We’ve all heard it. “It must be SO nice working from home!” I cringe a little when that’s the biggest impression people have of my job. It’s like telling someone who works in an office “you’re job is sooo easy, all you do is type!” OR telling someone who works in a hospital “it must be soo nice to never have to go outside!” Let’s get real. No matter what your occupation is or where you do your work, there are parts that everyone assumes are great, but might actually suck. With career fields changing and commerce shifting from stores to online, more people than ever are working from home. Contrary to popular belief, unless you have the flu, staying in your pajamas till 4pm is usually a sign that you may be overwhelmed and prioritizing everything and everyone else before what’s best for you. I’ve spent too many years doing that and it doesn’t get you anywhere you want to go. Here are my top 10 tips for working from home that have helped me overhaul my workspace and make time for what’s important.
Top 10 tips for working from home to save your sanity and get sh*t done:
1.Make a routine. One of the biggest benefits and the biggest challenges of working from home is that there is no supervisor making a set schedule. It’s easy to fall into bad habits, so it’s important to make your own routine. Every morning my day starts with my coffee ritual. Whether it’s a half caff day or medium roast, I don’t feel productive till I carry my mug to my desk and then sit down ready to get started. I’ve learned that I work best when it comes to email, and business tasks in the morning and then I taper off as the day goes on. I try to schedule all of my work meetings and sessions for late afternoon and evening and personal stuff like doctor’s appointments, etc for the middle of the day so that it doesn’t interfere. In the morning, my house is calmer and I can focus on what I need to do. In the evening, there are other people, the TV, the dog is more awake and it’s harder to concentrate so I’ve learned for me that if it gets to be 6pm and I haven’t got my office work done – just scrap it and get up early the following morning to tackle projects.
2.Make your office a space that you want to hang out in. After all, you’re going to be spending a LOT of time there so invest in the good stuff. (You can write it off at tax time.) Give a little thought to decoration and personal touches. Anything that you find inspirational and keeps you focused on your goals through the challenging days. For me, I have a compass rose on my wall. I glance up at it once in a while and remind myself to stick to my true north. I also use vacation photos as my desktop background to keep the good times right around the corner.
3.Video chat and face time. One of the downsides of working from home that most people don’t realize is that it’s very isolating. People who leave home for work every day have to deal with traffic, being on time, the weather, etc but they also get to see a friendly face once in a while and talk about those shared experiences. When you work from home, you spend 90% of your day alone with only the other living things in your house for company. Depending on what those living things are – a lot of times they leave you wanting for adult human conversation. That’s when you find social media stealing your productive hours. It’s easy for Facebook to become a bottomless scroll when really we’re just sneaking over there to look for some human connection. This is why video chat and face time are great tools! I love to video chat with other photographers or other people within my industry when they are working from home sitting at their desks too. It’s like having coworkers that you can share an office with! Other times, I might be working on tasks that require me to sit at my computer but don’t necessarily require the language portion of my brain (like editing). That’s a great time to catch up with friends and family on facetime because I can get my necessary robot tasks done without my brain getting bored and turning to jelly.
4.Podcasts. When I can’t get anyone on the phone to chat with or I don’t feel like I can hold up my end of the conversation with what I’m working on, I love to listen to podcasts. I find that listening to the TV or a movie in the background can be distracting and then I find myself watching it rather than working. Podcasts are great though because I always choose podcasts that relate to photography, small business, etc. It’s something to listen to in the background but at the same time keeps me focused on work. Here are a few podcasts that I love: Ask the Photographers, The Photobomb Podcast, The GoalDigger Podcast.
5.Prioritize your health first. It’s taken me a long time to accept this. I think there’s a lot of guilt that no one talks about for people who work from home. That somehow we are being judged for the “luxury” of staying home. That combined with “the-more-I-work-the-more-I-earn” mentality of self-employment and it’s not uncommon for people working from home to log 80-hour workweeks. I can speak to this personally for photographers during summer, fall, and Christmas busy season, 80 hours a week is nothing. We’ve done much, much more. In the past ten years I’ve given myself a hell of a kidney infection because I refused to get up from my office chair to pee. I’ve had pinched nerves, eyestrain, back problems, eye twitch, migraines, and a whole list of other stress conditions. The human body wasn’t designed for that kind of life. We were meant to move. Prioritize your health. Keep a huge bottle of water at your desk and drink it every time you have to wait for your computer to do something. Get up and go to the bathroom, get the mail, get into a routine of having breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you’ve got kids or pets at home that come to you while you’re working, you probably struggle to find uninterrupted time at your desk. Make time for self care when you’re caring for everyone else. I try to schedule gym time in the middle of the day to break up those hours in the chair and give me a mental break as well. I also have to take my dog for exercise and I’ve gotten into the habit of doing that when I’m done in the office for the day. That way I get breathing room to transition from work mode to off work mode. My office dog, Scout, gives me a reason to walk away from my desk chair every few hours and I need that.
