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Please enjoy this guest post from the helpful folks at Office Suites Plus, a virtual office company.
Through recent advances in technology, the number of people working from home offices has greatly increased in the past decade. And for good reason. When you take the proper steps, a home office allows you to work from the comfort and convenience of home without sacrificing productivity. Here are five helpful tips to make your “home office” time more productive.
1. Adhere to a schedule: People who work from home have the luxury of creating their own schedule, but it is still important to treat your day like a regular work day. That means waking up early, allotting a reasonable amount of time for lunch, and making yourself available to coworkers and clients at the same hours each day. This not only helps make you more productive, but it also ensures that you aren’t wasting your coworker’s or client’s time.
2. Eliminate Distractions: A home office is an easy place to get distracted. Televisions, the Internet, spouses, and children can all contribute to a decrease in work productivity. While computers and the Internet are almost essential to perform any job in this digital age and therefore impossible to do without, utmost care should be taken to remove all other distractions from the working environment. You should choose an environment that is most relaxing to you. This could mean the peace and quiet of a basement or the beauty and radiance of a sun room.
3. Keep in touch: The modern employee uses a variety of technologies to stay in touch with coworkers. Email, instant messengers, text messages, and phone calls are absolutely vital to communicate effectively with coworkers and clients. Keeping them up-to-date with progress on projects will help everyone work at an optimal level. As mentioned previously, making yourself available between predefined hours is a great way to stay productive.
4. Take Breaks: A Gallup Poll conducted in 2000 showed that 80% of workers feel stress on the job and over half said they need help managing it. Working from home may help alleviate some of the stresses that come from a regular 9-5, but it may also create some new ones. After all, it is hard to escape the stresses of the office when you live in one. A great way to avoid “burning out” is to pace yourself throughout the work day. Short breaks every couple of hours can go a long way to reducing stress. Lastly, don’t be afraid to close your laptop and turn off your work phone when 5pm rolls around. You obviously need to finish all work-related responsibilities, but you are not obligated to be on call 24/7.
5. Stay Organized: Clutter kills productivity! Excess clutter is a distraction and can make it awfully difficult to find what you need amongst a mess of paper. The solution, go paperless! Throw away all sticky-notes, calendars, and to-do list and opt for their electronic equivalent. Removing all non-work related materials from your desk will help you stay focused on the job at hand. If you aren’t the type to continually maintain a clean working environment, dedicate a day in the week to tidying up.
Using these five tips, your home office productivity should greatly improve.
Guest post by Office Suites PLUS , a Leading Provider of Full-Service Office Suites and Virtual Offices. Pay them a visit for more information on how Office Suites PLUS cam help your business grow.
P.S. One critical part of your home office is phone service. I use RingCentral for my office phone service. Hop over and read my RingCentral review. You’ll also want to take a look at my online fax review.
About Denise O'Berry
Thanks, Denise, for posting this extremely helpful tips. Going paperless in the office really can clear the mental clutter, and help you really increase your productivity and efficiency. I highly recommend Office Live Workspace for you or your readers who might be interested in embracing a paperless workspace. You get 5GB of storage online for free, and it syncs seamlessly with Office. Here’s a helpful article about how it works: http://ask.officelive.com/workspace/blogs/workspace_team/archive/2008/06/30/go-green.aspx.
Cheers!
Kim
Microsoft Office Live Outreach
Sounds interesting Kim. I’ll take a look. Thanks for sharing that link.
Microsoft Live Workspace is really good I’ve used it previously. Google also have one which is also good. I used Live before but I started to exceed the 5gb limit so I switched to Google which I found was a lot cheaper at the time. Here’s a link http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en-GB/business/index.html#utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-emea-uk-sk&utm_medium=ha&utm_term=cloud%20computing
I can’t thank you enough for these very useful tips. I run my own business and have had to work from home on a number of occasions due to having a small family. Overall, your site is great and I will be stopping by regularly to read your tips!!!
Anne — My pleasure! Thanks for stopping by and leaving your thoughts. I always appreciate a good discussion about small business.
Hi Denise,
I’m so glad you retweeted this guest post earlier this week as it has so many tips that can be of tremendous benefits to those who have the opportunity to work from home. Staying organized is so important! I have my own business but I also work away from home and staying organized is critical to productivity and one’s well-being overall. There is a different feeling when you walk into a home office that’s neat and organized, as well as a computer that’s organized.
Thanks for sharing these tips.
Yvonne — I’m so glad the tips were helpful. I like to share this valuable platform with other like minded people who can offer up good tips for small business owners like you. Thanks so much for stopping by and, most importantly, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Hello, I read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam comments? If so how do you reduce it, any plugin or anything you can advise? I get so much lately it’s driving me insane so any help is very much appreciated.Thanks!
Thanks for reading. Yes, I get a ton of spam too. I use the akismet plugin which catches a bunch of it but some get through. Every once in a while a ton of spam bots will come through and slam a bunch of comments on the blog. Luckily because of my internal settings (moderated), none of them get posted. That would be a major nightmare. It’s a sad state of affairs that so many people waste their time focusing on spam when they could use it to do good. I hope things improve for you.