Five Ways To Work From Home More Efficiently

More people are working from home than ever before, but the biggest question still remains. How can we be productive outside of our typical work environment? When adapting to a new routine and environment, we need to focus on five key areas which will keep us productive, accessible, and efficient while working from home.

1.Create a Habit Machine: Lower the Bar

A stable routine is always helpful, which is why having a habit machine is essential for those who are new to working remotely.

Your habit machine, which is simply a system to help you build positive habits, will help you to begin adding more value to your daily routine. The first step is a little counterintuitive to some: lower the bar. Tell yourself, "I'm going to do this a minimum of one minute today, two minutes a day tomorrow." Set the bar low, but continually raise it to build momentum.

One of the things the habit machine will allow you to do is to save time. One of the practices that I've instituted is every day I set a goal or an objective to figure out how I can save four minutes a day. Four minutes a day is a magical number for me because I know it represents three full days of productivity each year. I know any positive habit that I can create or any system or process that I can implement that saves me just four minutes a day has a compounding effect on my results.

2.Be a Student of Your Calendar

By far, I think the biggest change in productivity came for me when I started studying my calendar. This isn’t taking a look at your schedule, there are three things to focus on:

Study the things you have planned for the day. Look to create efficiencies with your habit machine, as I mentioned above. For example, I have a 5/20 Rule when I try to schedule five-minute phone calls and keep my in-person meetings to twenty minutes, making it so the people that I interact with are ready for our interaction and focused. With a predominance of virtual meetings today, instituting something as minorly different as a 4/19 Rule could allow for more production.

Study the white space of your calendar. How can you schedule more of those four-minute calls or nineteen-minute meetings? How can you be more accessible to those who might need you? And don’t forget to ensure you schedule time for activities for your own enjoyment.

Study your sleep. It not only is the restorative process, but it enhances your immune system, which is of the utmost importance. You need to build a consistent sleep routine that helps restore not only your physical being but your mental health, as well.

3.Master Prioritization

As you're studying your calendar, you must institute the “Do It Now” rule. There's an old saying, “Ask a busy person to do something for you and you'll be much more likely to get it done.” It goes beyond that, though.

You have to evaluate your tasks by urgency and importance in order to determine priority. You do this by analyzing the actuality of the situation or event in light of your own personal values, not the urgency perceived by others.

If a task is Urgent and Important: Do It Now. If you put off doing something that you can do now, it will take you at least double the time to complete it.

If something is Important but Not Urgent: Plan it, schedule it in your calendar. Give yourself a deadline!

Something is Urgent but Not Important: Delegate it. Trust your team to take care of it.

Finally, if something is Not Urgent and Not Important, figure out a way to eliminate it. It’s obviously not worth your time.

4.Eliminate Distractions

What you focus on, or what you pay attention to and give intention to, will create coincidences in your life, whether you want them or not.

I’ve got a story that's extremely applicable to this that stems from the last time I was in a race car. I was given the opportunity to drive around at a real track, in a real race car, with a real professional driver. They had cones set up for us to maneuver around and I kept hitting the cones. My driving instructor told me to stop looking at the cones, to which I replied, "Well I don't want to hit the cones." He told me to look at the road in front of me, focus on where I wanted to go and not where I didn’t want to go. After that, I didn’t hit a cone.

If you're focused on the distractions you face, you're going to put attention and intention on it, eventually receiving the coincidence of the distraction. Pay attention to what you want for yourself and your business. Stay focused and realize that you will hit the cones if all you're looking at is the cones.

5.Use the Telephone

Finally, the last piece of advice for working at home efficiently is that you’ve got to be tough and you've got to learn to use the telephone. Your telephone is one of the best ways to prove to those who you work for or with that you are productive, accessible and gracious. Effective communication is more essential than ever, which makes the telephone one of the easiest and best forms of communication, with minimal technological know-how required.

You have an opportunity to send your frequency, intonation, connotation in context via voice on the telephone. Data can flow on the telephone using text or social media or email, but the telephone is meant for calling people and making emotional connections, something difficult to do over text. If you want to make sure that you're productive, accessible, and gracious, show you can be of service or of value by the way that you connect with others.