August 16, 2019

Tips for Working from Home

6.30 AM Monday morning and your alarm goes off. You force yourself out of bed, shower, brush your teeth and get dressed. Just enough time for a cup of coffee before you’ve got to begin your rush-hour commute to work.

We’ve all thought about how sweet it would be to work from home, but be careful of what you wish for!

Tips for Working from Home: eAskme
Tips for Working from Home: eAskme

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Yes, working from home can be a wonderful way of working that offers you a much higher degree of flexibility, independence, and autonomy than a conventional 9-5 does, but working from home isn’t all milk and honey.

Working from home requires a very specific skill set, one that may be very different from the one you may have acquired if you’re used to working in an office.

You’ll need to be prepared to adapt your tried-and-tested working practices to the demands of remote working dynamics.

Emotional intelligence

Firstly, you’ll need to have a level of emotional intelligence and maturity to cope with the isolation and lack of social interaction that can come with working from home.

You’ll need to be capable of spending long amounts of time on your own without those water-cooler conversations and lunches with colleagues.

Make decisions on your own

Additionally, you’ll need to be able to make decisions on your own without support and input from others.

You may find yourself in a situation which you have never faced before and without anyone sitting next to you to ask for support.

In order to navigate such situations, you’ll need excellent information processing and critical thinking skills.

Challenges and Motivation

There are several challenging yet fun games you can play to improve your mental reasoning and critical thinking, such as chess, poker, and sudoku.   

Are you the kind of person that likes to have a lot of supervision or needs to be part of a group in order to feel motivated?

If so, then working remotely might not be for you.

To work remotely you’ll need to be disciplined, self-motivated, and capable of working without supervision.

This can be daunting for a lot of us, so be realistic with yourself about your needs and working style.

If you’re the kind of person that will sleep in until noon and procrastinate if left to their own devices, then you might find yourself unsuited to working remotely and end up having a negative experience. Get to know yourself and be honest with yourself.

Image: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2014/05/02/21/50/home-office-336378_960_720.jpg //. Photo by Unknown //CC0 1.0

Caption: Keep your workstation organized and tidy 

You’ll also need to make sure that the work you do can indeed be done remotely.

Technological developments in fields such as web conferencing, cloud-based software, and project management have made it possible for many of us to do our jobs from home.

However, if your job requires you to have a physical presence in your workplace, working remotely is unlikely to be suitable for you. 

Another difficult reality about working from home that you may well have to face is that your relationship with your home may drastically change.

Your home, once a refuge from the pressures of your work life and place of rest and relaxation, may start to feel like quite a different place once tensions and stress from work begin to infiltrate your living space.

When you finish your working day, instead of leaving the office and making your way home to relax, you’ll still be in your office.

It is vital to divide your home into working and living areas and be strict with yourself about keeping them separate, as without the physical separation with work, it can be hard to make an emotional and psychological separation.

Maintaining a healthy work/life balance is absolutely essential.

So, if you’ve read to the end of this article and still feel that working from home is something you’d like to try, then good for you!

With the right skillset and mentality, working from home can be a truly liberating and rewarding experience that transforms peoples’ relationship with work.

Of course, there will additional stresses and strains but, as Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “With freedom comes responsibility.”

So, bear that in mind and, if you’re confident in your own abilities and realistic in your expectations, deciding to work from home may be the best decision you ever made.

If you still have any question, do share via comments.

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