How to Avoid Procrastination When You Work from Home

The first thing to understand when working from home is that distractions and consequently procrastination are bound to happen. It’s almost unavoidable, if you are new to working from home, it’s something you’ll come to find out. When you understand this, you can prepare for it and hold yourself more accountable when you see it occurring. The ultimate solution is to own the procrastination when you feel the onset of it occurring and try to cut it at the root. Otherwise, if you don’t take steps to counteract it, it could eat into your productivity and throw your whole work routine out of whack.

Controlled Breaks

With that in mind, the best thing we can often do is understand that distractions will occur and account for it by taking control of our likelihood to procrastinate. How do we do this? Take controlled breaks! If you take a measured break every so often it will do a lot to help your acuity with respect to productivity. Try to break you day up into 30 minutes of designated production and allot yourself a five-minute break following these periods of high productivity. The break will help you recollect your thoughts and take a different perspective from any “state of flow” you might be experiencing.

Set Conservative Goals

You need to be conservative in your daily tasks and goals. Regarding productivity, you should always set a conservative goal for the day and do your best to surpass it. Since small goals are easier to achieve they’ll also tend to keep you more busy and focused on achieving as opposed to getting distracted. Achieving goals (even if they’re small) is also an extremely powerful positive reinforcement mechanism and can do wonders for both your psychology and productivity. Moreover, this will always allow you to feel more accomplished and retain a positive attitude if things don’t go as planned. Psychologically speaking, it feels much better to overdeliver on a conservative goal than to meet a standard goal.

Keep a Clean and Tidy Workspace

Regardless if you are working from home or in an office, it is best to keep your workplace extremely tidy and make sure to always separate your personal space from your work space. In the home setting, you really need to make a space for the sole purpose of working at home and make that space your own (you can add any items you may have had in your work office). It can be extremely difficult to separate your personal and work life when working from home so setting up that boundary for work is absolutely necessary! This will help you separate your personal time from your work time and keep your production level high so that you can more easily make that transition.

Hybrid Model

Although some companies have stopped allowing work from home, some are still going strong and many are using a hybrid model. In either case it’s still important to separate your personal life from your work life. Without doing so, things tend to mix in with one another and when that happens, it can get really difficult to stay on goal. Your personal life and your work life can easily get mixed up and when that happens your productivity and routine tend to suffer. If you take bite-sized tasks and small achievable goals you can counteract the productivity and strive to be the best version of yourself, whether you're in the office or at home.