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How to Successfully Work from Home

In today’s new work-world, telecommuting, online jobs, and working from home are the new standard of doing business every day in the United States. If you haven’t already, it’s a good time to get up to speed and learn how to successfully work from home if you want to be a part of this new economy. Here are 7 ways to be successful in your in-home endeavor and to prevent getting burned out by doing so.

7 Ways to Successfully Work from Home

1 – Workspace

While working in your pajamas in your bed in front of the TV with an espresso machine on the nightstand might seem like a great plan. It’s a good idea not to work where you sleep (or regularly perform any other activities). Carve out a space you can designate as your workspace and make this the place where you perform all your work duties. Even if you live in a small apartment, you can still carve out a niche to call your office. Try to make your space distraction-free, and face a wall while you work, instead of an opened window, television, or entertainment center. Fell free to decorate your space, just as you might your cubicle or office space and have your office tools handy as well.

2 – Routine

Many jobs online can be extremely flexible in allowing you to adjust your work hours to what suits you best. This can be problematic when you put off some work to make time for other things, then find yourself cramming in streams of long hours at the end of the week to make up for it. Stick to a schedule and schedule as much of the rest of your life as you can.

Take breaks and eat at the same times, get up, get ready, and start your workdays at the same time(s) as well, if you can. This regular continuity will keep you on top of your game and prevent your work activities from spilling over into your private life, when there is little or no physical separation.

3 – Boundaries

Separation is the key. By setting boundaries you can create a sense of physical separation even if there is none. If you share your home with other people, like your family or roommates, make sure you let them know that when you’re in your room with the door closed, at your workstation (which could be as simple as a TV tray facing the wall), this means you are working, and you should not be disturbed or interrupted when you are in your home-working-space.

Also, set boundaries for family and friends, who may not have as much respect for your telecommuting status. At first, when your friends and family find out that you’re working from home, all they really get is the fact that you’re at home. That normally might mean that you are available to interact or entertain them. Set clear boundaries, and make them aware of your break times, so that they can phone you or “do lunch” during your regularly scheduled lunch break time.

4 – Me Time

You may already realize that no one can really look after your best interests than yourself. So, it’s up to you to find ways to practice self-care within the confines of your life as a teleworker or as you are working online jobs.

Make certain to make space for “me time” during your work week. Do a hobby, take a walk in the park, play a sport, take a luxurious bath, get a massage, etc. Taking time out for you can greatly expand your ability to maintain a heightened state of peak performance. Often, your best ideas about how to increase your performance come when you are engaged in self-care, whatever that means for you.

5 – Exercise

If your “me time” doesn’t include exercise, you should make some additional time during your workweek for a bit of aerobic activity. If the gym is not open, you can ride a bike, run around the block, get on the treadmill (if you have one), jump on a trampoline (could be a mini trampoline) to music, or put in an aerobic workout DVD and be sure to follow along (not just watch it).

A bit of regular aerobic exercise is good for increasing brain power, physiological metabolism, health status, immunity, and overall peak performance.

6 – Off-time

The best way to assure you’re successfully working from home is to not work when you’re not working. When your office is in your home, its easy to be lured back into your home workstation because something just occurred to you. The next thing you know, you’ve been working for three hours, and your chance to have quality time for you, your family, or friends has quickly slipped away. Don’t do it.

When something occurs to you, jot it down on a note, just as you would had you thought of something at home back when you had to commute to and from the office, only now you can leave the note on your workstation, then get back to it when your routine say it’s time to work.

7 – Backup

Have a backup plan and resources on standby. If you’re feeling stressed about working from home, telecommuting, or working online jobs, have a list of places you can go, calls you can make, and take advantage of services that are readily available.

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, many resources are available online or via cell phone. Take advantage of them and don’t fall victim to work from home burnout.

Have your list of backup resources ready before you need them.

