Working at Home: a blessing or a curse?

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Working at Home: a blessing or a curse?

Written by: Donna Ann Peck 513 views

There’s no place like home, until you try working there. Love it or hate it, the work-at-home lifestyle is quickly becoming a reality for many people. Whether you bring work home over the weekend, telecommute a few days a week or run a business from home; staying on top of your game is challenging.

Home sweet home can quickly transform into a place of dread if you feel thwarted in your attempts to get things done. Let’s say your 10-year-old knocks on your door, interrupting a critical conference call to say the sink is clogged or the Xbox controller is missing. undress-for-success2 Such episodes can wreck havoc on your happiness and output. What do you?

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Managing the people in your home environment is essential. Locking your door, for example, tells your family: I’m not to be interrupted. I need to get my work done. You can manage surprises that come up at home by setting rules. “If it’s not an emergency,” says Wayne Pepper, a GTD coach with the David Allen Company, “ask family members to put requests in your in-basket. If your family wants you to deal with something, take the paper and pen and hand it to them.” Studies show that it takes 1 to 6 minutes to come back from every interruption. Don’t let your mind get dragged away by worries about the family cocker spaniel until you can do something about it.

Set triggers for when it’s time to start

By far the greatest challenge is determining when to switch on your work persona and when to switch it off. There are no external cues that flick the switch in your brain that it’s time to get to work. The key is to establish cues, routines and clear boundaries to your workday.

“One of the most powerful things I tell people to boost their productivity is to set boundaries— concrete units of time—for when they actually work,” says Pepper. They may start at 2PM, take a five-hour break, then work until midnight. Or they work in 2- hour blocks. Parents’ schedules may differ for each day of the week. There’s nothing random about the day. You define what you want to do, then work in pre-determined blocks of time.

Set triggers for when it’s time to stop

Make sure you get true downtime. “For someone who works from home—and I speak from experience—it’s all too easy to let your work slowly creep until you’re doing work-related things nearly every hour of the day,” says Pepper. You know you’re in trouble if you get up at 6AM and decide to take a peak at email. The next time you check the clock, it’s 11AM and you haven’t had a shower or breakfast. Rule #1: never look at email before you take a shower. Resist the temptation. If you don’t, working at home can feel more like living at work.

“When the day is done, it’s tempting to go back, thinking what can I clean up here? It’s easy to get sucked back into work,” says Pepper. If you work on a laptop that you use for work and entertainment, don’t open work email. Otherwise, the workday can become depressingly open-ended.

For more advice, browse online booksellers. Just published is Undress for Success (John Wiley & Sons), which covers how to convince your employer to create a work-at-home job for you.

Let’s hear your experiences of working at home in the comments. Susan Spilka writes, “After 15 years of working at home on Fridays (in a very disciplined, structured manner), people who know me well (including my mother) still refer to it as my day off.”