Tips To Help You Maintain Focus While Working From Home

When you are working from home, it is quite possible to lose focus from work. You were hyper-focused, and you finish up an important project. Then you decide to check your phone or social media as a quick mental break. 30 minutes later, you’ve gone down the internet rabbit hole and you realize you’ve just wasted a huge chunk of time.If this happens every now and again it’s not that big a deal—if your schedule is flexible, you can tack on time to the end of the day to make up for lost time. The problem happens when this kind of slacking off happens repeatedly and it affects your performance.
Here are a couple of tips that can help you maintain focus while working from home:

Take real breaks

Away from the computer. Instead of spending a “mental break minute” in front of the computer, take it by going for a short walk or accomplishing some non-screen task.

Set and prioritize concrete goals

Make sure that at the start of each day, establish a list of things you have to accomplish. These should be measurable and should result in a product or other demonstration of goal completion. This way you can easily measure your progress. Within each larger goal, there might be smaller incremental goals. To get a handle on all these different tasks and subtasks, you might want to look into using a project or task management tool, like Asana.

Track your time

There are lots of tools that you can use to manually track time on tasks, like Harvest or the Hours time tracking app. There are apps that track how much time you spend on different apps on your computer. Using a tool like this requires that you estimate the amount of time a certain task will take you—this can be an extremely challenging concept for many people, not just remote workers. That’s why keeping track of your time is so helpful—it gives you data points to go by, instead of just estimates.

Connect with someone

Distractions can often happen when we you are disconnected from others. Check in with a team member, client, or business acquaintance to talk through any relevant roadblocks. When you see what others are doing, it can help you stay motivated. Additionally, when you keep others updated on your progress, that helps hold you accountable. It also has the added bonus of keeping you from feeling isolated from others, which is extremely common in remote work.

Work in chunks of time

Many recommend the pomodoro technique, which is focusing for 25 minutes and giving yourself 5 minutes of a break. Whatever format you choose, be consistent and track how any chunks (or tomatoes, if you’re using the pomodoro method) you complete in a day.

Stand up

Transitioning from a sitting to a standing desk can make all the difference in how focused and alert you are during the day. Plus, sitting for long periods of time is not great for your health. You don’t even have to stand the entire day you’re working—just stand more, and sit less.