Your ally in the battle to maintain productivity and health while working from home, is your home office. While you might be limited for space, if there is any way possible, then you should design a home office that will be separate from the rest of your home.

This is important, because it will allow you to step in and out of your “work mode.” The worst thing you can do, is to work in the room you sleep in. This will make it much harder to separate your working life from your downtime, which will have deleterious impacts on your sleep.

There are other things you can do to make an ideal home office for productivity too.

Inspiration

One powerful tip, is to surround your office with things that inspire you and that put you in the mood to be productive. These might be examples of the best work in your niche or industry, or pictures of your heroes and people who inspire you.

This is something that Cal Newport talks about in his book Deep Work (which I’ve referenced before). Here, he talks about the idea of the “Eudaimonia Machine” – a space built by architects with the singular purpose of generating the most productivity possible.

Part of this design involves museums filled with inspirational works. This is something that I feel very strongly about and believe can make a huge difference to overall productivity.

This is linked to the psychological concept of “priming.” Priming essentially means putting someone in the frame of mind most conducive to whatever

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Working from home creates other challenges too. Chief among these, is trying to look after yourself and your wellbeing.

When you don’t leave the house to go to work, there is no incentive to dress well. When no one sees you for days, there is no requirement to wash.

And when you can get up at any time you want, and work at any time you like, there is nothing stopping you from losing all semblance of routine and health.

What’s more, is that because you don’t need to go to work, there is no guarantee that you’ll get any fresh air or exercise! These are all serious issues, because they can be detrimental to your health and wellbeing.

When work gets on top of you, you might even find yourself eating poorly as you grab whatever is quick and stuff it in a microwave.

All this leads to your being tired, de-motivated, and less able to focus. Focussing and staying motivated requires energy, and resisting temptations and distractions likewise requires that you be in good health.

In short, if you don’t look after yourself outside of work, you’ll struggle to stay focussed when you sit down at the computer.

Optimizing your health will allow you to focus better, seeing as focus requires energy. Using a disciplined routine will ensure you get proper time to rest and recover. And taking the time to groom yourself and look your best will help you to feel (and thus become) more productive and professional.

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But THE most important key ingredient for doing lots of great work, is to be passionate and inspired by your work.

Inspiration is different from motivation. Motivation is being able to push yourself to work even when you don’t want to. But inspiration means having ideas for how you want your project to turn out. It means visualizing it when it’s complete, and it means wanting to get back to work to put those ideas and plans into action.

When you are inspired by work, it becomes intrinsically motivating. That means that you want to do it for its own sake.

One way to accomplish this, is to think about the type of work you’re doing. If you find that you are consistently being given tasks that you find dull or boring, or that you really can’t be excited about, then perhaps it is time to assess whether you’re in the right line of work.

Should you consider changing jobs?

Because when you find work you really love, you’ll find you become instantly more productive and better at working.

Now of course, changing jobs won’t be an option for everyone. You might not have this luxury. Moreover, even if you love your job, there will be still be tasks and jobs that you don’t love. No one loves every single part of their job!

So another thing to do, is to try and look at whatever it is you’re doing, and then make it more interesting

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Of course, sitting down and doing the hardest and biggest thing first, isn’t always easy. It’s one thing to set yourself rules for working, but it’s quite another to stick to them! With so much to do, how can you make sure that you stay on-course and actually do it?

Especially when it would be so easy to grab a good book and a hot drink, and then retire into the armchair that’s right there in the corner of the room!

This is where you need some productivity hacks!

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So, you’re stuck working from home? There are now two ways this can go.

One option is that you work like so many other people who are confined to home offices. That means you’ll spend a huge chunk of your day procrastinating before you actually get anything done, which will result in work spilling over into your evening.

You’ll go to bed with work still on your plate, feeling stressed and behind. Meaning you’ll wake up the next day and start work in your pyjamas.

Without someone looking over your shoulder or structuring your day, it’s all too easy to fall into bad habits. You make yourself that morning cup of coffee, you check your emails, you read Facebook… you neglect to shave! It feels like liberation at first, and it’s a great feeling not having to rush out of the door.

But as a result, you end up with no structure. You spend all of your day “half working” and you spend all your time cooped up in one room. Your work life bleeds into your downtime, and you end up falling behind in all kinds of aspects of your productivity AND your personal life.

So what is the other option?

The other option is that you grasp this opportunity with both hands: that you apply a little strategy and discipline. Most importantly: you gain the correct mindset that will help you to tackle this unique challenge in the best way possible....

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Learning Strategies for Mastering New Skills

Technology is advancing at unprecedented levels, and it’s only going to get faster. According to Moore’s Law all technological changes occur faster and faster doubling approximately every 18 months. Because of this fact, if you want to keep up in the world, continuously seek to master new skills.

If you want to master a new skill, it’s imperative first to ask and answer a few questions:

Are You Really Ready?

Do you have the right background to learn a new skill? For example, if you want to author a novel, what do need to add to your skillset? There are many processes to learn about that involves more than just writing do you need to back up and learn plotting, character development, or something else?

Do You Really Need It?

If you are entertaining learning a new skill, why do you want to learn it? What will you do when you do learn it? You don’t need to know everything. For example, if you are going to get your gallbladder out, you don’t have to learn surgery, the doctor knows what they are doing. There are experts for a reason. Let them do what they do.

