Happy New Year! Like many, I spent most of my holiday at home with family. Also like many others, to keep up with my tasks, I chose to work from home during the break. I usually don’t prefer working from home, as I like the office atmosphere better. Knowing how New England winters can be (with all the snow), I realize this won’t be the last time this season that I’ll need to work from home, so I took the time over the holiday to come up with some strategies and tips to make it easier. With the right strategies, you can be even more productive at home than in the office. In fact, a recent Stanford study showed that working from home can boost overall productivity by 20 to 30 percent! I hope these tips will help you create a home environment that works well for you as a B2B inside sales manager!
Continue following your daily routine.
The temptation to sleep in until it’s time to click on your computer is strong, but I found that waking up at my usual time and using the extra minutes to make myself breakfast and get settled at a workspace made it feel more like a regular day.
Create a workspace conducive to actually working.
If you don’t work from home every day, it’s likely that you don’t have a specific workspace or office set up. I know some people who can work from their couch or bed, but that doesn’t work for me. Find a spot at the dining room table or in a quiet room where you feel comfortable—just not so comfortable that you lose focus. When there are many family members around, I sometimes ask if I can work from their house for the day to change my surroundings and escape my usual space.
Embrace tasks that can periodically take you from work.
This tip might be a little unorthodox but it works for me! Embrace tasks that can periodically take you from work. One of the reason I love coming into the office instead of working from home is because the people I work with are genuinely fun to be around and our culture is reflective of that. We may take a few minutes out of each day to socialize, watch a funny video, go grab a coffee, etc. and working from home can feel very isolating. Infusing a daily task like laundry, or washing the dishes or taking a half hour at lunch to catch up on that episode of “The Mindy Project” you may have missed that week helps to break up the day as you would have had you actually been in the office.
Pack your day with tasks that are easier accomplished outside of the office.
On the flip side, I try to take advantage of the isolation when working from home. As an inside sales manager with an open-door policy, there can be days when it seems like people are constantly stopping in to ask questions, sometimes taking you away from time-consuming administrative tasks. As a final tip, if I know I am planning on working from home I purposely pack that day with all the administrative tasks that would be difficult to accomplish in the office so that I can be as productive as possible.
I give a lot of credit to peers I know who work from home every day. It is certainly a testament to AG that I want to be here every day and interact with the staff. The moral of the story is that if you are like me and only work from home on a very sporadic basis, it’s best to go into it with a plan to get the most productivity out of that day. Inside sales managers, what do you do to stay productive when working from home?
