10 1 Habits To Survive Working From Home During Isolation

Whether it's from the coronavirus pandemic or being downsized or laid off or retired, you may find yourself needing to work from home. I work from home. I love it. I've worked from large offices, maintain large staffs. But working from home has its advantages if you do it right. In this video, you will learn 10.1 habits to to working from home without driving yourself bonkers. Because make no mistake about it, it is easy to go crazy working from home, especially if you aren't used to it. Habit number one, and this may surprise you a little. Habit number one, Find a reason early in the day to put on your game face. I mean, a reason to get showered, shaved. If you shave, cleaned up, presentable to the world, you need a reason to do that. It can be too easy to just sort of get rough around the edges, get dirty, wake up later. You don't want to do that. You don't want to feel stale. Here's what I do. I grab my cell phone and I make a short video, 15 seconds to 60 seconds long, where I give one habit tip to my audience, the personal development world. This forces me to get cleaned up, to shave, shower, and I try to do that by 8:45 every morning. So I might not go out of the house. I might not have to meet with anyone. But this gives me a good excuse to get ready, to get cleaned up, to face the world. Whether you make a video for your clients, customers, colleagues, or whether you schedule video conference through Zoom or Skype or webex, try to plan some meeting where you know you have to be on. Now, you might not want to dress up from the waist down, but at least knowing you have to be cleaned up presentable gets you focused and gets you motivated. Habit number two, have a set time to start. Have a routine. Just because you work at home doesn't mean you get to stay in bed till 11. Roll out of bed 1130, have coffee. No, you need to get some serious work done now. A very famous quote. It's been ascribed to William Faulkner as well as many others. The quote is, I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately, I am inspired at 9 o' clock every morning. Have a set time to start work. You might not work for a big company, you might just work for yourself. Either way, you're going to be so much better off having a start time every single time. When you know you have to show up in your workspace, whether it's an office, a desk, a studio. Have a time and hold yourself accountable. The wildly successful author Stephen King has a set routine. He shows up in his office at 8am every day. He has his headphones just the way he likes it. He has the papers stacked on his desk. He has music set to go. It is a set routine that will get you going. Don't wait for inspiration. Show on time. That is habit two. Habit three, have a quiet room. And if you can't find a quiet room, figure out a way to be quiet for yourself. Now, I work in a home. It's usually pretty quiet, but not always. My wife, my daughter might be having conversations, entertaining other things. Here's how I get my quiet room. This blocks it out. Now, I'm not endorsing any particular brand. These are Sony headsets. The main thing I look for is something that covers your ear because you might not want to listen to any music. But this blocks out other noise much better than an earpod because that doesn't block out extra noise. So I highly recommend you find a way to work in a quiet space. You may think you love noise, lots of music, but if you're doing serious work, you need to be able to control the noise. So find a quiet space. If you're working in a huge mansion, go to the basement. If you are working in a tiny studio apartment, get some headphones on and don't let other noises disturb you. Habit number four. Literally put a sign on your door that says do not disturb. If you have roommates, family members, others around you, they need to know this is serious time. This is work time for you. You're not just goofing around waiting for someone to come chat with you or ask you to run an errand or do some home repair. During your work hours, you're there to work. This is a good reminder. Even if no one else is around, it's a reminder for yourself. Put a do not disturb sign on your door. Habit number five. This is perhaps the most important. Carve out a certain period of time on your calendar every day for deep work. This is the concept popularized by Professor Cal Newport in his book Deep Work. I highly recommend the book. He talks about how for most human beings, no matter how successful they are, they really have a limited amount of time where they can be at their absolute most productive. Could be five hours, could be two hours a day. I try to go for three hours a day. This is time when you eliminate all distractions. You may think I'm crazy for saying this, but you need to find a block of time in your workday. When you're working from home, where you Literally turn off your cell phone. Turn off your email notifications. If you have to make an exception for your boss or your most important client, do so. But you need to turn off all notifications on your phone. Ideally, turn off your phone. You can use blocking software. I use freedom to to block my access to other websites. This way I can just use the word processor if I want to. I can just record videos. But I'm not going to be distracted by going to lots of different websites and email and applications apps on my phone. If you really want to skyrocket your productivity during the day, I recommend highly that you do this. You might start off with just one hour a day, but you need some block of time where you're not checking email every 10 minutes and instantly responding to every text from a friend. Time for you to really go deep. Think. Concentrate. Whether you are writing a new business proposal, balancing a spreadsheet, coming up with a new concept for an app, whatever it is you do, making a how to video, whatever it is you do, you need complete total ability to concentrate and do that deep work. You can't do that and unless you cut off outside stimulation. So pick an amount of time. 1 hours, 2 hours, 3 hours. Don't be greedy. No one can be in deep work for eight hours, but you can do it for two or three hours every single day. Don't snack. This is a tough one because it's tempting. Your refrigerator is right there. And if you're coming from a previous environment, in an office where you had to get in an elevator, go down steps, take 10 minutes to go get food, all of a sudden that temptation of having your refrigerator right there might be too much. And before you know it, you're snacking constantly. You're a little bored. Go snack. Want to stretch your legs? Go snack. Here's the problem. If you're working from home, left to your own devices, you are going to need fewer calories than normal. You're not walking to the train station, the subway, the bus, to the office, up and down steps as much. You're not going to walk as much. So you need fewer calories than normal. And yet you have access to this refrigerator plus your cupboards. The tendency is to eat more than ever. You need to stop that. My recommendation have a no snack policy. Have your breakfast, have your lunch, have your dinner. You don't need snacks. Unless you're doing hard manual labor. Sure, if you are a blacksmith working from home and you are burning 5 and 10,000 calories a day, sure, snack. But if you're doing anything from a computer where you're sitting down, you don't need snacks. Habit number seven, you must