Tips for Making the Most of the New Home Office, Part 3 of 3

For better or worse, I have worked out of my home for nearly my whole life. Out of necessity, I have learned some tricks for improving my productivity. Mainly, they all boil down to the necessity of staying in the zone - this is the happy, fulfilling moment when the day seems to fly by because you are concentrating so hard and so completely. It is actually easier to get into this highly productive state at home compared to at work. Nevertheless, you need to do everything you can to keep yourself in the zone.

1. Don't answer the phone. Phone calls are a terrible distraction. The worst thing about answering them all immediately is that you teach your customers, lenders, suppliers, and employees to call you at the drop of a hat when things get tough. Surprisingly, if you are a little tougher to get hold of they can sometimes solve the problem on their own. I like to avoid answering calls immediately. Instead, I allow phone messages to pile up and then I deal with them all at once. 
2. Don't do email first thing in the morning. Sadly, responding too quickly to your emails is also a great way to bust up your home office routine. It is better to batch those as well. I try not to even open up my email until later in the day. If you begin with your email, you will quickly find yourself doing less important tasks, generating additional unnecessary work, and distracting yourself from the work that really matters - meeting deadlines, closing deals, collecting checks. 
3. Eat the frogs first. This means get your unpleasant chores done first. I number all my chores each evening or morning and then force myself to do the top one or two first thing in the morning. Usually, the call or confrontation isn't any where near as disturbing or as time consuming as I feared. I also feel great for the rest of the day because I know I accomplished something that was tough for me to do or say.  
4. Use games to stop procrastination - remember you don't have a boss watching you any more or peers to inspire you. For example, to overcome call reluctance, I often find it helps to imagine that when I call someone I'm just calling their answering machine. 
5. Take a baby step to get started. Another great gimmick is to just tell yourself you are just going to do something for five minutes. You will often find that once you are started you fall into the flow state and you work until the task is finished. 
6. Leverage your advantages. Use all the resources around you to be more productive. Have your wife or children help with simple tasks. Make use of your assistants, co-workers, and others around you. Just because you are alone at home doesn't mean you can't be on the phone every hour checking up on people, assigning tasks, and leveraging the talents of others to get things done. 
7. Bliss out. It is easier to be spiritual at home than in the office. Use this to your advantage. You have more ability at home to be serene, in the moment, and happy. You don't need to conform to useless social conventions. In fact, you have more time to meditate, feel the balls of your feet, enjoy the fact that you are alive. I know I am taking advantage of this COVID-19 crisis to improve my meditation skills. I'm noticing I'm seeing opportunities sooner and profiting from them.
8. Don't wear pajamas. I think it is better to dress up for work at home just like you would at the office. Clothing is a psychological cue for you even if no one else notices it. I think people can tell if you are answering the phone in your pajamas. Don't do it. 
9. Watch out for sound quality. Remember that small sounds travel when you work at home. More likely than not, the other party on the phone will hear the clatter in the kitchen, the flushing toilet, or the dog in the background. You need to be sensitive to these sounds and not allow them to impact your listener. This means no music during phone calls. No television in the distance. Above all, don't wash dishes or clean cabinets while on the phone with a client. They can hear the noises and know that you are distracted. 

In the absence of office peer pressure, you need to find other ways to make yourself productive. Creating a happy, calm, quiet atmosphere will go a long way toward allowing you to outperform your office self by making it easy to concentrate and harder to be interrupted.

Tips for Making the Most of the New Home Office, Part 2 of 3

Due to the spread of COVID-19 many of us be working from home. As I heard a friend say, "It makes no sense to drive one hour just to go from one computer screen to another computer screen."

Nevertheless, I think there is good reason to be cautious about the benefits of working from home. The only thing that makes the office more productive is peer pressure. It forces you to show up on time and leave on time. You are in a competitive environment and the social pressure for performance is immense. Without that social pressure your productivity now seems to depend on an almost inhuman level of self-discipline.

To be productive at home, you need something else to keep you working. For me, I've found it helps to get into the flow state. This is the state-of-mind where you happily work for hours seemingly unaware of your surroundings. Getting into and staying in the flow state is the principle behind all my specific suggestions for improving home office productivity.

If you follow them, there is a chance that you may be more productive than you would normally be in an office.

1. Set aside special times for phone calls, writing, reading, and other work related activities. It is more efficient to batch these activities than to mix them up. Remember, the key thing is to get into the unconscious work flow state. If you establish the habit of doing certain activities on certain days at certain times of the day, then you will be more disciplined about following through. For example, at Drew & Associates I set aside specific times each week for introducing myself to new potential clients. Every Thursday between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m. that is what I'm doing.
2. Never rewrite anything the same day you write it. This is a huge productivity advantage. Too many people tear their hair out writing and rewriting the same sentence over and over again until it is perfect. You cannot write and edit at the same time and expect to be successful. Instead, write without rewriting whenever you do a first draft. Then only review it the next day when your mind is fresh. Sometimes you will find that the material you were agonizing over what actually pretty good. You were just being hypercritical during the drafting process.
3. Make sure you have music in the background. It seems especially helpful to have familiar music which keeps part of your mind distracted while your higher mind focuses on getting the real work done. I have my own mix that I sued which you can see on YouTube. Using music to distract your wandering mind leave the rest of your brain the space it needs to concentrate. 
4. I like having a beverage on my desk, usually coffee, often a Diet Coke. Getting up for a drink breaks the flow state that is the key to home office productivity. This means anything that keeps you in your seat longer is good for you. This means moving the coffee pot close to your desk, keeping a refrigerator in your office, or making sure you have a beverage when ever you sit down before your keyboard. 
5. Go through everything in your office and reorganize it. Make sure the things you use the most are in the drawers or shelves closest to you. Things you use infrequently should be further away physically. It sometimes help to have an outsider help you decide which objects and which files should be closer or farther away. 
6. Create a tight, brilliant filing plan. Be consistent in your labeling and organization of your file folders. I was reminded of the importance of internal organization when we helped charities apply for Paycheck Protection Program loans earlier this month. I was under stress and moving quickly. I saved a lot of time my setting up a system beforehand which put the key information I needed for a loan application all in one place. In a sense, orderly files are more important than brains. 
7. Make sure you are happy at work. If you are feeling unhappy it is probably because you are doing something you don't need to do. Your subconscious will warn you. Your level of happiness is also a key indicator of whether or not you are in the flow state. Changing the task so that you remain happy is one of the secrets of staying in the productive flow state. 
8. Use fans, air-conditioning and/or space heaters to maintain a consistent temperature. If you work at home you absolutely need to pay attention to your environment. Anything which makes you too hot or too cold will now be more likely to knock you out of the flow state. Ideally, your environmental temperature and humidity, if you can control it, should be perfectly consistent in your home work space. You need a stable environment if you want to be able to focus 100% on your work. 

