My Top 3 Working From Home Tips (+1 Bonus)

This Blog post was written for everybitelectronics.co.uk which went live in 2019 and expired in 2023.

3 main things have helped me stay productive while Working from Home and I would like to share these tips and tricks with all of you:

1) Keep a clean and tidy desk. Remove all distractions from the room you are working in - this includes your phone (Something I struggle a lot with 😄).

For most of you cleaning the workspace every week will be fine, but for a messy worker like me, I have to do it every morning 😂.

Keeping a clean working environment not only helps you stay focus but also helps your mental health by reducing stress levels.

2) Make the most of the extra time some of us are getting. While working from home can be hard it does come with a few perks such as no more commuting 🚗🚆. For some of us, this can add an extra hour or 2 to our day.

My challenge to you all is to use this extra to do something that helps you develop. Whether this is reading one of those books that have piled up or learning a new skill (For Example Sewing 🧵 or programming 💻).

3) My third and final tip is a key one to keep morale high and reduce stress in these difficult times. It's to keep a clear separation between work and home life. Previously, we mostly all spent work at a separate building to home, this meant that our minds related home with relaxing and office/place of work with working.

Now we find ourselves in a difficult position where we can easily blur the line between work and play. This can go 2 ways. Either “Playing” when we should be working. Whether this is an extra-long break or scrolling through social media in meetings.

The other way that these lines can be blurred is more serious. We can find ourselves not being able to relax - relating “Home” 🏠 with work 🏢 meaning we can't switch off our brains to just chill out.
If you are one of these people (like I was) then you need to provide a clear line in your day with the end of work and the start of “Home Time”. For me, this line has been a quick 15 min walk after I finish working to simulate the end of a working day. For others, this can be a few minutes of exercise or just a phone call with a close friend. Whatever you choose to do it needs to be consistent every day so that you can maintain a boundary between home life and work life.

I hope these tips help you all to stay positive and make the most out of working from home. They have helped me and I hope they help you too!

Bonus Tip

My bonus tip is not specific to Working from Home, however, it is a skill/tool that has helped me become more productive with the time I spend working.

I first heard this technique from Developer and teacher - Scott Hanselman in is 2012 talk "Scaling Yourself":

In this talk, he talks about the Pomodoro technique - which literally translates to Tomato 🍅.

This technique splits your day into sections of 25 mins of working and then 5 mins rest. This may seem like a lot of time resting, however, these 25 mins should be full of intense work with no distractions. I'll leave you to watch the video to understand how powerful this is - it'll surprise you how much you can get done if you put 100% of your effort towards it!

If you stuck around to the end of the post - congratulations 🎉🎉.