I’ve been working for Dr Perna for close to 4 years now. I help with his marketing efforts and have been working from my own home for around 5 years now. From a work perspective, the pandemic hasn’t affected me too much and it’s been interesting to see how others have been coping with their change in working environment. It has taken me quite a while to really get myself set up both mentally and physically, but now I have my office exactly how I want it, it has both improved my productivity and also lessened back pain. I’ll be sharing my experience and some suggestions in this and a following article.
I live in a modest home, 3 bedrooms, a family room, dining room and another front room which we had originally used as a play room. As the kids grew up, this room wasn’t really used much. It was there and had some furniture in and just sat there. In 2015, my circumstances changed so that I could work from home. The front room was perfect to use. It was a decent size and kept me away from everyone else.
That was the first important factor in working from home. That separation. It’s so important to be able to separate your home life from your business life. If you’ve been working at the kitchen table or on the couch, it instantly puts you at a disadvantage. Firstly, you’re not mentally separated from home life. Secondly, it’s not practical to keep your work stuff out like that. It doesn’t help anyone.
Discipline was the second issue I had to deal with. I’m at home, this is the first time I had ever worked from home and so I had to mentally prepare myself each morning to work and not be distracted. Being in a separate room to everyone else helped that a lot. The other thing I did was dress as if I was actually physically going to a job. It helped me psychologically get into that mindset. Now, 5 years on, I don’t do bother dressing up, I prefer working in comfortable clothes, but by now I am well disciplined and have a good habit going.
Getting up early. I’m up at 6 latest each morning. I feed the dogs, have a cuppa, meditate for a few minutes, and then I am on the laptop. This is the only time I will have my laptop on the couch during the work day, and it’s at this time I get some of my menial tasks done with the TV on in the background and coffee in me. It gives me that little push and feeling of achievement before I’ve even started work proper. I’ll do this for an hour or so, then get showered etc and come down and start work proper.
The early start, the wearing proper attire (at least in the early stages) and having a dedicated home office area have helped me enormously to working successfully from home. They are the three key areas that provided me with the foundation to work effectively from home. It did take a few months to really perfect and work out what worked best for me, but I got there.
In my next post, I will talk about my actual set up and how I have everything arranged to help me both physically and mentally.
In the meantime, if you’re experiencing back or neck pain, head on in to Back and Body Medical and get treated. You’ll be out of pain in no time.
