Use Your Travel Time When Working From Home
If you work from home, you’ve probably read all the tips for optimizing your working day that you can find. And I’m sure you know all the basics: make a schedule , shower and get dressed, don’t eat at your table, do some exercise .
Big yawn, okay? I have been working from home for at least part of the week for almost 10 years. It takes a lot of remote work productivity tips to impress me.
But recently I came across a tooltip that breathed new life into this genre of productivity tips. This is from Shani Silver, who writes for Forge to make the most of her travel time .
She’s not talking about the dozen steps you take to get from bed to table. She talks about the time you would spend in the car or on public transport if you had to travel to your place of work. This is one of the biggest benefits of working from home, right? You don’t have to deal with traffic jams, crowds or work costs.
Silver writes that an hour before the start of the working day and an hour after the end of it is a gift. “Use this time wisely,” she writes. “Sleep is great, but you can also spend those hours on additional services that will make your life richer, if only you could accommodate them – because you can.”
Silver includes the beginning of a side fuss about the ways you might use that “found” time, but I don’t think how you use that time is as important as the simple fact that you use it.
If you tend to procrastinate until 8:59 a.m., like someone I know but definitely not me, then starting the day at 8 a.m. instead suggests time for breakfast, shower, stretching, or a short walk before you sit down on yours. place. Job. After all, if you had to get up to get to work, you wouldn’t be asleep anyway, right? Except for this situation, you do not need to rush to get out the door in time.
It’s the same at the end of the day. Depending on your circumstances, you can sneak in as little as 15 minutes to read a chapter of your latest library book. Or maybe you can find a full hour to go jogging, get busy, or start cooking dinner.
It’s so easy to get bogged down in your inbox or “something else” that time slips away from you to the point where your next commitment calls for your attention. But isn’t that why we work from home to be more efficient? Do the same amount of work without worrying about going back and forth to the office?
If you can come up with some kind of plan – or at least a couple of realistic options – for how you will use the time immediately before and after your day at home, you can better respect the boundaries between your work and your personal life. family life.
And you may find yourself recovering from some of the same imperfections that have crept into your workday, such as your tendency to sit at your desk in your pajamas until lunchtime. Again, this is definitely not me doing this, it’s just a friend.