4 Tips for working from home successfully for course creators & bloggers | How To Be Productive Working From Home series
Maintaining focus is challenging in our hyperactive world with so many competing activities. To focus and be productive working from home you need a few simple things. Discover 4 tips for working from home successfully for course creators & bloggers:
Have you struggled with this to be productive working from home?
How to set your deadlines & priorities to be productive working from home
Bonus tip: Does multitasking make you be productive working from home?
I am going to share with you examples and techniques to bring this framework into action. This blog gives you the framework to maintain focus to be successful in a balanced way.
You haven’t got the time to read the blog! I get it. Just grab your 4 tips for working from home successfully checklist and get ready to see results fast!
Let’s go for it and discover the tips for working from home successfully for course creators and bloggers!
You know you want to be successful without overworking.
You are prepared to try new things.
You might have tried already a few things to be productive… Starting a fancy bullet journal? Or going for a zero-email inbox? Or starting your day suuuuuuper early?
However, you have not seen the results you had hoped for… What would be different this time round?
The fact is that we all can soooooo easily get distracted. Try new things for a while and, without noticing, go back to our old habits. We convince ourselves that we are doing fine. That is our comfort zone.
What is that one thing that makes a real difference between those who succeed and those who give up?
Do you know what is the one point in common between a successful online entrepreneur, an elite sportswoman and an astronaut?
Their focus.
Their focus on what they want to achieve and what they need to do to get there.
You can easily lose focus when trying to change habits, trying to do things differently. When things require a bit of effort, because we are not used to them, because we feel outside our comfort zone, unconsciously we drift. We get distracted. We go back to old ways. We lose focus on the end goal.
Oh wow… that sounds quite disheartening… Cheer up!
I have a 4 tips for working from home successfully for you, with easy techniques to be focused as an Olympian.
Nothing better to illustrate how to remain focused than very challenging endeavours. How do you remain motivated and focused when wanting to succeed with huge challenges that looked impossible to achieve?
Would you volunteer to go to the moon without any of these 4 things? You may not be clear how to do this… No worries! I promise it is much simpler than it sounds. You don’t need to be an Olympic medallist or NASA programme manager to follow this framework to remain focused.
Being a blogger or a course creator, working from home, and driving all the different aspects of your online business feels at times as challenging as going to the moon, I know! 😂
With these 4 tips for working from home, you will remain focused to be successful in a balanced way:
Your goals
Your milestones
Your priorities
Your high level plan
Take these 4 elements as the pillars of your online business strategy, the 4 wheels that will get you to your destination.
Before getting crazy busy and anxious about your endless to-do-list, let’s stop and think whether you are clear on why you are doing what you are doing…
This is the right time to just take a few minutes to go through a few simple questions to help you relook at your goals.
Having clear goals defines what you want to achieve with your online business, your blog, your online course.
Goals give you the reasons and the drive for all the tasks you are doing and all the challenges you face.
Watch out, goals are not just actions you need to get done! Your goals set your destination. They frame your aspirations.
Here are a few examples of goals closer to the Earth (haha!):
A goal is your personal & business destination. The more they are part of your personal dreams, the better. Make your goals aspirational and full of personal meaning so that you find the energy on the long run to remain focused to achieve them.
So now that you see how important is to have goals, let’s have a look at how to use them to be productive working from home. Goals will help you prioritise.
Every day you are bombarded with too many things you think you have to do… plus all the unexpected ones that appear from nowhere that add to your to do list. And… then there are the opportunities that come along, that you are so tempted to jump into. Let’s look at an example:
You now have your first tool to make this type of decision. You can now easily assess what matters most versus what can wait or should not even be done. Why? Because the first tip of working from home successfully is to understand your goals to be able prioritise. You now have those clear. Fab!!!!!
In the example above, there are a number of potential ways forward.
So goals are NOT just this thing you define once to feel good about your ambitions.
For a A Complete System To Setting Goals For Success and Make Them Happen Without Overwhelm check out my blog:
There is something that makes having goals even better… This is the piece that many don’t do. How many times people define goals at the very beginning of a project and kind of put them in a drawer… forgotten, not used? Almost as if once defined, that’s it, no need to refer to your goals anymore. That’s where the value of goals is totally lost.
