Being Productive While Working from Home

Being a consultant I have several different offices.  Some days I am working on-site consulting and others I am either at home or at a coffee shop.  Some days I am on-site for half the day and home the other half.  Staying focused and continuing to be productive is a tough task to manage.  There are a lot of responsibilities that you have, that you just may not be able to do while working on-site.  One of the most difficult things that I find is being able to monitor social media sites and keep active with them.  By the time you get home, you are 6 hours behind on tweets and some good links, that you can get lost and fall even further behind by trying to catch up.  Here are a few tips that help me stay up to date and stay productive.

Schedule

Go get yourself a calendar, white board or note pad right now.  Before I even type anything into my Outlook or Google Calendar, it goes onto paper first.  I always have my idea pad with me, at all times.  When I am working on-site it sits right next to me and as soon as an idea pops into my head I write it down.  It could be a blog post idea, or a new design idea for a client, or a new set of tasks for clients, whatever it may be, I write it down.  I tend to break things down on a weekly basis first and then go from there.  I schedule my activities in 30 minute slots, because for me after 30 minutes I need to at least get up and walk around.  Finally, I add events to my Google Calendar and sync it up with my phone that way I can know my schedule no matter where I am at.  Don’t over work yourself, schedule all of your work and work to your schedule.

Create Family Time

This one seems simple, but it’s not.  Family to me is the most important thing, business comes second.  If I was able to, I would work 24 hours a day because there is always something going on, someone you can connect with and learn from, another blog post to write or blog to read and comment on or more code to fix.  But there comes times that you just have to shut the laptop, leave your office and just go and spend time with your family.  Go for a walk, spend time by the water side, watch some television, go see a movie, do something that is quality time with your family.  Don’t open TweetDeck on your iPhone, don’t answer e-mails, don’t make client calls, just spend time with your family.  I do not watch much television, other than sports, but there is at least one show that I will watch every night.  Some nights it’s only a 30 minute show, and others may be an hour long show, but that gives me 30-60 minutes of quality time with family to enjoy a weekly program.

On The Other End – Create Alone Time

It is extremely important to create that family time, but it is also important to create enough alone time that you are not being disrupted or constantly interupted while trying to do work.  My home office does not offer me that much needed privacy at times.  My home office is located in a loft which is doubled as a family room at times.  At times when I know it is going to be busy and possibly a little loud at home, I will decide to go to a local coffee shop that is not very busy.  You need to find a right balance between the two, but like I said, family comes first.

E-mails

I know I’m not the only one who receives hundreds of e-mails a day.  Majority of them are junk or not even worth the time to read, but if they are from clients, or comments or issues, then they do require your attention.  However, the priority that you place on each e-mail is very important.  If there is an urgent e-mail about a site being down then you may need to react to that one right away.  The e-mails that I hate the most are ones that I am cc’d on that I probably didn’t have to be included on.  I think we all that know that one person that cc’s you on everything when you don’t need to know.  I just wasted my time reading that e-mail that I could have spent on some other one.

Google Reader

At any given time my Google Reader typically has about 100 unread items in it, and that is on the lower end.  I tend to read most blog posts late at night, from about 1:00 – 3:00 a.m.  I don’t really sleep because there is too many good things out there to read and then figure how to implement those things into either my own business or client’s business plans.  I add anywhere from 3-5 new blogs to RSS a day.  The way I do it is to just skim through tweets throughout the day and look for some good blogs through links sent out.  If I like the blog, I will add it to RSS and check it out another time.  You can always unsubscribe to thingsif you don’t like them.

Don’t Spin Your Wheels Too Hard

What I mean by this is quite simple, if you find yourself thinking too much on one issue and can’t seem to find a resolution or a creative idea, move on.  Don’t be afraid to move on and work on something else for a while and then come back to it.  There may be times that I don’t know exactly what to blog about, no big deal, go read a magazine (yea a real print magazine, I still subscribe to some) and you will get plenty of ideas from that.  The longer that you are just sitting there spinning your wheels, you can be productive on another project.

Document

This final tip is something that has saved me so much time over the past few months and allowed me to bring on more clients with the free time.  Once an hour I document whatever tasks I had just completed, with some simple notes.  Sure this takes some extra time, about 3-5 minutes, however at the end of the day or week when I look back I can find about 60-90 minutes worth of time that I can eliminate and free up with other things.  You can lose track of things that you are actually doing throughout the day, so documenting everything is one thing that has worked for me.

I hope these tips will help you work from home more productively.
photo credit: fatheroftheweasel via photopin cc