Ah – work at home. A dream that turns into reality to many, including me. The idea of working in your pajamas and work as you like (and how you like it) is intriguing.

To me, working at home is freedom; working at home brings you more ‘power’ to control your life and money making endeavours.

However, this quote proves true: “In great power lies great responsibility.”

With all the perks you enjoy from working at home, you will always have downsides – Those that if you didn’t take care well will lackluster your productivity, and will eventually push you to work outside your home.

Responsibilities in working from home

Working whenever you like, the way you like it is nice, but it often backfires.

First of all, working from home requires you to have a (much) greater self-discipline. If you are not good in motivating yourself and have yourself stick to what’s more important, work at home is probably not for you. Forcing to do something for not who you are will eventually backfire.

In working from home, I particularly enjoy the freedom. However, as my responsibilities increased along with the progression of my webpreneurial journey, not mentioning the arrivals of my two children, scheduling a working hour for me proved to be the key if you want to maintain your work from home lifestyle.

Scheduling for a working hour is the key

Setting up ‘boundaries’ is not as easy as you think. Chances are, you did manage to set them up, but sticking to them is another story.

What if there was an ‘emergency’? The state of emergency to me is probably different to that of my wife and children. Defining ‘emergency’ would take forever, and a general rule of thumbs that everybody should abide to will always be broken.

Due to all those above, I have some tips to help you increase your work-at-home productivity – I have ‘invented’ the working hours ‘blocks’, inspired by the Pareto’s law or 80/20 rules:

1. ‘Do not disturb’ work hours – The most critical work hours of the day.
2. ‘Disturb me occasionally’ work hours
3. ‘Disturb me whenever you want’ work hours

The implementations are as follow:

• In ‘do not disturb’ hours, shut down your communication tools (including cell phones and instant messaging) – Never check your email during this hours. Use these hours to finish the works that are urgent and have tight deadlines. In my case, writing for Noobpreneur.com (and my other blogs) is on my ‘do not disturb’ hours schedule.
• In ‘disturb me occasionally’ hours, you should open up all communication channels. In these hours, you should take calls from your clients or prospects and read-and-reply emails. Why I place such important thing into a less-important block of hours in my work day? Because any interruption I might receive from any of my family members will stop non-productive chit-chat with a colleague, client or prospect.
• In ‘disturb me whenever you want’ hours, you should do works and ‘chores’ that is, in a sense, non-critical to the very-existence of your business, but need to do on regular basis. In my case, this includes the seek for business opportunities and checking stats on my websites.

Take care and good luck in increasing your work at home productivity.

Ivan Widjaya
Work at home dad
Image by thms.nl.

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