aggressively find ways to exercise. Now, if you're working from home because there's a pandemic, you might not be able to even get outside. You've got to figure out a way of exercising from home. You have a huge mansion. You may have your own gym, but if you live in a tiny studio apartment, you're not off the hook. You can do push ups, you can do sit ups, you could do jumping jacks. I do all those every single day. Regardless of whether I go out. You've got to find a form of exercise that works for you. Perhaps you can go out in your backyard and shoot baskets, do something calisthenics, watch an exercise video. But you need to be much more aggressive about putting this on your calendar when you work from home because you're going to lose all the natural exercise of walking to and from a place of work or an office. You need to exercise throughout the day. You shouldn't really be sitting for more than about 50 minutes or so without getting up. Walking, stretching. I like to go do push ups throughout the day. Jumping jacks. Do something that gets your blood circulating. And if you do have access in your home to any form of exercise, whether it's a treadmill or any other machine, expensive or inexpensive use. It doesn't do any good to buy a treadmill if it just sits there collecting old laundry. You've got to use it every day. So find out a way of exercising every single day. Habit number eight, have a set quitting time. Those of you who are baby boomers out there may remember it. The Flintstones. Fred Flintstone. When that whistle went down at 5, he went off the dinosaur and he ran home. He was so excited. You need to have a very specific set quitting time. Many of the most successful authors in history do that. They have a very set time. And what that does is make you more efficient. I have a set quitting time every day in my home office. It's 3:59. Believe it or not. My computer is literally turned off at 4. That's my quitting time. You may want to quit earlier, you may want to quit later, but here's the thing. If you don't have a specific quitting time, you'll never quit. Have a quitting time. Stick to it. It will force you to be so much more productive and efficient with your time. Habit number nine, establish boundaries. Sometimes when people start working from home, they think, oh, this is great. I can set my own hours, I can work whenever I want to. Yeah, that's fine in theory, but what happens is you're now working every hour. If you can work anytime, then you can work anytime. That will burn you out, that will destroy your productivity, that will SAP you of your motivation. You need to have firm boundaries. Now, some people like to work in only one spot or one share in their home that works for them. I like to work at different places around my home, inside and outside. I find that just works best for me. But you need to experiment with what works best for you. And you need to tell yourself if it's the evening and you're watching a movie with your family, you're not going to just take every random call. I understand there can be exceptions. If your boss is someone who's going to fire you if you don't return a call instantly, you've got to do what you've got to do. But with many clients, colleagues, others, they will respond to us the way we ask them to respond to us. They will treat us the way we want to be treated. If people know you're instantly going to return every email, Even if it's 9:45pm, they'll expect that. If they know that if they send you an email After 5:30, they're not going to hear back from you until 9 the next day. After a while, they won't expect you to return it instantly. They probably will just wait until the next day before sending it to you. Establish boundaries. That's why it's not enough for me to get up, put myself away from my computer at 3:59pm each day. I literally turn off the computer. That way, if I'm walking by for some reason later, I can't just say, oh, let me just check one thing. Because then email comes up, work email comes up and you're back into this work mode. If your brain is always at work, that means your brain is never resting, your brain is never truly recuperating. You've got to carve out sometimes for weekends, evenings, vacation, fun time, otherwise you will feel overwhelmed and you will feel suffocated from working at home. Habit number 10, get outside now. During a pandemic, you might not be able to safely, but you might be able to go out on a small balcony, perhaps the roof of your building. If you live in a home, perhaps your backyard or a courtyard, as long as you stay away from people. But it's critically important for you to get outside, ideally every single day. When you work from home. Because if you stay inside and you don't have an excuse to catch a bus or drive or take a train to an outside office, all of a sudden everything starts to feel the same. You lose track of what day it is, what month it is, what time of the year it is. You need to get outside. It's good for your brain. It's good for your mental health, it's good for your physical health. Try to find some time each day. If it is safe where you are to walk outside, then do so. Try to get some time outside every single day. It will make you much more productive when working from a home office and a bonus habit 10.1 do absolutely everything you can to preserve and protect your sleep time. Just because you don't have a friend Firm hard committed 7am meeting with the boss in an office somewhere requiring you to get up at 5:30. Does it mean you don't need to get up at a set time? The easiest way to get up at a set time and start work at a set time each day is to go to bed early enough to make it happen without being exhausted. You need an evening routine where you don't look at any cell phone or electronic screen an hour before going to bed and and you need to stick with it just because working from home it's kind of like play day and like I'm in college or something. No, you need a set bedtime. You need a great night sleep. When you're working from home, typically you don't have some manager standing over you monitoring saying I need this in five minutes. Get this in 10 minutes. You have to be self motivated. It's a thousand times easier to be self motivated if you are well rested. So habit 10.1 get a good night's sleep at all cost. I hope you found these tips helpful. I need some help from you. I clearly haven't listed every tip someone could need or use to be happy and productive working from a home office. If you work from a home office and I missed something, please share it in the comments below. I would love for this community to really help each other. It's not just me here, it's you too. So I want to hear from you. Please don't just hit like. Although I'd like you to like this video. Don't just hit subscribe. Although I would like that. Take the time to add a suggestion of what you think helps people work more effectively from home and if you have questions please post that as well. Making the transition from working in a regular office to working from home is very difficult for some people. They find it requires a lot more self discipline. Well, if you'd like to improve your self discipline, I have a brand new course on self discipline. If you'd like a discount on that, please click the link you see below on my latest self discipline course. I think you'll enjoy it. It'll give you some innovative techniques to really build discipline in everything you do every day in your home office and every place else in your life.