Is working from home everything you expected it to be?
If you have been working remotely since the start of quarantine, you have probably realized that remote work comes with a lot of surprises and unexpected challenges. Some good. Some not so good. Some days you feel like you are crushing it and achieving levels of productivity you never thought possible. Other days you have to fight the urge to sit on the couch for even a few minutes because you know you may never get up.
If this feels familiar to you, I can relate. Working from home isn’t as easy as everyone thinks it is and some days are a real struggle to stay focused. But I designed Liveli Planner working from home full time and have optimized it to keep me on track, focused, and most importantly, balanced.
To help you maximize your productivity while working from home, and to keep you from feeling like you are actually living at work, here are a few ways you can use Liveli Planner to work from home like a boss:
Establish Office Hours
The fastest way for your work-from-home life to turn into a work-never-ends prison is to fail to establish and observe office hours. Set your start and end times in your Liveli Planner for each weekday so you can affirm what is work time and what is personal time.
Set Your Routine
The freedom that comes with working from home can be disorienting at first. For those of us who WFH permanently, we eventually learn to develop a strict discipline when managing our time so we actually get stuff done and we don’t spend all of our time working. This discipline is easy to develop when you keep a daily routine. Use your Liveli Planner to establish that routine by adding time blocks to each day (and color coding them) to allocate your time appropriately.
Separate Work from Personal
Working from home already blurs the line between work time and personal time so the last thing you need to do is blend your work and personal calendars. However, it does help to maximize your productivity and your feeling of balance when you can see all of your calendars in one place.
With your Liveli Planner, you can overlay your Outlook and/or Google calendars over your Liveli Planner calendar so you can see everything you have going on in one place but track them separately. Keeping these boundaries is an important part to maintaining your sanity when working from home full time.
Corral Your Distractions
Working from home certainly minimizes the distractions you often have in the office (unless you have kids – then you have a whole new kind of distraction). However, WFH comes with its own temptations and it’s easy to get caught up in your chore list, meal planning, and typical home activities when work is slow. To streamline your focus during work hours, capture all of your distractions in one place so you can easily refer to them later. This is a great way to use your Liveli Planner’s tickers. Create tickers for the items that normally distract you during the day and “jot” them down as they come to you.
Here are the tickers that help me the most in keeping my WFH life organized:
- What’s for dinner?
- To-Do List
- Chores
- Reminders
- Fitness Goal
Track Your Fitness
Two things I failed to realize about working from home that should have been pretty obvious – the snacks are bottomless and you don’t have to walk very far to get to them. I always considered my office job to be sedentary but working from home is MORE sedentary. Hold yourself accountable to staying active and getting your steps in by setting daily activity goals. Do this by creating a checklist ticker and adding your fitness goals for each day. Once you complete them, you get the satisfaction of checking it off our list (and you can have that extra piece of cake).
Check Your Liveli Planner Daily
To help you center yourself at the start of each day, check your Liveli Planner every morning. Check for any major work obligations that may require an adjustment in your routine. Note what you want to accomplish for the day. Reminding yourself of the structure you have setup will hopefully help you feel more organized and able to maintain control of your day.
The shiny newness of working from home may be wearing off at this point now that you have been at it for two months. You may be finally hitting your stride with this new reality or you may be needing a course-correction to stay focused and productive. Liveli Planner was built for you either way and is your best friend for managing all of your sh!t, even if all of your sh!t is now occurring in one place.
Want to try Liveli Planner?
Our beta planner is now available for free at www.liveliplanner.com