How Do You Learn Best?

This is something you may know instinctively, or you may need to explore. Some people learn best from a hands-on method, others learn best by reading, and yet others require even more. Knowing how you learn best will help you find the right course, book, or plan for your needs.

Now that you know the answers to those questions when you do want to learn something new, remember to follow these tips.

• Set Clear Goals – When you want to learn a new skill, you need to set goals that define what you’re going to learn, the timeline behind it, and specific information that helps you succeed.

• Start Small – Be sure to break up the things you need to learn about the new skill into smaller parts. This is going to make it less overwhelming for you.

• Be Patient – Sometimes, the rush to learn can affect your mind and block your ability to absorb latest information. Instead, be kind to yourself and patient as you learn the new skill.

• Teach What You Learn – For most people, regardless of learning style, turning around and teaching someone else about what you’re learning is helpful. Even if you cannot teach someone, you can send a note to yourself via email telling yourself what you learned.

Developing the capacity to master new skills faster will help you stay ahead of the curve. However, keep in mind that you don’t need to know everything. You only need to know what you need to know to make the right decisions for your life and your work.

Powerful Tips for Home Offices That Will Drastically Increase Work Flow

If you work from home then you will probably be familiar with what a struggle it is constantly to remain productive and to get work done when you're surrounded by distractions. When your work environment is the same as your home environment either all the time or sometimes, it's far too easy to make excuses to pop to the kitchen or to pick up that tempting book lying on the coffee table and these things can actually destroy our productivity.

Another problem is that home offices are designed and maintained by us. There's no boss telling us to keep our desk tidy and no HR team to advise us on the best posture or the best point in the room for enhancing productivity. Below are some fixes that can help you stay on task.

Paper Trays

Having papers everywhere is a problem that affects not just home workers but pretty much everyone else too. The first solution to this issue is to get paper trays which allow you to quickly and easily 'dump' your papers out the way so they at least aren't making mess.

Here you're going to have two trays. One will be your 'working memory' and one will be your 'short term memory'. Anything that you're done with but not ready to get rid of will go in your 'short term memory', whereas anything that you're currently still working with or that you'll be able to throw away later will go in your 'working memory'. At a predefined time every day/week/month you'll then sort through the trays and move anything from the short-term memory tray into a filing cabinet – your 'long term memory'. This mimics the way the human brain stores information and it makes it much easier to keep on top of everything.

Portable Scanners

Portable scanners are scanners that can take paper through a feed in a similar manner to a printer. Some of these can even take multiple sheets of paper at once and this actually makes it much easier to quickly scan reams of documents, while OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software will automatically catalogue and organize them. This allows you to get rid of an awful lot of paper and to thereby create far less paper for yourself. Likewise you should of course go paperless with your bills, statements and everything else you can.

Desk Toys

If you do struggle with procrastination then a desk toy can go a long way to help. This can include things like small rakes and sand pits, or like cat's cradles. The reason these work well is that they provide work for idle thumbs but aren't nearly as engaging as a mobile phone. In other words, you can play with these little toys while your computer loads and not risk getting 'sucked in'. They also add to that business feel and make your home office feel more like a real place of work.

Working Through Fear: Ending Success Roadblocks

Some people fear failure, and others fear success. That might seem nuts to fear success, but success brings responsibility, and some people are afraid of that too. If you really want to be more successful it’s time to work through your fear.

Signs of Fear of Success

If you fear success, there is a chance that you actively avoid success. You don’t make goals, remember deadlines, or aren’t self-motivated, or often second-guess yourself. Making decisions is difficult for someone who is acting in fear.

In fact, fear of success is so intense in some people that it seems disaster strikes them anytime they’re getting ready to taste success. They get sick, use drugs, and actively sabotage themselves. Some people just never make decisions and don’t even realize they’re practicing sabotage.

To deal with fear, you can work through it by doing the following:

• Confront Limiting Beliefs – This could be about all sorts of things from yourself to what you think about society. You must remember that your life is just one of millions, and even though your feelings and experiences are valid, they’re not a real representation of reality.

• Surround Yourself with Supportive People – The more people you have around you that are positive and supportive of you, the better. People who want the best for you will not encourage you to stay stagnant in life. They’ll want to hold you up and help push you toward success with joy.

• Keep a Journal – A gratitude journal is helpful, but so is a journal that you write down all your negative self-talk. After you let it all out, go back and correct what you wrote as if your child wrote it to turn it into positive self-talk.

• Revel in Past and Current Successes – The one way to get over the fear of success is to experience more success. When you do something difficult for you to do, and you feel good about it, let yourself feel it. It’s fun to be successful, and you should be proud of everything you overcome.

• Ask Yourself: What’s the Worst That Can Happen? – For any given situation, when you are unsure of what to do, and you can feel the fear rising up and preventing you from making a good choice, ask yourself what the worst thing can happen is based on each option you can make before making a choice.

• Accept Discomfort – The idea that you can be successful in life without any discomfort at all is flat out wrong. The truth is when you feel uncomfortable is when you are most likely to learn something amazing or accomplish something amazing.

The more success you experience, the less fear you’re going to have. Challenge yourself and learn as much as you can so that you can overcome any fear that is holding you back.