Time management for remote work
Remote work looks very tempting when you look at it from the outside. You know all those fascinating pictures of freelance work? The photo shows a smiling man with a laptop sitting at a cup of tea in a cafe or lying in a hammock under palm trees. Having succumbed to the charm of this image, many decide to change a deserted office for a free schedule and soon find out that it was a trap! It was possible to leave the office at seven o’clock in the evening and throw all the official business out of your mind. And at home, out of habit, the whole schedule goes to hell, and it begins to seem as if you are working all the time that is not sleeping, and business does not decrease.
We’re sharing the most useful lifehacks:
1. Work in the daytime. On freelance, almost everyone quickly becomes an owl, and there are several reasons for that. First, because of the natural propensity for this lifestyle. Whatever they say about the solar cycle, most people do not coincide with it at all. Secondly, because of the habit of postponing everything to the last moment, you go to bed later and later than you knock down a normal rhythm. Thirdly, you work more productively at night, because nobody distracts you or twitches on different little things.
2. Don’t start work right away. Do not open the messenger still lying in bed, and then compose an answer to the customer, chewing a bun at breakfast. Give yourself time to wake up and come to your senses! No matter how burning the project is, you can still afford at least half an hour to wash up and have breakfast.
3. Remember to eat and move. Now that we’re talking not only about how to work, but also how to properly organize breaks, we’d like to add that for lunches and dinners it’s also advisable to take your free time not occupied with working tasks. Insufficient attention to this issue leads to the fact that we stop hearing the signals of the body, and either do not notice hunger and tolerate to the last, gaining problems with the gastrointestinal tract, or mechanically shove food into ourselves, without noticing the feeling of saturation, and overeat, and then upset because of excess weight. It is really important to do some fitness. It is easily possible even at home.
4. Don’t get distracted and don’t switch. If you are a freelancer single, you can easily afford this luxury. If you are burdened with family, you will have to assert your right to quiet work for the first few months. “You’re still at home – is it hard to look after your child or run away to the store?” Looking after and running away may not be difficult, but getting back to work is a problem. The time spent on each such distraction can be safely multiplied by two, because the same amount of time you will have to spend focusing and getting back into the process. So you can go for bribery and blackmail, but convince your family not to touch you for at least a few hours.
5. Get some rest. And scrolling through the news feed does not count as a break! First of all, it’s healthier for the body to get up and stretch. Secondly, you’ll still be distracted by everyday activities. So it’s better to plan breaks in advance and use them as a useful change of activity. Believe me, conscious switching at the moment when you have reached some logical point or comma in your work is significantly different from suddenly pulling out in the middle of your writing sentence to “Mom, there’s a cat in the toilet!”.
