I’ve been fortunate with this career advice blog lately. I’ve received lots of requests from folks who want to do guest posts. Brian Jenkins is one of those folks. He works with Braintrack.com. Brian has written a career success post directed at freelancers on staying motivated while working from home.
However, I think Brian’s career advice applies to anyone who works from home – and I’ve found that more and more of my career success coach clients are working from home more and more often. So I think that Brian’s career success advice applies to most everyone who reads this career advice blog. It certainly applies to me as I work at home when I’m not traveling to visit clients.
Check out what Brian has to say…
Useful Tips for Staying Motivated While Working from Home
At times, staying motivated is a big challenge for freelancers who work from home. These folks sometimes miss the stimulation that results from collaborating with co-workers. Here are some helpful tips to keep you motivated while working from home.
Goals: Increase your degree of motivation by setting goals for yourself. For example, set a goal to gain eight new clients every month or to increase your sales by 20% during a given year. Set your goals a little higher than what seems practical, because you just might reach them!
Office hours: Regular office hours remind people working from home to be professional and to focus on work and not on surfing the Web and eating snacks. Also, don’t perform chores during your set working hours.
Productive hours: Most people have specific times of the day when they’re more productive. Don’t use this time to play video games or perform routine tasks. During these hours, work on challenging or high priority projects. And when you’re in the zone, avoid taking that three hour lunch.
Be organized: A messy office isn’t conducive to productivity. An organized office makes you feel more professional.
Take time off: Take a short vacation every quarter. Get away from the computer and spend time with friends and family members. Unfortunately, Facebook can easily become the social life of people who work from home.
Dress for work: Don’t wear pajamas while working. If your personal habits decline it will probably lead to a decline in your work habits. Dress as though a client is showing up for a meeting.
Exercise: Take one or two walks during the day or do some aerobic exercises, and try to get up from your chair and stretch on occasion. Try not to think about work while you’re exercising. Being active will definitely make you feel better.
Change projects: If you get bogged down on a project, put it to the side and work on something else. Select a project that’s completely different from the one you were working on. When you return to the other project perhaps you’ll have new ideas and inspiration.
Distractions: Pets, children, email, telephone calls, text messages, and social networking websites can take up valuable time. You don’t have to instantly respond to unnecessary “What’s up?” text messages from friends. Use your call display to decide if you should answer the phone during work hours. Only respond to personal email during scheduled break times. And don’t take additional breaks unless something truly crucial comes up. A desire to snack on cheese puffs is not a good enough reason! If you have kids at home make it clear that they shouldn’t interrupt you unless it’s an emergency.
Freelancers make more money when they’re motivated, and motivation also prevents boredom. Following this advice will help you work more productively from home.
Following Brian’s career advice will help you work more productively from home – even if you’re not a freelancer.
The common sense career success coach point here is simple. More and more people spend more and more time working from home. Working from home can be helpful to your career success – you can get more done if you manage your time well. Working from home can also hinder your career success – there are more distractions and you might not be as disciplined as you would be in an office setting.
Brian Jenkins provides some great pieces of career advice on working from home. Here are four that I think will facilitate your career success. 1) Keep regular office hours. 2) Work on high brain tasks, during your high brain times. 3) Dress for work. 4) Most important, manage the distractions that come with working at home.
I hope you found this career advice about working from home by Brian Jenkins to be helpful as you pursue your life and career success. Let us know what you think about what Brian has to say by sharing your thoughts in a comment. As always, thanks for reading this career advice. I really appreciate you.
Bud
Brian Jenkins writes about a variety of career help topics for BrainTrack.
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