How to be Productive Working from Home

tWorking from home is a great way to be with your family more as well as providing for them financially. The one thing people might not realize is that working from home can be harder than it sounds. It’s easy to be sucked into distractions when you’re right there in your house. But I’ve got a bunch of great tips that will increase your productivity while working from home that will leave you feeling like a rockstar. Being more productive can mean the potential of more money or freeing up time for other things.

This post is sponsored by Spektrum Glasses. All opinions are my own.

 7 Tips to Be More Productive Working at Home

1. Get ready as if you work out of the home.

Get dressed as if you’re leaving the house for a 9 – 5 job. Shower, put on your business casual, do your hair and makeup. This will put you in the mindset of “I’m going to work”. It’s super comfy to work in your PJs, but it can leave you with too ‘casual’ of an attitude, almost giving you permission to slack.

Also, pack a lunch. Instead of eating up your work hours with day dreaming about what to make for lunch later and getting lost in the sea of recipes on Pinterest, get your lunch made and put away before you start working. Have a sandwich or salad is in the fridge, ready and waiting.

2. Be sure that your work area is clean, comfortable, and has some personality.

It can be a lot easier to work if you have your desk is organized and tidy. You’ll know where everything is and it’s within reach when you need it. Dress up your desk and wall with things you like – desk accessories in colors that are aesthetically pleasing, a corkboard with fun tacks, or a trendy planter with succulents for your desk will help you feel comfortable in your space and help you stay focused.

3. Use a planner, make lists, and practice task grouping.

All three of these will help you maximize your productivity working from home. Start your work day by making a ‘to do’ list. Go through your planner and see what you have scheduled for the day. A planner can help keep you on track of what needs to be done and when. After you make your ‘to do’ list, go through it and group your tasks. Put all writing tasks together, all your phone calls together, any reporting tasks together, etc. Instead of going back and forth from one type of task to another, by grouping them, you can knock out an entire category of work in no time.

4. Turn off the social media distractions.

It doesn’t matter what the platform, be it Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, it is so easy to spend tons of time on social media. What starts off as checking a Facebook alert you got, can turn into 30 minutes of lost time in the blink of an eye. Turn off the phone, put a temporary block on websites, remove the distraction during work hours.

5. When you need to concentrate, close your inbox.

One of the easiest ways to get side-tracked from what you’re focusing on is a full inbox and new incoming emails. In most cases, there aren’t tasks so urgent that you need to reply within a minute. Plan to check your emails just once an hour, if you have a heavy email load, or plan to clear out your inbox in the morning, afternoon, and again just before signing off for the day and let everything else wait in between so you can stay focused on your other tasks at hand.

6. Track your time spent during work hours.

Tracking how you use your time can help you improve your productivity immensely. Spend a week tracking what you’re doing, when, and how long during that time you are ‘working’. At the end of the week, go over each day and evaluate wasted time. You may be surprised by what’s eating up your time. By evaluating what you do, you can actively change your habits, eliminate time waste, and become super productive!

7. Be sure to take time off.

This may seem silly seeing you’re trying to be more productive and taking a day off sounds like you’d be less productive. Really, it can make you more productive. When working at home, you can easily become burnt out. There are so many ways to make money, so many potential clients, that you can easily slip into the mode where you always want to be working on something. Having a real ‘go-getter’ attitude is great in the work at home game, but not having time away from work can kill your drive. By taking time off, even if it’s just an afternoon, it will help recharge your batteries. Instead of getting in a slump where you’re feeling like ‘ugh working on this again’, you’ll come back from your time off, ready to start something new, finish a project, and watch your bank account grow!

8. Work at home parents can benefit from a schedule and flexibility

If you are pulling double duty trying to work and parent during the day, you understand the constant demands and how difficult it can be to feel productive during the day. First things first is to schedule out times that will work around your children and family schedules to put in focused time to work. Rather than trying to work here and there throughout the day when you can sneak in a few minutes, spend quality time with your children attending to their needs when you are needed, and schedule in specific times to work when your children don’t need all your attention. For babies and toddlers, this probably will mean naptimes and evenings. As your children grow, you can set-up a routine of snacks and reading time in the afternoon while you sneak in an hour. If your children are at school, use their school bus as your alarm that it’s time to call it quits for the day.

Even with a schedule, you’ll have to plan to be flexible and work around the changes that inevitably occur. If you have a partner or older children, be sure to communicate to them what you need to be able to balance all that you juggle. Your family will understand if you need to work late one night because you have a big project you need to complete but if it’s not communicated or it becomes a pattern of every night when your family needs that time, the relationship can struggle. A little communication, flexibility, and planning can go such a long way to give you that needed time to work.

Protecting Your Eyes While Working

Many work at home jobs these days involve a computer and lots of time spent staring at a screen. Taking care of your health is so important for helping you to be able to concentrate and not fall behind on your work. Slouching at your desk with a bad back, for example, can make you uncomfortable, in pain, and restless. Likewise, eye strain can give you headaches, damage your vision, and reduce your ability to focus on your projects. If you spend a couple of hours or more facing a screen each day, Spektrum Glasses can help cut out some of the problems.

Their special lenses help block out blue light while using your tech – smartphone, computer, or other handheld devices. Our bodies were designed to recognized and determine day from night by the amount of blue light in natural daylight. The introduction of all the technology around us can throw off our body’s ability to properly distinguish between light and can through off our biological clock.

Spektrum glasses easily filter out the blue coloring that comes through so strongly on our screens to help prevent the negative aspects from those devices we trust. These special glasses don’t change the amount of light like sunglasses do, instead they simply tint the way we see colors making everything a softer, yellow color tone to protect our eye health.

The best part is, Spektrum does this while looking stylish and smart. The glasses look just like a regular pair of prescription glasses so you’ll fit right in. They offer a satisfaction guarantee that if you don’t love your glasses and notice a difference during the first couple of weeks, you can get a full refund.

Spektrum Cateyes – 50% Blue Light Blocking Glasses

As a blogger, I spend a lot of time on the computer and facing a screen. My eyes always felt strained, I noticed I rarely blink, and after especially long days I would end up with headaches or just plain tired eyes. I really love my pair Spektrum Glasses. They really have affected how I use technology and my eyes don’t feel so strained and tired at the end of the day. I find myself flipping the glasses up from time to time to compare and I’m always blown away by how simply the glasses change a dull blue screen to a more life-toned colors that are much easier to read and consume.

Visit Spektrum Glasses to browse all their styles and get started today protecting your eyes.