6 Tips To Maximise Efficiency When
Working From Home During Covid-19

Working from home is hard.

Here we are, sitting at home, with our TV to our left and our phone to our right.

How are we meant to get anything done? How can we concentrate when there is so much going on around us?

As humans, we are socialized to make home a place of relaxation, and our place of work a place of concentration.

This creates a dilemma for people who have been confined to the space of their home to sustain their work lifestyle – work ethic slips, laziness grips hold, and productivity becomes a thing of the past!

Do we force ourselves to work less efficiently or do we give up working entirely?

Here are our tips on how to stay efficient when working from home during this pandemic from Shape the Market.

Becoming used to something new is always hard, especially when it comes to a change in the work environment.

According to multiple studies, on average it will take 66 days to become used to a new habit. This feels like a long time, so what can you do to make yourself accustomed to this new rhythm of life when working from home?

Simple – repetition, organisation, and activity.

Firstly, repetition translates into lifestyle by creating a schedule. Waking up sets the tone for the day and you should seize it.

What does setting multiple alarms say? I am not ready for the day. It breeds an unhealthy work ethic.

You know the type of days when you wake up with a purpose to get stuff done? These days allow for inescapable tasks to be completed with ease, such as preparing for work and – for some, when working from home – setting the kids up with their educational materials.

Equally, in the evening, you should structure your time as a means to decompress from income-earning activities. This can allow for appropriate time for planning for the next day, meditation and reflection on the day you had, and – of course -conversing with the family.

This schedule will subconsciously train your brain to become active and inactive at the corresponding times of the day.

If you think CEOs are untouchable by the virus and the workload, tell that to the fired CEO of a reclining chair company who was too laid back.

CEOs have an inventive way of staying organised, even in spite of how busy they can be.

For example, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square and Chairman of Twitter, allocates specific days of the week for certain tasks. Mondays for managements, Tuesdays for products, Wednesdays for marketing, and so on. This allows for targeted efforts.

Even a Harvard Study suggested that employees are happier when focused on one target.

Emails have become an endless time waster. With thousands of emails cluttering an inbox, it is easy to spend entire days dedicated to dealing with them.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh suggests a method to deal with this, with his devised term “Yesterbox”. He suggests dealing with your emails the next morning. This will create a positive work system, making you feel accomplished and create freedom from emails for the entire day.

Thirdly, we all can sense when a day lulls. Typically, this is after lunch about 3 o’clock, when the day is almost over but not quite there. With energy levels depleted, it is worth using this time to conduct your routine activities like setting up appointments or running general errands.

This will ensure that no hours during your day are wasted, meaning you are working at prime capacity.

However, you can’t be unrealistic. When you are working from home, distraction lurks around every corner. In the words of Prince, it’s “hard to do what’s right, when all I wanna do is wrong.”

His words certainly ring true about a new routine. How can you stay an efficient worker when temptation surrounds you? Keep reading to find out.

We live our lives through association – so what can we do to keep this reality alive?

Create a space in your home which is purely to do work. For example, an empty room, a side-room, or even a garage. This space will be your economic activity zone, your temple with which to sustain your work, or more simply, a place to work without distraction.

According to a study conducted by CareerBuilder, smartphones, the internet, social media and email were the biggest productivity wasters. The study states that because of such distractions, 45% of work becomes compromised, a 21% loss in revenue, and 24% missed deadlines.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom – there are ways to turn procrastination into productivity.

Using the technique of positive reinforcement can help combat this. Allocating yourself time to relax after working hard can give you something to look forward to after achieving a task.

Oprah Winfrey says to “surround yourself with people who are going to lift you higher”, and although this might be a problem during the virus, if you have other people living with you who are also self-isolating, surround yourself with productive people also working from home.

Concentrating can be hard, we all know this. Taking a 10-20 minute walk can refresh your mindset and rejuvenate the brain. However, work can feel dull and grey at home. At home, all you want to do is put your feet up and kick-back.

So how can you keep up with your workload when being at home?

It’s hard to achieve anything when we don’t know what needs to get done. Unguided and unstructured time achieves nothing except boredom.

An atmosphere of goals must be created to deal with this sense of unguided freedom when it comes to working from home.

For example, create an action plan at the start of every week for each employee or yourself as an individual that outlines what needs to be done and when.

This will set a deadline and generate a sense of urgency to maintain perspective to sustain a work drive.

We all dread dealing with admin and backlog. But how is backlog and admin work created?

Putting off work until another date is something we all do – don’t worry. But the hard bit is coming back to it.

Coming back to this dead-end work in an equally dead time like these will create time in the future for when work picks-up again.

How do you make sure the work being done is of the best quality and by the right people?

Keep reading to find out.

There is nothing worse than doing work that is already done.

Here at Shape the Market we have sustained communication internally to maintain our productivity.

For example, every day at 10 am we have a conference call to discuss who is doing what and the general wellbeing of colleagues.

It is vital to keep all means of discourse open between colleagues when working from home. From workload needing to be relieved, to being confused over a task, a channel is needed to voice concerns.

This will make work frictionless as employees will feel less isolated and more interconnected, producing a higher quality of work. Communication externally should also be maintained so as not to surround yourself with negativity.

This means keeping an awareness of news outside of the virus.

It can be hard to stay happy during this time, so how do you do it? Read on to see our tips on how to maintain a positive state of being.

Keeping healthy at home will always remain a challenge. We all know it – when at work we eat less and do more. The term “healthy body, happy mind” can seem arrogant, even condescending, because it does not understand the struggle of sustaining it.

However, exercise can be a way to keep your work-drive and ethic alive when it seems to be drifting away as we are working from home.

Exercise releases endorphins which trigger a positive feeling in your brain. Maybe it’s not all that bad?

Perhaps the term we should be using is that from Bear Grylls – “little and often” – with regards to exercise. Even 30 minutes a day can be the difference between a productive or wasted day.

But when you simply can’t bring yourself to work, what do you do?

Here comes your final problem. At home in your distraction-free environment, browser open, to-do-list at the ready…. But you just won’t work?

What’s wrong here? You’ve done everything right. You try to find a solution, you take that walk but come back feeling the same.

Deflated and in danger of causing your day to achieve nothing, you spot your headphones at the corner of your eye.

Suddenly, your feel-good playlist comes on and you demolish your inbox, and the to-do list is marked with ticks. Time well spent, but how did we do it?

According to research, music can help relieve anxiety, depression, and stress. But we all know it does much more – music makes us happy, motivated, and excited.

So keep a happy medium when it comes to listening to music as you are working from home. Enough to keep you engaged but not too much to distract you.

Everyone is in the same boat, stuck at home with nowhere to turn.

With lockdown commenced in the UK, the only thing we can do now is to continue working from home.

The Coronavirus and the impact it has had on our work, however, is far from negative. It provides a wealth of opportunities to breathe and catch-up.

While we can mourn for our social interactions, let’s shift our efforts into making these months a time for economic freedom. We can experiment with new techniques to make our work efforts and businesses more efficient.

Let us know how useful you find these tips.