The golden nugget of goals come when you make them consciously part of your DNA and your decision making.
Goals are the light that let you see with clarity the road ahead.
To make it easy for you, I have included the actions in this blog in a simple checklist. Get here your 4 tips for working from home successfully checklist:
Fantastic! You now have goals and have a simple set of questions to use your goals on a daily basis. Of the 4 tips for working from home successfully, having and using goals on your day-to-day decisions will make a real impact to your focus and productivity.
The #2 step to be focused and be productive working from home is to define milestones. Miles… what?
Milestones are key achievement stages in your journey to achieve your goals. I know, this is a bit too theoretical… Let’s just look at a few examples of milestones.
When you define milestones, you are defining what specific key outputs you need to have by when. When you complete a milestone, you know you are making real progress, because a milestone completed gets you closer to your goals.
There is always an array of actions and tasks to get completed under each milestone. Based on the example above, let's look at the difference between tasks and the overarching milestone:
When you reach a milestone, it is also a moment to reflect and analyse what has gone well and what has not gone as expected. This reflection helps you assess whether you need to make changes to the rest of your plan for the future. Simply put, milestones enable you to look at lessons learned and adjust your journey as needed. In programme management, the best plans are those that adapt from the learnings. Milestones create the opportunity to assess those learnings.
Milestones are the #2 of the tips for working from home successfully, to keep you very focused.
Without milestones, you end up with a long list of things to do without much of a framework. Milestones let you focus on the next important thing to achieve. It becomes so much easier to track real progress.
Milestones are also super useful to set priorities and plan workloads to be productive working from home.
So now that you have goals and you know your key deadlines (your milestones), you can easily prioritise your activities… It feels great, isn’t it!!!
Forget endless to do list that capture all you need to do.
Forget fancy bullet journals that take too long to keep tidy and beautiful.
Just follow a simple approach:
The importance of having deadlines and priorities is that they enable you to divide big milestones into do-able, meaningful activities that make you really progress. That way you don’t get overwhelmed and you see what you need to do to get closer to your goals.
This is very different to managing your time with a to do list. To do lists become endless and, more importantly, when you tick things done they give a false sense of achievement.
There is no point in doing plenty of things in a to do list if they are not the right things.
You now have 3 out of the 4 tips for working from home successfully. Let’s see what is the glue that makes it all come together: tip #4.
You know your goals, you have defined milestones, deadlines and you can easily now define your priorities.
Wow!!! This is just great progress. Your #4 step to focus and achieve your goals is a simple step.
Writing down your plan. You have now most of it now:
your goals
your key milestones for the next 3 months
your deadlines for the next 30 days and short-term priorities
The other pieces are simple and important:
who and what you need (contributors, team, tools, investment…) - without these people & things you can not make it happen.
what risks & opportunities you face and what do you depend on - this will help you mitigate your risk and leverage your opportunities.
Have you noticed? I’ve said “write down” your plan…
Yeap! It is actually important to keep you committed and accountable to your own plan to be able to refer to it easily and regularly. Writing it down truly helps achieve this.
The worst tips for working from home is to only work on time management for time management sake. Save time here. Save time there. I might be controversial with this, but hear me out…
The best practice to be productive working from home is to make you feel better, less overwhelm, more aligned, by having and following a framework that makes you achieve your dreams.
More time is useless if you are not doing the right things to achieve your dreams. Focus to achieve more. by doing less to gain time for the right things is priceless. You can now chose to use your gained time by being productive working from home to pursue further opportunities for your blog, your online courses or your online business, or alternatively to have more time with your family and friends. Up to you!
Now you know how to schedule your day to tackle your top 3 priorities.
You have a Do not Disturb Code in place (check out my blog: “How To Be Productive Working From Home Series - Set Yourself Up For Success”) to avoid interruptions.
You are very conscious that being productive working from home is not a complicated thing with the right system.
You have the most important: your mindset. You know you want to change because you have it in you to make it happen!
This is the perfect time to share with you this bonus tip. Something you need to watch out for as it is a big time waister…
Multitasking.
Surprised?
A number of recent scientific studies across the world have clearly concluded that our brain is unproductive when multitasking. When we are doing a number of things at the same time, switching to one to the other, the brain needs a bit of time to refocus into the next task in hand. So each time you move, while multitasking, to do another thing, the brain consumes time to move on.
