7 Tips For Remote Workers To Plan A Weekly Schedule
Congratulations, you’ve finally gotten out of the office and gained the freedom to work from almost anywhere. Now it’s time to hunker down and make sure you get to keep your job in a remote position. Even if you’re self-employed, you have to be as productive or more than if you were on-site.
Find Your Most Productive Hours
The change in your work environment will be immediately noticeable. The distractions of others and objects at home can lead to an unproductive workday. Your first task is to find the best time of day for you to work. Sometimes, this will be dictated by your job, sorry help desk ITs. In the case that it’s not, experiment with working at different times and even different intervals. Not everyone has the same internal clock. If you find that you’re the most productive in the later hours, use it.
A simple way to start is to let your body get into a natural sleep cycle and work when you’re the most aware. You might find that you wake up even earlier than you expected or later. Either way, you’ll have a better understanding of when you best operate.
Create a Working Plan
Now that you have figured out when you work the best, it’s time to create a weekly plan. Schedule your day with your work hours and what days of the week to work. At first, you may feel like you can manage to work every day. For a week or two, you might even do it. You can’t sustain this forever though. You need to plan days to relax and recover. On Yalantis.com you can read the advantages of appointment scheduling apps that can help you to plan your meetings in advance. Even if your job mostly requires brainpower, it still takes energy to perform. Overuse will only cause you to wear down and feel overwhelmed.
Take it easy. Work the same amount of days you would if you needed to be in the office. Get creative with your days off. Working two days and then taking one day off might be more efficient for you and provide extra time to do other things.
Work in a Dedicated Space
The next trick to work around the obstacles of being productive at home is to create a dedicated and clean workspace. It should be separate from your living space. Be sure to set up everything you need in this area. Objects you use frequently throughout the day should be within arms’ reach. Think of any tools, utensils, or equipment that you may need throughout the day and strategically plan it around your workspace. You’ll want to make sure that you have as little reason as possible to leave your workspace until you take a break or are done for the day. As well, you want to make sure that you have all the tools necessary to perform your best.
You can also take some advice from University students on how to boost productivity at home.
Organize Your Workload
Define what tasks you need to complete and when they should be finished. It helps to break down your workload into categories that suit your profession. Sometimes, it’s better to work in a specific order to create a more logically coherent result. By defining the overall task, you can sort the order to whatever makes the most sense and flows logically.
For example, most jobs have a task board with the daily, weekly, or monthly required tasks. Daily tasks can be sorted in order by efficiency. I would recommend that you begin with the most difficult and time-consuming tasks to alleviate the pressure for the rest of the day. For weekly tasks, you should organize them by similarities and create task blocks. After assessing your total workload, separate the blocks you’ve created to measure the time needed to complete. Divide the tasks throughout the week. Try to give yourself a shorter deadline than is necessary.
“—work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” -Parkinson’s Law
Plan for Breaks
Don’t push yourself too hard. You may have set a certain amount of work time, but you need to take breaks to realign and keep your top performance. Let’s use those corporate studies and take fifteen minutes every two to four hours. If you plan to work full eight-hour days or more, plan for lunch or even dinner. You can’t afford to skip the fuel that keeps you going.
You can be as lenient as you want with your breaks as long as you can stick to your deadline and complete the job. Even if you truly aren’t, working from home makes you the boss.
Prepare Meals Ahead of Time
A good time-saving technique is to plan and prepare your meals in advance. Whether you choose to get a whole week’s worth of food ready or just the next day’s, pre-cooked and ready-to-eat meals will save you the time to make it on your lunch or dinner breaks. You can still take a solid half-hour to eat at a reasonable pace, but you won’t need the extra hour to cook it. Sometimes your workload will get to be a bit much and every minute counts. If you don’t want to resort to working overtime and overnight, make the best use of the time during the day.
Change Your Mindset
The biggest obstacle to performing productively when working at home is the mindset of being at home. You’ll need to get yourself out of that mode. Now that you’ve planned your week, your day, your workspace, and your meals, it’s time to get to work and recognize the importance of being independently productive in a healthy way.
Adjust your mentality the best you can. It will take some time to get used to, but you have control of how and when you work. Recognize that it’s your responsibility to make yourself productive and to keep yourself healthy.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these tips will make it easier for you to be productive in your remote work. Remember to stay positive. You will be overwhelmed at some point. Accept it and overcome it. It will not only help you grow as a person, but you will build discipline that will make you even more skilled and qualified in your profession.
