Ahh the luxuries of working from home...waking up when you want to, working from wherever whenever, not having a boss to tell what you should and shouldn't do, taking Skype business calls with a professional looking top half of your body done up and an unprofessional bottom half of your body still in the pyjama pants with the dinner stains from the night before. It is the life! The question is, how the hell do you ever get any work done?!
In all honesty..some days I don't get any work done, some days I do get lazy and feel unmotivated like I'm sure a lot of people do even when they're working in a busy office environment. Working from home takes a lot of practice and getting used to. Its not for some people and thats ok. What I've discovered over spending a bit of time doing it myself, is that theres an art to it.
There are a few techniques that I have taught myself over the last couple of years that I've been running my business full time from home, and these techniques were only learnt by making massive mistakes in the first place. My hope is that by sharing my mistakes and techniques, It will help you to avoid, learn faster and better than I did!
I'd also like to note that these techniques that I use are things that people do conciously and unconsciously anyways, im simply just listing them out in a way that is easier for people to understand. I am also very conscious that im very lucky to even be able to have this freedom and appreciate what I have and what I do very much :) Let's get started!
1. FINDING THE WHAKAPAPA OF YOUR BEHAVIOUR AND EMOTIONS
This is number one because I think it's the most important point. We're all on our own journeys of self-discovery, but when you have to spend long periods of time in your home office by yourself you tend to get to know yourself a lot faster. You start to get bored faster, talk to your pet a lot (if you have one), Hang out on Social Media heaps because there's no one else there to tell you what to do otherwise. I still do these things, but I now know how to not I found that the first step to taking more control over your behaviour is not to fight it, but to understand it. Im not just talking about understanding when you're in those states, but what provoked it, what triggered you to become that bored. When you understand the WHAKAPAPA OF YOUR EMOTIONS AND BEHAVIOUR, you can understand how to set triggers to change it. This leads me to our next point
2. SETTING TRIGGERS
Our brains and our emotions are like pages and pages of coding. Our codes were being written generations before we were brought into the world, through our parents and our ancestors, and when we're born our individual codes start to develop by seeing for the first time, hearing, feeling and experiencing things throughout our lives. Every line of coding is made up of moments in our lives, the smell associated with that moment, the colours, the sounds, the feelings. These get filed away so deep into our subconscious that sometimes we forget about them, but by setting familiar triggers that help us to remember the feelings associated with something, all it takes is a certain smell, song or colour combination that helps us to remember that moment in time and the feeling associated with it. Here are some of the ways that I use the triggering technique to help put me into different states of productivity while working from home .
TO SET A TRIGGER
Say I wanted to set a trigger that
TO USE A TRIGGER
When the weather is bad, my natural reaction is to snuggle up on the couch and watch movies, but when I need to be up and productive because I have client meetings, I'll put on Spanish or Hawaiian Music. These
building a business is stressful, and finding motivation to build it is really hard and having the freedom to do the work when and where you wanted was even more difficult to manage when you have no one to hold you accountable but yourself. It took a lot of practice and understanding me to get to a point where I could be most productive working from home and so I thought it might be interesting to share with you all.
Im definitely no expert at it, but I have taught myself some tips and tricks over the years to help me counteract LWFH (lazy work from home) behaviour. Now that its become more common for people to work from because of the amazing tools that we have at our finger tips (which I'll be doing another blog post about later), a lot of us have to work out how the heck this working from home business actually works. I have put a few of my own personal techniques down to share with you all. Please note that I don't have kids, or own a house, nor am I married or even currently have a partner, so these techniques may be a a little different for you depending on your journey.