What are my top tips for Working From Home?

I share my top tips for prioritising the important work in the time you have!

Transcript

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Hello, Recovering Perfectionist. I'm Claire Riley and you're listening to episode number 64 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. You can head to clairy.co forward slash 64 for all of the key takeaways and any links that I share in today's episode. So today I'm going to be focusing on how you can get the most efficiency and effectiveness working from home. Let's jump in. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. All right, so this is one of the questions that I get asked most often is how do you stay productive and effective and do things efficiently when you're also working from home? So most of the people who I work with, women who are in service-based business, who are entrepreneurs, usually solo printers, sometimes have a small team, which usually are remote as well, that we work from home and it can be really, really challenging to balance what we need to be doing in our personal and home lives with what needs to be done in our business lives. So I've put together a couple of my absolute top tips and I hope they are helpful for you. So the first one is setting the tone with your environment. So everything that has to do with where you work and how you start your workday and all of that sort of thing, I think is really important. It's really great to have a few different places in your home where it really signals to your brain and usually to those people around you as well, that you're now in your workspace. Something that used to drive me a little bit crazy, especially when there were more people in my home, was that because I was working from home, I was always accessible. If I was working in an office in the city as I used to, people would have to think a bit more about whether they were going to contact me, whether the thing they wanted to chat about was important enough to interrupt me at work, but for some reason that didn't translate to when I was working at home. So having some sort of environmental triggers for yourself as well as for the people around you, I think is really important. So I actually move around where I'm working between when I'm at home, between my dining table, which is also kind of my desk. Sometimes I sit on the couch if there's something a bit less formal, sometimes I'm outside. But having a space that is really, really important to you and signals to you that you're about to start work, I think is really important. Some of the key things that I think that comes into that is having, you know, the things around you that you can see that make you really happy, the things around you that lighten you up or that inspire you. So no matter where you're sitting, if there's a little space somewhere in your in your vision, in your field of vision, that can have things that make you feel productive. It might be your calendar, it might be your notebooks, your journals, little trinkets, whatever it is, that's something like that that makes it feel like it's your beautiful office space and that you're now ready to start work. The second thing that I think really affects your productivity is it's a bit controversial, this one is what you're wearing. Now I am a hundred percent a fan of working in my active wear, and I only have to look half decent from about here up, right? So I'm absolutely all for comfort and that sort of thing, but just working in your pajamas might not lead to the most productive day of your life. You can get out of the pajamas you slept in, have a shower, do whatever you need to do in the morning, and get back into some other jummies or casual lounge wear if that feels good. Um, but actually uh signaling to yourself that you're now entering a work day and you're ready to go. Um, often, you know, if you're like me, things pop up at the last minute and I end up booking in a call at the last second. And I don't like having to scramble to, you know, get myself feeling like I'm camera ready or ready to have a chat on the phone. So definitely have a think about feeling fresh and feeling like you are physically in yourself ready to join the workday. We totally can't smell if you haven't brushed your teeth, but you can and you'll feel the different energy, right? So that's the second one. The third one is to make sure that you're staying hydrated and to eat well. So I know in um in a lot of workspaces we had those sort of forced break times, and you were absolutely encouraged to get up and go and get yourself a coffee, have your morning and afternoon tea, leave your desk for lunch. Some of us did, some of us didn't, and that's cool. Um, but we definitely have a tendency to just work through and we finish a task and we'll um accidentally just move on to the next one. And then we'll finish that one and we'll move on to the next one. I'll say I'll just go and I'll just do this last little bit before I go and have some lunch. I'll just do this last little bit. But the more I notice um when I do actually consciously look after and plan for how am I going to nourish my body today, the more productivity I get. Otherwise, I can push on pretty hard until about 1:30, 2 o'clock, and then it's all downhill from there. So um I definitely try and have my water, my coffee. It's a very important part of it. But also just giving myself permission to get up and have a snack or go for a little wander and have a you know, a nice big drink of water or something like that. So absolutely also it helps you to make sure that you're getting up and stretching your legs and moving blood around your body and that sort of thing as well. So the fourth thing is to stop obsessing about hours. This is a really, really big one for me. When I first started my business, and I know for a lot of us, we start our business and we've usually come from a job and we feel like we have to start work at nine and then we have to, you know, take our break at 12:30, and then we have to just work until five. And then if we don't do that, then we mustn't be serious about our business, right? Which is just such a load of absolute rubbish. Um, and the more that we obsess about how many hours we are doing and putting in more hours and hustling more and all of that sort of thing, is that we end up overworking but not being very productive. So I would um highly suggest to you to do some little things like stock taking your time. So one of my favorite activities, I do it about once or twice a year when I feel like things have just gone a bit haywire, is I list out the tasks that I want to get done in this work period. Let's say I've got six hours to get some stuff done, and I might have six jobs that I want to get done, and I'll put next to those jobs this one will take 20 minutes, this one will take two hours, and so on and so forth. And then I work through them, but I actually take note of the time that it actually takes me. And this is a really interesting reality check most of the time, because the jobs often that we think are going to be really quick end up blowing out and taking a lot longer. And some of the jobs that we think are going to take a lot longer, we end up having to hand over or outsource, or actually they didn't need to be done at all, and they take a lot less time. So it just helps you with your forward planning if you can get that little reality check on how long the tasks you want to do are actually taking you on the daily. Um, the other thing is to not fill up all of your hours. So if you have six hours, give yourself maybe three hours of actual work to do. Um, it gives us that beautiful sense of freedom and space and having completed something. And if you complete everything that you wanted to by midday and you've still got three hours of your work day to go, it's up to you. You can celebrate, you can go to the beach, or you can continue working, you can do whatever you like, right? But not filling up all of the time actually leaves space for opportunity and for new things and for that beautiful sense of abundance that comes to you as well. So that's the second last one. The very last one is to keep it fun, right? We depending on your brand and and your delivery and how you are and what sort of um business that you're actually running, it's completely up to you how much fun and chill and all that sort of thing. But you're working from home, you get to make the rules. If you want to have music on in the background, you get to have music on in the background. Um, I have these beautiful rituals in the morning where I always have music playing and my diffuser on. Sometimes it's a candle, but usually it's just some essential oils in the diffuser. And I really love that ritual that my whole space feels fun and light and exactly how I want it. I don't have to work in someone else's office where it's got the perfect backdrop and where it's got um, you know, no noise, and we all have to be very quiet because someone else might get distracted if you're too noisy. You get to make whatever, you get to make the rules of whatever and whatever makes it fun. Um I'm also a big fan of things like Pomodoro, um, the Pomodoro timers. So you do the 25-minute work sessions punctuated by small breaks. Um, and one of the things that I love doing there in the breaks is I have a list of personal things I want to do, and half the time the personal things I want to do are friends that I want to call. So I get to call my friends a couple of times a day if I feel like it, and just have a bit of a chat, or just call and you know, have a bit of uh have a bit of fun. So I think um the more that you can instill your flavor and um whatever it is that makes you tick, and whatever is in your surroundings and on your person, and with your time management and your lifestyle that makes it feel fun and um aligned to what sort of um life and lifestyle that you want to create always is going to make things more productive and more efficient and more effective. So, those are my top tips. I will round them up with a couple of dot points in the show notes, which you can get at clairey.co forward slash 64. And I will speak to you on the next one. Take care, everyone. Bye.