Moreover, the more the tasks are complex, the more time the brain requires to switch backwards and forwards between tasks and get going again. And that is all time waisted.
The studies have even measured how inefficient we become when multitasking… Are you ready for this?
Most of us have been brought up to the belief that multitasking is a great ability to develop. So I must admit I was shocked to discover all this while researching for this blog. I could not finish it and not share this finding with you!
I have since reflected on my own ways of working, and I have concluded that when I do demanding tasks, I always go into a bubble of concentration, only working on that one thing. In fact, without knowing it, my brain rejects multitasking.
In fact, blog writing is one of those things that benefits enormously from not multi-tasking.
I have now understood why writers are pictured in so many books and films working in their dedicated spaced, in the garden shed, the cellar or the hidden office, isolated from interruptions! It makes total sense.
So if multitasking wastes on average 2 hours (and up to 3.2 hours) in a 8-hour working day, wouldn’t you love to have those wasted hours back for something else?
I have seen a significant difference since I have implemented this. Give it a go. Easy!
Have you struggled with remain focused to be productive working from home? So many distractions, competing priorities, interruptions, long to do lists…
Focus is the one technique that elite sport men and women constantly use to compete and win.
Why does focus matter? Because it helps you achieve your dreams in a balance way!
And it is easier than you think.
Remain focused to be successful in a balanced way with these 4 tips for working from home:
Your goals
Your milestones
Your priorities
Your high level plan
Your goals will create direction and alignment.
Define your goals. Use the following questions to help you:
Where do I want/need to get?
What do I ultimately want to achieve?
What drives me? What is my purpose?
Why is this my goal? Why am I doing this?
Goals are living things. Do not define them and put them aside!
Refer to your goals daily when prioritising what you do. Goals are a great framework to ask yourself:
Why am I doing this? Does doing this truly gets me closer to achieving my goals?
Am I drifting into 'stuff' that actually keeps me busy?
Could I be doing something else that gets me closer to my goals?
Milestones are key achievement stages in your journey to achieve your goals.
Define your milestones for the next 3 months:
Define the important outputs you need to achieve.
Set when you need to have them done and add them in your calendar.
Define how you will measure success for your milestone.
Write them down and put them somewhere you see them easily.
When you reach a milestone, take the time to assess what has gone well and not that well. Review you plan.
Define your weekly deadlines and daily priorities, based on your next milestones.
At the end of the month:
Block time in your calendar at the beginning of each day.
Use these time blocks for your priorities.
At the end of the week:
Look at your next milestone the month.
Set your deadlines for next week to get you closer to your next milestones?
At the end of the day:
Look at your deadlines for the week.
Define your top 3 priorities for the next day.
Use your blocked time to get your priorities done.
Write down your plan reflecting:
Your goals
Your milestones for the next 3 months (important outputs to be achieved)
Your deadlines for the next 30 days and priorities
Who & what you need
What risk and opportunities you face & what you depend on
Review your plan at the end of each month or when you reach a milestone.
Adapt your plan as needed.
Multiple scientific research studies have proven than multitasking is very far from productive.
On average you can waste 28% of time when multitasking and up to 40%.
So just simply single task. Eliminate multitasking as much as possible to be productive working from home.
Do one thing for an allocated amount of time
Once finished, move on to the next.
Multitasking is a habit that can be difficult to stop. You might find yourself multitasking even if you were trying not to. So be patient and develop the awareness that you are multitasking.
And plan what you want to do with the time gained by single tasking! Cool!
Now it is up to you to put into action.
As you have see, the 4 tips for working from home successfully aren’t complicated! Implement them this week and will feel less overwhelmed and super focused.
You know you can do it! Just give it a go. So that you can easily refer to the actions in this blog, I have summarised them in a free 4 Tips for Working from Home Successfully Checklist for you.
Don’t forget to comment!
Enjoy the journey to gain a whole 1 day of your time back weekly to spend as you want… in your blog, your online business or your family!
Being productive from home is not about working more is about working smarter.
Thank you so much for your time. It feels fab to know you are reading these blogs.
Don’t forget to grab your free checklist!