Working from home wasn’t something I was familiar with until eight months ago when I started working as a full-time developer from the comfort of my room. The first couple of months were challenging but soon enough I was able to develop a solid system for effective work from home, with the word effective I mean getting enough things done to feel better about yourself and impress others. Now, I feel that I can share it, and I hope that this would work for you or at least inspire you to develop your own system. Who is this article for? this article is for people who either work or study from home and are looking for ways to improve this process.
As Stephen R. Covey writer of the book 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People once said
“The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.”
my goal with this blog post is to help you use the most out of your time to finish your work and have time to do other things that you like doing in life. I am going to talk about 4 steps that I go through almost every day, so without furthermore talking let’s get right into it:
1. Set your tasks and goals for the day
It’s so important to know what work are you going to do in a day, it helps to clarify how can you spend your time, and personally, it excites me to know which tasks or challenges I am going to work on the next day. So how can we set these tasks? usually, I would have a couple of tasks to finish in a day so what I do is I divide my tasks into smaller pieces or to-do items and I add them to my to-do list, my favorite to-do app is Microsoft To-Do. Breaking tasks into smaller pieces helps me know the steps I will go through to finish each task.
2. Build a well-structured work schedule
Following the previous step after knowing the tasks and the steps to finish those tasks, now, it's time to priorities the to-do list items and specify a time block for each. Time Blocking is a technique to divide your day into time blocks where each block is dedicated to accomplishing a specific task. For example, from 9 to 10 — I will be preparing for our team’s morning meeting, then, from 10 to 11 — I will be having that meeting, and so on. I use Google Calendar for this, putting items from the to-do list into the calendar helps me get them done. Amy Landino a YouTuber and a best-selling author calls this Calendar Blocking and she made more than one video about it, I recommend you watch this one.
3. Take regular breaks
Sometimes while working or studying, we feel that we just can’t think anymore which is probably because of too much information coming to our brain all at once, that’s when we should take a break. Taking frequent breaks helps us stay productive, retain focus, and stay creative. One more thing that these breaks help me with is avoiding any back or neck pain because I won’t be setting on my chair for a long time. So, how do we take regular breaks? An app I use for that is called PomoDone which applies a famous technique called the Pomodoro Technique which is basically, using a timer to break down work or study time into intervals. You can also use those breaks to check your notifications, email inbox, or reply to someone’s message but the key point here is to be careful not to get dragged into a long break because that will make it harder for you to get back to what you were doing.
4. Take notes and track your progress
When I have a big task that takes more than a day, I usually document it, I write down the process I went through to get it done. As a developer, there are so many things I would learn in a week so having these notes is very helpful when I want to teach someone about something I had learned or if I want to do the same thing again. A nice tool I use for this is Notion it can be used for many things and that’s one of the things I use it for, I would have a template for the tasks or the technologies that I’m learning and each task or technology has a page where I keep all of my notes.
Now! if you have used the tools I am using or even better ones, you will be able to create weekly reports on the amount of progress you’ve made, how much each task took from your time, how much you’ve learned, etc. Looking back at what things you have achieved by the end of every week is going to contribute so much to your productivity and your overall happiness.
Building routines or habits isn’t easy I still face difficulties sticking to my routine every once in a while because sometimes life just gets in the way but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, we should try and we should also be patient because it will take time. I’d like to refer you to an amazing book called Atomic Habits by James Clear if you are someone who is struggling to build habits or break bad ones this book will help you, if you don’t like reading that much you can listen to it on Audible. In the end, I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog post, and if you did, share it with someone who might find it helpful.