Let’s face the facts here: it isn’t easy when you’re learning how to work successfully from home. Even if you’re a seasoned worker in the work-from-home sphere, you know it isn’t always easy.

Sure, learning how to work successfully from home has great benefits like flexibility and spending more time with your family, but only if you can plan it right. Working from home takes a lot of self-discipline.

Stay Focused and Stay Productive: How To Work Successfully From Home

This post aims to give you some work-from-home essential tips for a more productive, efficient you. This post goes beyond the standard advice like, “Don’t forget to take breaks,” or, “Set boundaries,” and even “Reach out to people” advice.

Instead, this article focuses on a few suggestions to keep your work-from-home lifestyle smooth and productive. Here’s to a productive, efficient workspace with tips for how to work successfully from home.

Master These Tips to Maximize Your Productivity

Create work “triggers” for your brain

You’ve probably heard of the benefits of creating a morning routine. If you’ve ever worked in an office, your morning may have looked like this: a quick shower, makeup, a half-eaten bagel stuffed in your mouth with a watered-down coffee in hand while you run out the door to work.

This ritual may not sound like any of the typical morning routines you’ve heard of (exercise, stretch, read, meditate, etc.), but it is a series of mental triggers that tells your brain you’re getting ready for work.

When you’re learning how to work successfully from home, these triggers can really help you get into a working mindset. Take some of these triggers from your office days and put them in your work-from-home routine, and make sure to take the time to make a full cup of coffee.

You can add things to your mornings or simply take more time doing them. These things could be called a ‘morning routine’ if you feel inclined to call it that.

The point is to have a set of ‘triggers’ that get your brain in the right mindset to have a full and productive day. How this looks is up to you.

If issues arise with clients, resolve them with a phone call

Emails, text, and other forms of written communication won’t cut it. Email and other means of communication are great when something doesn’t need an answer immediately.

If there’s a pressing problem or question, it should be solved as soon as possible with a phone call. Not only is a phone call faster and more efficient, but it also connects you to your customer on a personal level and shows you care enough to deal with these problems first.

Your client will appreciate you being fast, receptive, and efficient in dealing with their concerns. This means you could easily turn a one-time client into a repeat client.

Use cloud-based programs

We’re talking Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google. While there is other cloud-based software, these are some of the most well-known.

Using cloud-based applications gives you control, better security, and reduced costs, to name a few.  Besides those benefits, if your computer freezes or dies, you know your files are saved in the cloud and are protected.

Storing your files in the cloud makes sharing files a breeze. You can share specific files with people more quickly, keep some files private, and even send files more efficiently. It’s cloud-based productivity at its finest!

Cut yourself some slack

Working from home can be harder than working in an office. People can easily get lost in the work they do and lose touch with the world or get off track with their work.

Try managing your time and setting achievable targets. Don’t overwhelm yourself with all the things you need to do. Choose one large task per day and several smaller ones littered throughout the day.

This way, you’ll be setting yourself up for success by chipping away at things a bit at a time and cutting yourself some slack, and at the same time being efficient and productive about it.

Keep a separate number for work and personal use

Keeping a separate number is important on many levels.

Having a business number allows you to be more organized, and you will appear more professional. It similarly helps with your peace of mind. Having a separate phone line helps build a boundary and set working hours.

You don’t have to think about answering your business line as you normally would on your personal line by accident, potentially coming off as unprofessional and creating a disconnect between you and your clients.

When you’re learning how to work successfully from home, having a phone line specifically for your business is a great tool to have in your professional arsenal.

Make sure your home is well-connected, or work from the area that’s connected best

When you work from home, being connected virtually is non-negotiable. You need to have a decent, reliable internet connection with which to do business.

If you don’t have good internet, you can’t do your job. So many of us use the internet for work every day, and it’s not even a question that you need a good connection. If you have wi-fi but get spotty service in parts of your house, move to parts of the house where the connection is strongest.

If you don’t have decent internet, try working from a local café, library, or another public place that offers internet. If you find yourself using your home internet, did you know you can write off a portion of your internet usage if you’re working from home full time? Check that out here.

In Conclusion

Learning how to work successfully from home isn’t easy. There are a lot of subtleties to it. But learning how to work successfully from home is part of not only growing your business but growing as a person. You’re learning new skills, so have a little patience with yourself. With these tips on hand, along with your typical work-from-home tips, you’ll be ready to be a productivity machine in no time!

Let us know your experiences of learning how to work successfully from home below in the comments or reach out to all of us at CanScribe on Facebook or our other social media platforms.