Working from home is the dream of many, but it also comes with some challenges. How can you stay focused on your work and maintain a healthy work-life balance when you’re sitting in your pajamas? Do you have trouble staying focused while you are working from home? Have you tried all the tricks to no avail? Whether it’s your day job or freelancing, a lack of focus is a big problem. So why do we have so much difficulty staying focused? Why are we not more efficient at work? The reason is that we are not “in the zone”.
If you’re like most people, you probably hate that you can’t stay focused when working from home. When you are more than an hour’s drive away from your coworkers, it’s easy to get distracted by your family, your kids, and all sorts of other things that tend to come up when you are not expecting them. In this article, we are going to talk about how to stay focused while working from home.
Avoid Distraction
Technology has changed the way we live. There are now a lot of distractions that can distract us from our daily routines. Some of these distractions are more serious than others, and some can be more dangerous than others. This is why it is important to know how to limit these distractions to avoid situations that may cause us to lose focus.
Distractions can be anything from a constantly updated to-do list to the constant emails, texts, Facebook shares, and other notifications that can keep us tied to our screens. The result is lost productivity, which can be a huge problem for today’s busy professionals. To maximize the productivity, it’s recommend doing whatever it needs to avoid distractions.
Turn Off All Notifications
We sit at our desk, logged in to our computer and have our phone and laptop next to us. We surf the internet, check our emails and juggle our to do lists. All the while, there is a constant stream of notifications for social media, our favorite news sites and other apps. All these notifications can be distracting. To be more productive, we should turn off all notifications while working from home.
Put yourself in your Best Environment
It is very hard to stay focused when you are at home. You can’t have all the distractions around you. So, you need to find the right environment in which you can stay focused. If you didn’t have the right environment, they you might need to create one. It can be locking yourself in the room and communicate with your family members by telling them you are working and need to stay focus. Make sure during your working time no one will coming and disturbing you.
Find a Quiet Place
People are glued to their computers or tablets an average of 8 hours a day. It is almost impossible to avoid this time. While working from home, you may feel like you are missing something important or you have to stay on top of several tasks at once. You can’t be everywhere at once. To stay productive and focused, you need to set aside a quiet place to concentrate. Whether you are working from home or from another office, it’s important to create a quiet area where you can focus on your work and not be distracted by other people and noises.
Close all Browser Tabs
In a recent study that was conducted by the University of California (UC), researchers found that the number of tabs you have open can really impact your ability to concentrate. Yes, it is true that having multiple tabs open can disrupt your concentration, but the UC study shows that the level of distraction is directly related to the number of tabs that you have opened.
Every time you open a new tab on your browser, a new window is opened that takes your focus away from the task you’re currently working on. That’s why it’s important to close all browser tabs, so that you can focus completely on what you’re doing.
Identify your Priorities
You’re busy. We all are. That’s why it’s easy to get distracted, distracted, distracted. You find yourself jumping from one task to another, never finding the time to focus on the important things. This is the key to staying focused while working from home… the ability to identify your top priorities. If you can identify them, you can know what needs to get done. If you can know what needs to get done, you can stay focused on what is most important, and take the time to do the work.
Temporary turn off all Social Media Accounts
It’s easy to start an account for your business on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and the like. You’re likely to attract plenty of new customers because of the numbers of people who already use these services and are keen to follow you. However, it you are working on work without the necessary of using the social media. It’s better to temporary disconnection from social media to improve your productivity.
Set Goals
We’ve all experienced those days when we’re not feeling the inspiration to get anything done – or when we just don’t feel like working at all. This is when we can really benefit from setting and reaching goals. But not just any goals! We must set our goals to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. This way, we can stay focused on our mission while we keep moving towards our goals.
Develop a Work Schedule
It is common that we work from home and feel that we should be able to work anywhere and anytime, but this is not a fact. We need to have a strategy that will keep us focused, and this is where a Work Schedule comes in. A work schedule is a technique that allows us to organize our working hours, and lets us feel that we are working for a fixed time of the day, and not when we want to. When developing your work schedule, you need to think of your habits as a team and try to develop a schedule that will work best for your life.
Avoid Information Overload
With the explosion of technology in our lives, it’s getting harder to stay focused, especially when you’re working from home. People are constantly being bombarded with information and they even can’t scroll through their Facebook feeds without being distracted by a banner ad. Having too much information at hand can overload the brain and cause us to lose focus. To avoid information overload, we should unsubscribe and unfollow anything doesn’t relate to our work on all the work accounts.