Working from home can be a great way to stay productive while still having access to the same tools and resources that you would at work. Here are a few tips to help you stay on top of your work schedule and stay productive:

  1. Make sure you have a solid work/life balance. Make sure you have time for both your personal and professional life, and make sure you are able to balance these two things so that you can be successful in both fields.
  2. Set realistic goals. Don’t set yourself up for failure by thinking that working from home will be easy or quick. Make sure your goals are realistic, and don’t expect to achieve everything in the first few months or years of working from home.
  3. Use technology wisely. Use technology to help with tasks that are time-consuming or difficult, rather than using it as an excuse not to work because it’s “not done yet” on your work schedule. This will help keep you focused on your task at hand and avoid distractions from outside sources.

By far and away the most common technique deployed as carefully isolating work from home life. Carol writes:

Carol’s last point–that you can fail to find a stopping point for work–certainly resonates with me. I just recently moved my home office from an open area off the kitchen to a remote upstairs bedroom and can’t believe what a difference having an out-of-sight office makes in terms of being able to successfully unplug at the end of the day.

I plan my ‘get off from work’ time and try to stick to it, as with any job some days I am late getting off, but it all works out. I make sure my office is for work only, any other computer play time is in a different part of the house on different computer. My office has laptop, dock, couple of monitors, multipurpose printer, fax, scanner, file cabinets – just like the office at a company. I just also happen to have a couple of golden retrievers that come to work with me and usually lay quietly until 5, and yes they know it is 5pm sometimes before I do.

For me, one of the biggest concerns when working from home is not being unproductive, but the danger of never stopping work. You could keep going and going because let’s face it – the company will let you do it, so I set myself up to prevent that and maintain a separateness.

Routines and a work-profile on his computer play a big part in Howie’s work-from-home setup:

Sushant also silos his work and play:

I do a couple of different things to help keep me on task while I’m working from home. One thing that I do is I setup a chrome profile specifically for work. That way none of my personal book marks are available in the window I’m working in.

I also make sure that the TV stays off. I know for sure that I would get distracted if I turned it on at all. Instead I made a playlist of songs that help me to focus on my work at hand. Whenever I hear those songs, I immediately go into work mode and get things done.

I try to make my morning routine as similar to when I’m going to work as possible. That means getting fully-dressed and not working in my PJ’s. One thing I’ve heard of but haven’t tried yet is leaving the home before coming back to it to work. This could be something like going and getting a coffee from Starbuck’s or a breakfast sandwich from McDonald’s. By doing that you can mentally walk into your office instead of your house. I haven’t tried this yet but I plan to next time I stay home from work.

For more home/mobile office productivity tips, check out the full comment thread here.

For tracking my project, I use Asana and for managing meetings I use Google Calendar.

Last but not the least music and coffee keeps me going :)