 

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Turn Your Office Job into Your Telecommute Gig and Work from Home

Be aware that there is no fill-in-the-blank form that you can present your existing employer with to pitch your suggestion that it may be highly beneficial for the company and you as the employee to turn your office job into your telecommute gig and work from home from this point forward.

This may be your idea, to convert your job into an online job, or it might be necessary. It could be the only way to continue to work your job during the COVID-19 lockdown. Many government agencies, organizations, and businesses have continued to conduct their affairs and remain solvent enough to weather the coronavirus storm by initiating the move to telework solutions. Those who adopted this new style of doing business fared best of the businesses that suffered greatly from the pandemic.

Maybe you’re working for an essential business, or maybe you’d just like a little more freedom and increased quality of life that comes from transforming your day job into a telecommuting scenario.

Family leaders can possibly save a great deal in daycare expenses, and everyone can benefit from the hour-and-a-half loss of life during the commute to-and-from work, as well as not having to pay the cost of commuting to and from work.

You must formulate a compelling presentation for your employer to get a glimpse at all the unforeseen positive possibilities that could arise from such an arrangement.

  1. Evaluation

You will have to take a good hard look at your job duties and how your work interfaces with the rest of the agency or business. Then, ask yourself, “Would your job function and the performance of these duties translate well to a work-from-home environment?”

If your boss hasn’t already told you how this is supposed to look, it is up to you to chart out exactly what you performing your job duties and working from home is going to look like.

Evaluating what is required of you and translating this to a telework scenario and remembering that the result must be more advantageous to your employer as you work from under your own roof than working under his roof.

If you cannot show at least a 20% increase in your work performance, it will be a harder sell to your existing employer.

Be as explicit as possible as you evaluate how much time you spend doing each task throughout your regular workday.

  1. Prepare Your Presentation

The presentation that you present to your employer must be well thought out, detailed, and look good. This is not the time to take your employer to lunch and scratch out the details on a napkin. Use your best presentation skills.

Make sure to express your strict work schedule, how you will separate yourself from other potential household distractions, and how you will be available to your employer and via which methods (phone, text, video chat, desktop sharing, email, etc.). Note that you may not be able to translate all specifics to your home, so you may end up with a presentation that has you working Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from home and Tuesday and Thursday in the office.

Advantages to you are obvious but you will have to emphasize all the benefits your employer will enjoy from this enhanced working enhancement.

  1. Troubleshoot in Advance

You must be prepared to address all extraneous issues that might come up, such as technology and security issues. Have your answers ready in advance. Will you be able to connect to the servers in the office? How will you attend in-person meetings? Does your employer already have a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for your telecommuting usage? Check with the IT department to make sure that you don’t forget anything that might be a barrier to your successful telecommuting gig.

  1. Give It Time

If your employer does not already embrace the idea of teleworking, don’t demand a yes or no answer right away, because the default answer from any employer who has little no experience with telecommuting workers is, “No.” Instead, allow the employer to think about it, mull it over, sleep on it, and make yourself available to answer any questions or concerns that he might have with your working from home arrangement.

If you are prepared and not impatient, there is an excellent chance you will be working from home soon.

And if your boss doesn’t go for it, there are many other employers out there anxious to talk to you about working for them from your own home.

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Non-teleworkers Just Don’t Get It

Many people are working their normal jobs (or as normal as possible) from home during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. They used to have to go to the office every day and work from there, but now their job has moved online, and now they work from home. And people who hear about your working from home, they may not respect your telecommute or have no idea what it means to work from home.

Of course, there are huge advantages to working at home, but there are also a wide variety of disadvantages as well. The biggest problem when you start shifting your work from the office to your home is that your people don’t get what that means.

If you have a family, they think since you’re at home, you should be able to tend to their whims and demands because you are at home (and that might be normally expected when you are at home). They don’t get the idea that while your physical location is at home, but you are actually working, and cannot break character as an effective employee during work hours, except for possibly during your regularly scheduled breaks.

