Motivation while working from home: is it possible?
Although working from home sounds like a dream, it turns out that it’s actually a very difficult thing to master, and we will, on occasion, find ourselves having fleeting moments of missing working in the office.
Working from home has somehow made many of us feel a little less motivated. Getting out of bed later, working in loungewear and pyjamas, and then I find ourselves tired and grouchy as the day goes on. So, how do we get ourselves out of this cycle and get back to our productive selves?
Wake Up Early
It’s harder to get up with no office to go to and no boss to be disappointed in you for being late, but training yourself to get up on time – like you would if you were physically going to the office – encourages you to be more productive. There are multiple studies that prove that getting up earlier in the morning will lead you to become a more proactive person: when we actually get out of bed and start working earlier instead of procrastinating in bed, we have a bigger burst of energy.
Another helpful thought is that – the earlier you start work, the earlier you can finish it. So once you’re up early, get the motivation to work faster, harder and more efficiently in the hopes of finishing everything early to enjoy the rest of the day!
Be Mindful Of What You Wear
Most days we probably roll straight out of bed and straight to our work set up in whatever clothes we slept in the night before – but by doing so, you are adopting the characteristics of that garment while wearing it, meaning that your brain associates pyjamas with cosy sleepy time, so working in these clothes can make you too cosy, and therefore, sleepy while we are trying to work. The last thing we need to be is sleepy. Let’s trade in that snuggie for fresh clothes: we can then change straight back into comfy loungewear as soon as we finish work!
Go Outside
When we are spending all of our workdays and weekends at home, the place can start to feel like a prison: we have everything we need at home, so why should we ever leave? To simply put, because our brain needs it. The next time we are facing a mental fog, the best thing to do is to get up and to go for a walk, so we can feel more alert, more driven, and in a better mood.
Get out of Bed
As tempted you may feel, do not work from your bed! As mentioned above about feeling lazier when you are wearing pyjamas, you will feel equally lazy, if not lazier, if you work from your bed. Think of it this way: our bed is a sanctuary where we escape to every night to switch off your brain and recharge – so don’t taint that sanctuary by bringing work-life into it! Working in bed will take away the special, relaxing feeling we get when we slink into bed, and it will also make us sleepier and less enthused if we try to work from there.
Schedule Your Day
Scheduling our day can begin with the simple task of getting out of bed at a set time every weekday, and if we have a particularly long and busy day ahead, schedule the day to start a little earlier to get a jump on work.
We should also schedule a lunch break in and around the same time every day, and ensure we take that break to give ourselves a breather and some mental downtime. We should also give ourselves a set time to close the laptop and to switch off work mode – just because we are working from home, it does not mean we need to overwork ourselves to compensate for not being in the office.
We can start integrating scheduling into our day by physically writing it down to get into a routine: we will be amazed by how productive we can be with a structure to follow every day.
