At the office, your workspace had a perfect time management system with a variety of calendars, file systems, and other structures. Now, your workspace might be that desk you had to pull out of storage plus a laptop and whiteboard.
It’s quite the change, and suddenly your perfect time management system is out the window.
It may take time to adjust to your home office, but your time management systems won’t be much different. Here are our 10 simple time management tips for working at home.
Re-Manage Your Schedule
If you’re meticulous about time management, the thing you probably miss the most is your calendar and schedule. With any luck, you probably have an online calendar that you can access. Sometimes, though, the classic pen-and-paper schedule will be what makes you the most comfortable.
It also doesn’t help that you might have to factor a pesky pet or an attention-seeking child into your new schedule.
Set up a calendar that has all your recurring meetings or obligations. After that, you’ll have a good idea of how to plan your to-do tasks around your work. It will also help you plot when you want to take a quick break or your lunch. After all, no one likes having to sit through a five-hour grind.
Schedule Your Free Time
This was mentioned before but it’s worth mentioning again: Time management includes scheduling free time into your day. Give yourself a break every couple of hours and factor in some time to eat lunch.
To make things even more manageable, if you have any things to do around the house, schedule those into your break periods. Or if it’s a rough day at the home office, schedule a cup of tea or coffee into that break instead.
There’s plenty of research out there that says productivity increases when you aren’t feeling overloaded. So that quick break will always be worth it, no matter what it entails. Just don’t forget about the work you need to do afterwards.
Think Long Term
Plan like you’ll be at home for a while. Hopefully, remote work won’t be forever but, depending on how your situation unfolds, you could still be remote for a while.
Long-term time management is thinking about how you can properly accommodate projects in the future. If you’re expecting to be back in an office sooner than later, it still might be good to plan for remote work just in case the situation changes again.
Use a Time Tracker
Time trackers will save your productivity in ways that you won’t know until you try one. Toggl Time Tracker, for instance, lets you manage your time based on projects and tasks so you know exactly how long you’ve been working on a specific thing.
Trackers are a great method of measuring how long it takes for you to do certain tasks. Additionally, they also let you know if you need to put a bit more time into those tasks.
Create Routines
Routines are an important time management strategy, especially for having a good start to your day. Set your alarm, then plan a breakfast, morning activity, or anything else that gets you into the flow for the day.
Another tip is to avoid turning something that you don’t like into part of your routine. If you end up constantly dreading having to do a part of your morning or lunch break routine, reschedule it to a part of the day that makes it more manageable.
Work With Your Energy
Are you a morning person, an afternoon person, or perhaps you’re a night owl? Manage your time around when you have the most working energy.
You also might not be working your normal 9 to 5 hours since you’re remote. It’s worth talking to your boss or supervisor about changing it to an 8 to 4 or a 10 to 6 depending on your productivity and energy levels throughout the day.
Create Similar Spaces
This falls into the time management category of treating your home office like your actual office. While you’re at work, you’re probably not spending a lot of time in the cafeteria or break room. So, designate similar spaces in your living area as such. Your kitchen can be the “cafeteria,” or your living room can be your “break room.”
If you’re cutting down on the time spent away from your desk, that turns into more time put into your work. After all, if you’re not on break, you probably shouldn’t be in the break room, right?
Minimize Social Media and Personal Tasks
Following up on creating similar spaces, you also shouldn’t be using your workspace as a personal space.
Save the social media check-ins for your break, as well as other personal check-ins. Make the phone call with your partner when you’re off the clock and give your kids that “how are you doing?” text for when you’re on break. Same with planning that vacation that you’ve been thinking about since the morning.
Set Your Workplace Boundaries
If you were still in your office, would your child or partner be able to walk in and drop off a snack or a coffee for you? Probably not.
Keep your work boundaries the same as if you were at your actual desk. Try to keep as many external distractions at bay as possible, unless your two-year-old has something vitally important to tell you about that spreadsheet that’s due at 3 o’clock.
Obviously, in emergency situations, there can be an exception but your office is your office and it’s up to you to manage your time in there accordingly.
Stop Multitasking
When you have so many different moving parts to your business, it might make sense to try and work through a bunch of them at the same time to save time. However, this doesn’t always work and can actually waste more time than you think you’re saving.
Multitasking can hinder you by mixing your trains of thought together and dropping your focus on a specific task. While office work might have some tools to help multitask, you might not have those at home. So, it’s better and more productive to take things one at a time so you can do your best work.
Conclusion
In summary, we now have the following list of ten time management tips for working at home:
- Re-Manage Your Schedule
- Schedule Your Free Time
- Think Long Term
- Use a Time Tracker
- Create Routines
- Work With Your Energy
- Create Similar Spaces
- Minimize Social Media and Personal Tasks
- Set Your Workplace Boundaries
- Stop Multitasking
These will help you organize your short-term and long-term time, and help you manage your immediate time to get things done the way you want them to.
Are you pushing off the chores that might make you start dreading the weekend instead of embracing TGIF (Thank Goodness It’s Friday)? Here are some tips on How To Manage Your Chores And A Home Business.
