Working from home has because a much more mainstream choice for professionals in 2022. This is mainly because of the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw many businesses going remote. If you work from home, you may be familiar with the struggle to keep yourself focused throughout the day.
Staying alert and focused requires ongoing effort no matter where you work, but the truth is that there does seem to be a higher rate of people struggling with concentration when they are working from home. Many businesses have fully transitioned to being a remote organisation since the pandemic first started – such as TechQuarters, an IT company that specialises in managed IT services London businesses use. When we spoke to them, TechQuarters said that overall, their productivity has remained roughly the same. But there will always be people in every organisation who need support with staying alert while working.
The Challenge of Working from Home
Your home environment is radically different to that of the average company office environment. At home, you have all your personal belongings, a kitchen full of food, chores that need doing, and of course, you have nobody monitoring you throughout the day.
All these things can come together to make it hard to stay focused while working from home. When we asked TechQuarters about this, they said that there are some measures an organisation can take to help their employees with this. For example, they arrange daily calls among teams and departments, because it keeps people connected with their colleagues and engaged with the organisation at large. But there are also things that the individual can do for themselves to help them stay alert and focused.
Tips for Staying Focused and Alert
- Setup a Good Home Office
The first thing to consider is your home working environment. If you’re just sat at the dining table – or, even worse, on the sofa – then you will find it much harder to get into the mindset for work. If you have the budget a space, investing in a proper office desk and chair will make a huge difference; if you have a space that you can segregate off from the rest of your home, this will also help compartmentalise your work and home activities.
- Add Structure to Your Day
There are a lot of ways in which working in the office had a lot more structure than working from home. For starters, your workday was bookended on both sides by the commute to and from the office – meaning you had a specific chunk of time that was dedicated to work. Comparatively, it is easy for your work time and personal time to bleed into one another when working from home. When working from home, one should set strict boundaries around work hours.
- Take a Walk Before Work
Another way to emulate the structure you once had when working in the office is by taking a short walk before you start your day at work. This has a number of benefits. Firstly, it simulates a commute, and can help you mentally prepare for your day at work. Additionally, it means you get some exercise first thing in the morning, which is great for your energy levels.
- Eliminate Distractions
As mentioned earlier, when you work at home, you’re completely unsupervised, which can make it more tempting to get distracted by your phone, or by non-work related apps and websites. It is best to keep these distractions eliminated. The easiest way to do this is to use a distraction blocking app, which will restrict access to websites and apps that you select, and therefore it eliminates the need for willpower.
- Take Regular ‘Coffee Breaks’
Even in the office, you don’t spend the entire day glued to your desk. You get up to make coffee, or go to the toilet. It has actually been found that people working from home on average spend more time at their desk. However, this can be detrimental to productivity. Instead, taking regular breaks (and specifically getting up from your desk) keeps the mind and the body refreshed.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these tips will help anybody that is working from home and wants to get better at staying focused. Every business relies on the productivity of their staff – whether they are providing IT support Essex businesses rely on, or any other activity. Working from home can be very productive, so long as individuals take the right steps to create a good environment for themselves to work in.
