Productivity hacks are essential for working from home. Essential so you’re not stigmatized as lazy, and sitting on the sofa watching Netflix.
Don’t get seen as lazy; use these productivity hacks in your life and business. Become part of the 56% of people more productive than if they worked in the office.
Here’s the thing.
Working from home can be so unproductive at the best of times. Unproductive without a boss watching over us and getting work done.
Sat at our laptops, we’re notified of
- Emails
- Facebook notifications
- Other alerts on social media
All the distractions that we consume daily.
Having good intentions to get stuff done. Unfortunately, old habits can creep back in. At the end of the day, you’ve still not done any more than normal.
Here’s the thing, distractions are everywhere. Get systems and new daily habits in place so you become more productive with your time. Put in place these productivity hacks into your daily life. Make them part of your daily routine, and you’ll soon find yourself doing more in your time without realising it.
5 Productivity Hacks To Master Working From Home
Outsourcing
Where will you spend your energy today? Will you just be concentrating on client tasks all day and forgetting about the admin?
As a boss of your business, you know where your skills are best placed. If your skills are at client tasks, do that. Though if you’re more efficient about generating new sales and growing your business, concentrate your efforts there.
Here’s the deal:
Whichever you’re best at, that’s what you should be doing. All the other tasks can be outsourced to a team. Your team doesn’t need to be ‘in-house’, so no need to worry about renting office space. Use a project management tool so you can delegate tasks to your team.
Hire freelance staff to work remotely to do the tasks you’re less skilled at. A team working whilst you’re doing the tasks you can do. To start outsourcing your tasks, you can go onto freelancing websites and find the right freelancers for your business.
Daily Plan
Plan out your day or even your week. By doing this your being proactive instead of reactive. When people don’t be proactively planning their day they end up starting the day checking emails and social media. Being reactive to everybody else and their demands.
Being reactive isn’t any good for you. You’re missing out on what you need to be doing to move your freelance business forward. So having a plan to be proactive is paramount. It all comes back to the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 rule that says
“80% of outcomes (or outputs) result from 20% of all causes (or inputs) for any given event”
Vilfredo Pareto
Every day plan the most important things in order that you want to accomplish. Then with the Pareto principle, you’ll get that 80% done of what you want to achieve.
Achieve the most important task you want done by doing it in the morning. By doing it in the morning you don’t get distracted by other tasks, phone calls, or anything else that just happens to pop up. You get it over and done with and you’re left feeling proud of yourself that you’ve got that task checked off. Task done and dusted, now onto the second important task for the day after a well deserved coffee break.
As a freelancer, I get on and do the client tasks for are needed to be done first. Then when I’m caught up with doing client tasks, I respond to emails and social media comments whilst having my lunch break. After the lunch break, I schedule my social media, responding to any potential freelance gigs that are of interest to me, and pitching potential clients I’ve already built a relationship with.
If you’re starting as a freelancer, pitching and responding to job boards may be what you do first. That’s alright. Just schedule your day to what’s important for your day and make you more productive.
Eliminate Distractions
Working from home there are so many distractions. We’re constantly surrounded by distractions. Text messages, emails, Facebook, even the post man knocking on the door with another Amazon parcel. They are all distractions that are not helping your productivity.
To really eliminate these distractions you need to discipline yourself. Discipline yourself to stay in that zone of being focused working on the task at hand. After you’ve finished the task then you can see what that knock on the door was or that ping on your phone. If you don’t discipline yourself and keep getting distracted, you’ll lose the productivity.
Scarcity
When you were at college or school did you ever leave doing the assignments til the last minute? If so, then leaving your freelancing work til the last minute may be helping you with this productivity hack.
How this productivity hack works is by convincing yourself that the client work is due in earlier than what the client actually requested. This tricks your mind into thinking I’ve only got this amount of time to do the task in or it’s going to be late and I’ll have an unhappy client.
With this scarcity (shortage of time), you’re being productive by actually cracking on and doing the client work not just leaving it till later.
Manage Your Mental Health
Ultimately, your mental health will dictate your behavior. If you’re feeling depressed it will reduce your productivity. But if you’re feeling on top of the world and on fire, you’ll accomplish your goals for the day. You really need to get on top of your mental health.
So when you start your day, you need to wake up with positive thoughts. Don’t start your day filled with negativity. Turn off the news or anything that could bring you down. Instead, listen to music, read books, or podcasts that boosts your mood and tells you that you can take on the world today.
To make sure that you tackle this, you really need to start making a ritual. A ritual to not absorb any content that could reduce your mood. But instead, absorb content that will uplift you and help you to smash the day. These are the top productivity hacks that I start with every day.
Think of an athlete, before they start a game, they warm up their body. A singer will warm up their vocal chords before performing on stage. As a freelancer you need to do some sort of ritual to warm yourself up before you start working and really focus solely on the job at hand.
In A Nutshell,
With the 5 best productivity hacks you can remove distractions and hone in on doing the task that’s most important to your freelance business in that moment. Distractions are everywhere, especially when working from home. It could be distractions from phone calls, family, friends, or social media. We have distractions everywhere that are really impacting your productivity. Drown out the distractions and reignite your fire by listening to these podcasts that boost your productivity.
