There are many positives to working from home. Avoiding long commutes, having more time to achieve a work-life balance, and higher levels of productivity are just some of the benefits. In fact, 69 percent of millennials say they would give up certain work benefits if it meant they could work from home.
There is one downside to working from home though, one that is a lot less likely to happen while working at the office: procrastination.
Think about it: if you’re at the office under the watchful eye of your supervisor, it’s a lot harder to procrastinate and not get any work done. But if you’re at home with no boss in sight, with the temptation of your favourite show on Netflix just metres away, it’s a lot harder to put up a decent fight against procrastination.
Not only is procrastination awful for your productivity, it’s also not good for your overall happiness. In a recent study, 94 percent of people said that procrastination has a negative effect on their happiness and 18 percent indicated that this effect is extremely negative.
To avoid procrastination and the negative effects it can have on your life, follow these simple steps to keep yourself in check.
Start with a to-do list
If you sit down to work for the first time in the morning (or the evening, whatever your schedule is) and you have so much to do that you don’t know where to start, you’re setting yourself up for a day of procrastination.
The best way to get on track and stay on track throughout your day is to have a clear to-do list of tasks that you’re meant to be accomplishing. A great trick is to set out your to-do list the night before so that you can get started with work the second you sit down.
The more you tick off your to-do list, the more momentum you’ll have to keep going. Momentum is the best way to avoid procrastination!
Set yourself a schedule
Although working from home means you have a little less routine to your day than you would at the office, it’s important to create structure for yourself. Without structure, you leave room to procrastinate.
While you don’t have to schedule every second of your day, create a guide for yourself as to what you should be tackling during each portion of your day.
If your day starts at 9am, dedicate the first hour of your day to reading and responding to emails. Then plot out what you’ll be doing between 10am and midday and so on. Having this direction will leave little room to spend endless hours scrolling on social media. Be sure to schedule meals and breaks too.
Eat the frog
Now that you’ve made a to-do list, where do you start? Often, procrastination doesn’t stem from having a lack of stuff to do, it’s more about what it is that we are faced with. If you have been procrastinating because you are putting off a particularly unpleasant task – bingo! This is the task you need to tackle first.
Productivity consultant Brian Tracy devised the Eat the Frog method after some epic advice from Mark Twain: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”
So, if you’re faced with a task that you just really don’t want to do, the best thing you can do is to prioritise it and get it out the way as quickly as possible. If you were to have to eat a frog, it wouldn’t help to sit and look at it for very long.
Stay organised
Cleaning and organising are one of the first things, other than browsing the internet, people do to procrastinate when working from home. How could you possibly get any work done if your desk is a mess and the dishes need doing?
Instead of looking to cleaning or organisation as a way to procrastinate, work these things into your pre-planned schedule so that they’re handled every day. If organising your work from home office and vacuuming the living room is already out of the way, there isn’t much left to do other than to get some work done.
Use virtual assistants
One of the primary reasons why people procrastinate is because they simply have too much to do and not enough time to do it. It’s easier to procrastinate than face a mountain of work and you just don’t know where to start.
If this sounds all too familiar, it might be time to use virtual assistants to your advantage. A virtual assistant is a remote employee you hire to tackle things you don’t have time to do yourself. Virtual assistants are usually highly skilled in a wide variety of tasks, from admin to bookkeeping and even marketing. Some of the most successful people in business use virtual assistants to help them avoid procrastination and boost productivity.
It’s not just you. One in five people procrastinate every single day. Procrastination is a particularly dangerous trap if you’re working from home. But, by having a clear to-do list that you set out the night before, as well as starting with the hardest task first, and even pulling in a virtual assistant to ease your load, you can be one of the millions of remote workers out there who beat procrastination and get things done.