If you rely on the same techniques which worked at your regular office, you most likely will fail at working from home. This is what a lot of people advice however. This is why they say you need to dress up for work, maintain consistent hours, check in with other people to be accountable. You are better off, in my view, to take a completely different tact and concentrate instead on doing something you could never do at the office - maintain a clean, consistent, uninterrupted state of productive focus. If you are having fun, then it is working.

Getting in the Zone: Tips for Making the Most of Your New Home Office, Part 1 of 3

Due to the spread of COVID-19 those of us with jobs and businesses will be spending more time working from home. For some, this is a great triumph. I have a friend who told me he thinks this is a harbinger of a brave new world where almost all of us have given up commuting and instead work from the comfort of our dining room table.

As he said, "It makes no sense to drive one hour just to go from one computer screen to another computer screen."

Despite my friend's common-sense observation, I think there is good reason to be cautious about the practicality of working from home. I should know, I've been doing it, off and on, nearly my whole life, as a college student, a graduate student, a young professor, a business owner, and later as a grant writing consultant.

To me, the biggest difference between working at home and working at the office is the different levels of peer pressure you will experience. At the office, much of your motivation and concentration is supported by the social pressures you face to behave yourself in front of your boss and your co-workers. Coming back late from lunch - drunk - will expose you to negative consequences. Working at home, however, you can get away with infractions.

Out of necessity, I have learned some tricks for improving my productivity at home. They boil down to tricks and techniques which improve your productivity in the absence of social pressure. One of my central principles is the necessity of preserving your sense of flow while working from home. To me, flow is the level of concentration and happiness that occurs when you are being most productive at home, it is a mental space where time seems to fly.

Maintaining flow is actually easier at home than it is under the stress of an office. If you concentrate on maintaining flow, then you will be leveraging the advantages of your home office. Potentially, you might find you may be more productive than if you were at the office. Nevertheless, I should warn you implementing these techniques and strategies takes an enormous amount of discipline. All I can say is that it is worth it.

1. Definitely keep track of your hours. For some reason it is very difficult to keep track of the passing of time. It is easy to deceive ourselves about how we spend it. One of the very best things you can do for yourself is set up a spreadsheet and record what you are doing every 15 minutes. You should do this for about two weeks. I think the first week is not really a good measure of how you waste your time because you will most likely be on your best behavior. What you will find is that minor activities like reading the paper, watching the news, or answering e-mails can turn into massive, daily, wastes of time. Keeping track of time will also help you see how little you have of it. 
2. Be realistic about your concentration and focus. I've found that I can only really handle about four hours of sustained writing a day. 
3. Demand quiet and uninterrupted time. This is difficult for some...not so much for me. What loved ones may not realize is that interruptions are huge consumers of time. The lost time is not merely in the act of dealing with the interruption, it is also in getting back into the rhythm and thought patterns of your work - your flow. Ideally, work should be a pleasurable, right-brain activity. You should be concentrating so hard that when you look up you are surprised to see that four hours have passed. That level of concentration cannot be maintained unless you have the active cooperation of those around you. For me, interruptions are physically painful. It hurts me just to think about them right now. 
4. I have found it useful to put up a do not disturb sign on the door to warn my wife off. 
5. Pro-Tip: There is nothing wrong with binge work late at night. I have done this since I was in high school. In the early morning, there are no interruptions because everyone else is asleep. It is quiet and there is nothing to do except work. Once you are on a roll, it sometimes helps to just keep it up. Once your head is into the work, it is unproductive to break your concentration and flow. 
6. Above all, you need to pay attention to ergonomics. This means get yourself a high-quality chair - something way better than what you had at the office. Also, make sure your keyboard is at the right height. Your arms should be level. Definitely get an ergonomic keyboard and use voice recognition software. Take breaks every hour so you do not mess up your back. While you are at it, you should probably make it a habit to look away from the computer monitor occasionally, toward a distant object, to rest your eyes. 
7. Be sure to exercise. Stress in your body distracts your attention and interrupts the state of flow which is essential to keeping yourself, happy, motivated, and taking action in the absence of social pressure.  

For me, the toughest thing about working from home is learning to force yourself to do things you are afraid of or do not want to do. This is where you just have to summon your inner warrior and get it done. Do not be shy about gloating over your superiority when you can force yourself to do unpleasant chores. I like to remind myself that successful people do the things that unsuccessful people do not like to do. Please remember, this is not an easy task. If it was easy to be productive working at home we would not have all these skyscrapers.