6.Speaking of chairs, get a really comfortable office chair. When we first moved in and I set up my office, I saw a photo online of a cute corner desk with a wooden shaker wood chair. I found a set at the auction barn that was affordable and we sat on those hard wooden chairs for five years!! I found myself taking my laptop and wandering off to other rooms just to sit on my couch and give my butt cheeks a break! That also meant that now my attention was divided and my laptop became the silent and always present member of my family. Movie night? Amanda is on her laptop in the corner. Game night? Amanda is on her laptop in between turns. Cooking dinner? Family visit? Thanksgiving? Opening Christmas presents? I was on my laptop. I hated it. Then one magical day, I walked into TJ Maxx and saw these padded, cow hide, rolling office chairs and I HAD TO HAVE THEM. I pushed them to the cash register and loaded them into my car at the curb totally giddy with excitement. These chairs just felt like they were meant for me! (And once I sat on a padded chair, I had no idea why I waited so long to leave the hard wooden one behind!)
7.Get organized at all costs. I just recently checked this one off the list. I spent over a year looking for a cute piece of wooden furniture that I could paint and repurpose into a storage cabinet for my out of control clutter and equipment collection. I combed all the furniture stores, catalogs, antique shops, and the goodwill. I wanted something with well made drawers capable of holding heavy objects and cupboard doors for oversized things, and I had to be able to set my printer on top of it. Just when I had given up and resigned myself to never finding what I wanted, Sean backed into the garage with a brand new toolbox on the back of his truck. It was stainless steel with a wood top and had drawers and was on wheels. It could have been a stylish kitchen island, except it was built to hold 700lbs of wrenches. I HAD TO HAVE ONE OF MY OWN. Isn’t Amazon Prime a beautiful thing? Seriously, how did we live before? I logged on to Amazon and BOOM – I could get the same cabinet with a drawer and cabinet combination and have it delivered to my house in less than a week. And it was less expensive than the fancy media console I had been eyeing from pottery barn! We wrestled it into the house and I picked up some super cheap adjustable drawer dividers on Amazon and now all of my gear has a place to belong. It has made packing up to go to work faster and more efficient and also created an unpacking routine for when I get back so that the job has an end and everything is ready to go for the next one. Seriously, if you have a clutter pile in your office or something that is just clogging up your workflow – tackle it and fix it. It makes a world of difference. This toolbox is nothing like the cute furniture piece I pined over for more than a year, but it functions SO much better than anything else I would have gotten. And in the words of Pam Wilson [my mother], “this is not a fashion show.”
8.Earphones. My earphones are my own version of the Cone of Silence from Get Smart. They are also a stop sign that tells my husband that I am “plugged in” right now and want to focus on getting stuff done. They are great for really forcing me to focus especially if there are other ambient noises going on in my house. For example, the whole time I’ve been writing this blog post, Sean is on a Netflix marathon of Madam Secretary. He is also on hour 3 of a tennis ball fetch tournament with our dog that sounds like we are being bombed with stones from above. Meanwhile, I’ve been listening to a YouTube video that I’m not watching of soft whispered meditation.
9.Clean up the spaces around your space. This is one of the harder things to accomplish. My office has no doors. So all of the dog hair, dirty dishes, socks on the floor, etc are clearly visible from where I’m sitting. I don’t know if all women feel this way, but I judge myself about these things all day long. My self judging voice is like a little gremlin that whispers mean things in my ear 24 hours a day. Not only am I bothered by the things that I can see, but I’m capable of being really silently upset about messes that are in other rooms even upstairs that I can’t see at all from my desk. It clogs up my thought process and I can’t get things done because I have this nagging feeling that I have to fix those things first. I explained it to Sean like this: our whole house is my workplace. How would he feel if someone trashed his work truck with take out containers and dirty sweatshirts and tools everywhere? It would suck. That’s how I feel when our house gets out of control. Like my workplace is also wrecked. However, when you’re one of those 80 hour a week working from home folks who is also struggling to prioritize health first and has other commitments as well – cleaning your house no matter how much you want to get it done falls to the bottom of the list. You’ve gotta make it happen. Whether that means hiring a clean team to come in every few weeks to do the heavy lifting, or scheduling one day a week to do no work at all and only work on home life stuff. You know that feeling when you clean your whole bedroom and put fresh sheets on the bed and get the best night’s sleep ever? That feeling carries into your workspace and you get more done!
10. Don’t fight the fade. Sometimes even under the best of conditions, you just hit a wall. For example, I wrote all of this blog post in one sitting friday night. Except for number ten. It had gotten to be later in the evening and I had already typed two pages and reworked some things. Dinner was hours and hours ago and I could feel my eyelids getting heavy. In the past I would have sat there till 3 a.m. trying to grind it out just so I could “earn” my time to lay down and rest. I’ve realized though that fighting the fade is always counter productive. I’ve gotten up the next morning only to look over my middle of the night progress on projects and been horrified. This is when you have to give yourself permission to take advantage of one of those working from home “perks” and just shut the light off and go to bed. Folks who work in a traditional away-from-home office setting have set shift hours and would not be expected to work all night long without some serious overtime pay. It’s OK to end the day even if the work isn’t done. After all, when you’re self employed, the work will never EVER be done. There’s always something that needs attention, accounting, website, taxes, advertising, client communications, learning new gear and techniques. It’s ok to walk away once in a while and come back to it when you are ready to plug in and be your most productive.
