Working from home has got many advantages; it allows you to set your own work schedule, helps to save a lot of money and allows you to productively work from home with a flexible schedule. With this sort of flexibility, you can sleep and wake up at your convenience, take breaks whenever you want and you don’t also have to face morning traffic every day.
However, in spite of these and many more advantages like these, the work from home schedule can sometimes become tedious and cumbersome, i.e. burnouts, digital distractions, procrastination to name a few. And above all, the pressure of meeting deadlines can take a toll on your physical and mental health.
The comfort of your home can also be your number one factor for delaying the tasks that are assigned to you and an approaching deadline might be adding more anxiety.
However, being responsible enough is the only way to ensure that you are working from home without any kind of active supervision and you are doing your best. One might not always display high motivation and accountability for his actions while working from home, so this article will give you few ideas on keeping up the energy and motivation to deal with office deadlines smoothly while working from home.
1- Plan in Advance
Planning is critical to any task irrespective of whether is a professional or a personal task. A good plan makes it very easy to achieve the task or the goal that you are aiming for. As soon as you get the details of the project you must start planning immediately. There is a need to separate the tasks that require urgent attention and will consume time from the remaining. The most difficult tasks should be completed during the most productive hours. A good to-do list or a task management tool will help you a long way in dealing easily with these tasks.
2- Track Your Progress
Technology is advancing everywhere around us and is dominating everything that we are doing in our daily lives. It can also be of great use when you are trying to meet your work deadlines while working from home. There is plenty of free productivity tools for working from home. Using some of these you can better track your work progress in accordance with the deadlines.
As there are so many options of progress tracking platforms to choose from, you should carefully choose the one that is best suited for your requirements. You also have to keep in mind that having too many monitor tools can further distract you, so stick to just one.
3- Under Promise, Overdeliver
Working from home sometimes makes people overconfident. Since they are at home they think that from the comfort of their sofas they will be super productive and will be able to troubleshoot all the work related problems. However, this is not always the case and people tend to commit promises that they are unable to keep leading to major embarrassments at work.
By showing some discipline you can easily avoid this situation at all. All you need to do is to commit less than what you intend to deliver. This not only provides you with a buffer time in case your work gets extended and saves you from any sort of embarrassment but will also make the client extremely happy if you are able to finish it within the committed time, thereby shedding a light on your professional career. Keeping a reasonable margin for work deadlines will definitely help you a lot.
4- Keep Workspace Distraction Away
It is important to organize your workspace. You need to have all the online as well as offline tools that are critical to your work right beside you. By doing this you will be able to establish a robust structure that will allow you to work within a framework, that too, without any distractions.
The unnecessary gadgets and items that you think might draw your attention towards themselves should be kept far off. Moreover, the setting should be such that it soothes your mind. Try to use soft color lights, plants, or even aromatherapy to lift your mood when you are working. Social media websites and phone notifications can also be a big draw when you are working seriously and thus should be either kept away or with notifications disabled. A distraction-free workspace is basically a more productive workspace.
5- Divide & Rule
As the name suggests it means to divide your work into various small parts and finish them one after the another. This will make the entire process much easier and will enhance your productivity as well. Outlining deadlines, goals, priorities daily or weekly will make your workflow smooth and uninterrupted.
The flexibility of working from home is unmatched but with so many things going around you at home, your productivity may not be as much as it is while working from the office and the last thing you want to avoid is a burnout situation while meeting work deadlines.
Summing it up….
Just follow the actionable tips given above and you will easily be able to handle work deadlines while working from home.
