10 Tips To Maintain Consistent Working Hours When Working From Home
Before major companies adopted the “work-from-home” business strategy, many staff would resume late or close early especially when they are unchecked, except for organizations with stringent measurement and sanctions for such unethical conduct.
This oftentimes requires conscious and deliberate monitoring of members of staff to ensure punctuality and effectiveness at work, hence the challenge of ensuring members of staff do not abscond from work, or not meet up with the required number of hours that should be dedicated to work or to complete the tasks assigned.
The greater challenge is ensuring members of staff who have to work from home do not neglect assigned tasks, abscond from work, or fail at being consistent with the working hours mandated for such workers.
In this article, you will find 10 proven tips, approaches, and methods that would help you in maintaining consistent working hours while working from home. Find those tips below:
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Create A Realistic Schedule and Stick to It
Nothing makes an employee effective and dedicated to assigned tasks other than creating a pragmatic schedule; a workable schedule that has to be strictly adhered to.
A realistic schedule has to be one that can be attained; such that can be measured and fits into the required time-frame of the work hours mandated by the employees-organization.
It also means this schedule has to be specific.
2. Adopt a Workable Resumption and Closing Time
Unlike working from the conventional office, your resumption time may be quite different because you now work at home.
However, you must ensure you adopt a workable resumption and closing time to engender your efficiency within the time frame stipulated by your employee.
3. Create A Morning Routine
Working from home may mean that you don’t have to follow the conventional nine-to-five schedule, but this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a routine. A routine could be what gets your mind and body ready to commence the task for the day.
Once you get used to a routine, it can guide your activities without the need for an alarm. Create a routine that navigates you consciously into resumption to work and closure.
It could be brushing your teeth, dressing up, a morning jog, a yoga class, or particular music that prepares you for the new day.
4. Maintain A Dedicated Work Space
Using a dedicated workspace will also help you commit to consistent working hours, since your mind is already conditioned to view a space within the house as a workspace, it means once you resume into that dedicated space, you have to commit yourself to the hour allotted to work.
5. Identify Your Most Effective Period
Even while you commit yourself to a time-frame to work and a dedicated work-space, you must lookout for the time you are most effective, when you can perform optimally.
It would be to your advantage to dedicate this time to attend to your most demanding task as this would help you complete your task in a very effective way.
6. Don’t Allow Visitors During Dedicated Work Hours
One of the disadvantages of working from home is that family members and friends think you have a lot of free time to maximize with them. Whilst it may be hard for you to disengage from your family, you must however set ground rules for them indicating that there are periods in the day that you need to concentrate dutifully to work and you wouldn’t want to be distracted.
You must also clearly spell it out to visitors that you are not at home to relax. Let them know that you are working from home and do not mince words when you want to tell them that they will not get any reception from you anytime they visit and it falls during your work hours.
7. Always Set A Time to Complete Your Tasks
By setting time to complete your tasks, it would get you committed to the work hours and schedule you to have for each day.
This is also a means to evaluate how responsible you can be to your organization and yourself.
8. Create Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life
The fact that you are working from home doesn’t mean you should mix personal life or tasks with work. You need to meticulously put the boundaries. Do not allow your activities to infringe on the time allotted to working from home.
It means that you should draft a schedule that serves your personal life and another that serves your work with clearly stated boundaries, else you won’t be able to judiciously manage your time.
9. Stay Away From Social Media
There is a reason it is called social media and not work media. This means it isn’t meant for the workplace and it can only serve as a distraction, especially since you are not being physically monitored.
Little indulging would only allow social media to chip away the time that you would have been most effective in completing your tasks and in the long run, you wouldn’t have been able to maintain the required consistency to the mandated work-hours required of you.
10. Use A Time Tracking App
With a time-tracking app, you will be able to monitor the time you allot to each task and the time required of you to complete your tasks for the day.
What this time tracking app will do for you is that it will help you keep a consistent fidelity to work hours accrued to your office work and in the long run, help you guide against distractions.