employees and companies, there are drawbacks as well. One of the challenges for employees is finding the best way to keep organized and productive at home.
As an employee, you must create a method that fits your personality and lifestyle. It will keep you motivated and focused while working from home. In this article, we will give you a complete guide on how to stay organized while working from home.
Why is It Important to Stay Organized When Working From Home?
When working at home, you will be getting more involved in your personal life. It is undoubtedly that you will face few distractions coming from your home. So, you need to establish ground rules to separate work and home responsibilities.
Achieving and maintaining a work-life balance is the dream of every employee. One of the strategies to achieve a work-life balance is to stay organized. By doing that, you will be able to concentrate better during working hours. You can also be more productive and feel less burnout.
Stay Organized With Your Colleagues and Manager
As we know, working at home has its benefits, but they also come with obstacles. We are bound to find a way to minimize the disadvantages and maximize the positive impacts of remote work.
There are several things you can do to stay organized with your colleagues and manager while working from home, such as:
- Plan a work schedule
- Set everyone’s roles straight
- Focus on one thing at a time
- Take a regular break
- Stay connected with your coworkers
Plan a Work Schedule
One of the benefits of working at home is you have the flexibility to set when to start or stop on your working day as long as you complete your tasks and attend the daily meeting.
When planning a work schedule, you can identify what time works best to communicate with your colleagues or manager via video chatting. This can be done by sharing your work calendar with your teammates, so everyone can see each other’s schedule and minimize a schedule clash between your work life and personal life.
When you are working, your main focus should be on work projects and communication with your coworkers and your manager. So, it is better to turn off all your personal notifications that have no impact on your work. However, give yourself a deadline for responding to the messages or emails you can not react to right away. For instance, you can set a 48-hour rule as the maximum time to give a response.
In a similar fashion, after work, all work-related notifications should be turned off, so that you can concentrate on your personal life.
Set Everyone’s Roles Straight
It is easy to mix up someone’s role or even your own role when you are not physically seeing your colleagues. This is an important matter to establish because it affects your teamwork performance. Furthermore, it gives a clear expectation for every member of the team on what they should achieve and accomplish from their roles. You can also set some ground rules and boundaries with your teammates, so everyone will be in a win-win situation.
Focus on One Thing at a Time
Single-tasking is the total opposite of multitasking, and it is superior in almost every regard. Your brains may initially oppose single-tasking because it is less stimulating. Working on one task at a time, on the other hand, allows you to go deeper and do well on each task. This way, you do not have to divide your time, attention, and energy across several tasks.
So, do not multitask, instead, focus on doing one work at a time. This can help you avoid making mistakes, reduce workplace stress, and complete it on time. When you are focused on one work without interruptions, you will feel more accomplished.
Take a Regular Break
The flexibility working from home offers sometimes makes the lines between break time and working time become blurry. If you ever find yourself eating lunch on your right hand, while your eyes and your left hand are glued to the computer screen trying to do more work. This can lead you to burnout because you do not take your break properly. So, it is important to take your regular breaks entirely to eat or do some activities that refresh your mind.
You can try Pomodoro Technique by deciding which tasks you should do first based on your priority. Every 25 minutes of doing a task, you can take a 5 minutes break. Repeat the cycle 4 times before you take a 15–30 minutes break.
Stay Connected With Your Coworkers
When you are at work, you might go to the coffee shop for lunch with a coworker, take your team out for a happy hour, or hang out after work. However, when working from home, you will need some fun way of staying in touch virtually with your manager and coworkers.
You can arrange a little catch-up session to talk about anything, but work-related stuff. It has been proven that socializing with coworkers outside of the office on non-work activities can improve working relationships. So, use this moment to strengthen your relationship with your teammates.
Put All Your Work Files in One Place
Working from home and doing most of the work virtually helps you and your team to sync every task your team currently working on. You can see your colleague’s progress and help each other without having to meet in person, it is practice and makes your team more productive.
The internet offers so many options to store your work files in a single cloud, and this feature helps a lot if your team usually does lots of group projects. With this feature, there will be no more time wasted away sending the same files over and over again every single time your team holds a group meeting, just one click away and everyone can see and save it on their own computer. So, your team will gain more productivity and keeps everyone updated.
