Working from home is a wonderful privilege but it also comes with its own set of challenges. I’ve been working from home for the past 5 years and I’ve learned a few things along the way, especially what to say no to. Here are 5 distractions to say no to when you work from home:
1. Notifications – This is one I feel like everyone would benefit from, not just if you work from home. I’ve talked here about my social media rules and one of them is to turn off notifications. How many times do you find yourself interrupted because your phone buzzed? You can control these notifications in the settings section of your phone. Better yet – turn your phone on do not disturb. It works like a charm!
2. Side projects that don’t serve your brand – Anyone else want to do all the things?! I feel like I could be president of that club! I often find myself distracted throughout the day because I had a “great” idea. The best thing to do is write it down and come back to it later. It is so easy as a business owner to feel like you have to do it all and say yes to everything. This is a huge distraction for me, so I’m learning to stay focused on what is important!
3. Budging on work hours – When I tell people I work from home, it usually plants the idea in their head that I don’t work much, or I have a ton of free time. It’s easy to want to set coffee dates during the day, or do a favor for a friend during the day… but I have learned this is a vicious cycle that is hard to break. My advice: set specific work hours that you keep and reward yourself after!
4. Housework – I know how hard it is to get work done if there is a mess around, so take care of these things before work hours. For the past month and a half our dishwasher has been broken so I have just allowed the dishes to pile up which makes me so distracted during the day. Now, I’ll leave to another room to work without these distractions and it gives me the motivation to actually do housework at the end of the day.
The 10 minute clean up rule is great for this, cleaning up for 10 minutes every night before bed can make a world of difference!
5. Endless background noise – This is another topic I’ve shared about here. Another misconception to people who work at home is they watch Netflix all day. I totally did this the first few months I worked from home as background noise. Now, it is easy to revert to podcasts (which I’ve recently retracted from). But I’ve found I get more work done without the noise. Try it, you may be surprised!
I hope this encourages you to say no to some distractions so you can say yes to better things for your business!
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