Those people who are trying to move their jobs online and are not able to establish clear boundaries for the family during work hours, experience huge drops in efficiency. Believe me, if your productivity is not increased by working from home, and especially if your efficiency is going down, your days as a telecommuting employee are numbered.

Once you’ve explained how things are, you can ask your family if they’d like to support the team. Maybe they can pick up some of the chores and help out around the house.

If you have a family or not, for sure your friends don’t get it. Your friends are expecting you to be available for lunch and unlimited phone conversations since you’re working from home.

Unless your friends are also working from home, they have no frame of reference about how it looks to be telecommuting or working from home.

Again, it’s up to you to educate your friends about what it’s like to being employed to work from your home. This is much easier if your telecommuting arrangement with your employer is highly structured with specific work hours and break times. This will be much easier to explain to both friends and family and once they are able to wrap their head around it, they will be more capable of honoring your work from home model.

If you don’t have a strict schedule, you will be miles ahead and more successful in your work from home arrangement by creating a specific work schedule for your telecommuting or job online.

We’ve learned this from at-home workers who have successfully conducted business from home long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to telecommute or move your job online. By far, the establishment of regular business hours has increased their survivability and success over time.

Regular hours for conducting business also increases your quality of life, otherwise, you might either fall behind or find yourself working yourself to death.

Some people do not accept calls during work hours or let them know that they can return their call at a later specific time outside of your work schedule.

Americans are doing the best they can to make the best of an uncomfortable situation during the coronavirus lockdown and finding ways to keep your job while telecommuting and working from home has been hugely advantageous.

The most interesting point to realize is that following the pandemic, when the restrictions are lifted, this will have changed the way business is conducted in the United States of America and possibly the world.

 

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Adjusting to the Telecommute Job Online Model

Connectivity is the key ingredient in telecommuting and moving your job online, which is not a problem for most metro areas, but for under-developed or outlying rural areas, this might be problematic. You may have the desire to work from home, but do you have the ability?

First, there are equipment requirements. If your employer does not supply you with the necessary equipment, you must have at least a phone, computer, and an Internet connection. Not having the tools necessary to telecommute will exclude you from the ability to work from home in the new world.

As this new home working environment emerges from the rubble of the COVID-19 pandemic, concessions may be made and subsidies offered by government agencies to expand service areas to include those hard-to-reach areas where little or no connectivity is problematic.

In metro areas and many communities, coworking establishments are springing up to enable those without adequate resources to share office space and equipment. This is a more than reasonable solution for expanding the abilities of those who do not have access to the minimum requirements for telecommuting.

Transportation to and from the co-working space is the next issue, but these coworking spaces will greatly reduce commute times and expenses for those who utilize these services which can act as a bridge for telecommuters with limited resources.

It will take time and effort to change the way we do business in the United States. While many Americans embrace the idea of working from home, there are others who are well adapted and prefer to conduct work from a corporate office. Some people prefer to keep a clear demarcation between work life and private life. Then there are workers who have become dependent on face to face interaction amidst the work environment and they find solace in this break away from home. These are the people who will find it less easy to convert to video chat and adapt to the telework environment.

As the world of work transforms, will staying at home cause more psychological stress on those who depend on corroborating and commiserating with coworkers for social stability and mental health support?

In our pre-pandemic society, dysfunctional families are rescued and are allowed to sustain themselves longer as family units because the family members are able to seek social interaction outside the home. This is important to maintain mental health and sanity in an otherwise difficult living situation.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, we have already seen the impact that basically being imprisoned or celled-in with at-risk family members has not fared well, as domestic abuse rates have skyrocketed. Increased rates of depression and suicide have indicated there is great concern with not being allowed to access what we have come to rely on as “normal” social interaction.

But keep in mind, that this is only temporary. Once the restrictions are lifted, the public will be able to resume all their normal social activities. The only difference being that telecommuting and working from home will become more of a valid option when looking to return to work if you’re not already telecommuting.