This guide outlines several strategies to get organized while working or running a business from your home. Working from home is seen as a great way of running a modern business. Especially if your company is relatively small, and there’s no need for proper premises. It allows you and your employees to be a bit more flexible with how you work. Plus, everyone can work from their ideal setting, which helps you be more productive.
The only downside is that it can be harder to organize your business and ensure everyone is on the same page when you’re not in the same room together. Thankfully, I have a few ideas that will help you stay organized even when everyone works from home.
How to get organized when you work from home
Host regular online meetings
Online meeting is pretty much the best tool available for modern businesses to get organized. It allows you to host a call with many other people, all in different parts of the country. Essentially, this means you can have typical office meetings, but with everyone at their homes. The purpose of these meetings is to ensure everyone knows what they’re doing, what the targets are for the day/week, and can ask any questions. It keeps your business organized as it gets everyone together in the same place for a few minutes. This is the best way to iron out any problems and guarantee everyone is working on the same page and keeps the company ticking over.
Use a cloud-based office program
One of the major problems of working from home is that you’re not right next to your employees. So, if they’re working on something and need you to check it out, they can’t just call you over. Luckily, you can get organized and solve this problem with a cloud-based program like Office 365. With this, you can upload documents to a shared folder that anyone can access when they have the right credentials. So, your staff can upload documents to a folder and get you to read through them easily. It’s a fast and efficient way of collaborating when you’re not in the same office. You can also edit other people’s documents or have more than one person working on the same document at the same time.
Create business group chats
Communication is essential when you’re not working the same building as your employees. As such, you need to make sure everyone is always available when you need them. There has to be an easy way for everyone to communicate with one another. The best solution to get organized with this is to create group chats for your business. You can add everyone to a big group chat, and it enables you all to communicate and ask questions throughout the day. If your company is split into different teams, you can also create group chats that include people within each team. This way, they can communicate with one another and not worry about disturbing everyone else. It’s effective as messages are sent instantly, and it’s basically replicating the act of actually speaking to someone next to you.
You can still work from home and run a very organized business. There’s no rule that claims every business has to have an office with everyone working in the same room. If you’re smart, and you consider my ideas, you will remain organized remotely!
Have a schedule
One of the best things you can do for your professional life to get organized, whether at home or at the office, is to have a diary to write down all your appointments and to-do items so you have better control of what’s going on in your day-to-day. If you’re already in the habit of writing things down, great! But if you still don’t have this habit, we recommend creating it, mainly to make a home office , where we work alone from our homes and if we don’t have the least amount of organization to remember things, no one will remember for us.
Set a start and end time for work
This tip sounds kind of silly, but believe me, it’s essential to get organized! Respecting your work schedule is key to making everything flow. I myself was one of those people who started work at any time and ended it at any time because I had the “freedom” to be at home and work.
So, be sure to set a time to start and another time to end. It is very important that these two times are respected by you. Of course, everyone has their own routine and preferences, but whatever time of day you take to work, try to comply, ok?
Take off your pajamas
A tip that seems a little silly, but that helps a lot to get organized: take off your pajamas! Because we are working at home, our brain tends to think that we are not in a “workplace”. This makes us more lazy and we start to procrastinate. And one of the things that helps us with that is the change of clothes.
If you start working in your pajamas, the impression you get is that you are living in an eternal loop of: you wake up, go on in your pajamas, work in your pajamas, then go to sleep, then wake up again in your pajamas and go to work in your pajamas… , a darn mental confusion! In the first few days, this might be fine, but after a while, it will start to hurt and hurt your productivity. Of course, you don’t have to produce yourself in one piece to stay at home. But taking off your pajamas is a very important part of that process.
Establish a place in your home to work to get organized
I will start by telling you that you don’t need to empty a room in your house, make an office and get to work. If you have an extra room in your house, perfect! It’s really cool to have a space for you to equip and call an office. If not, we are going to improvise to get organized. A small table in the corner of the room can solve your life. Or even a space on your dining table. The important thing is that you establish a place, other than the bed and the sofa, to do your chores.
Eliminate distractions
Working from home requires dealing with many distractions: noise, television, internet, cell phone, among other things. But how to focus? I, for example, need my cell phone many times to work, so what I do is leave it on airplane mode only for as long as necessary to get organized. I activate airplane mode so I can perform some task and after finishing, I put it in normal mode, to follow up on the workgroup on WhatsApp, for example. And when I have to start another task, I go back to airplane mode, until I finish it.
Another option is to put on headphones (with music or without music) to “isolate” from the world and be able to work. And there are also those who prefer the Pomodoro Method , which consists of managing your time with 25-minute intervals. The technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s.
Breaks are needed!
It is common for people to get lost in the flow of work at home and not stop for a moment to breathe a little, have a drink, stretch their bodies or even have lunch. And that’s one of the worst things, especially for anyone working with creativity or creating something. No brain can concentrate for so long. A break to rest is necessary to get the ideas flowing, be more energetic and relieve some of the mental fatigue that we acquire during the day.
Not to mention lunch, which is something that many people forget to do (incredibly!). Don’t let your lunch break go by , it doesn’t make you more efficient or productive in your work. Take at least half an hour to eat calmly and to clear your head a little. It makes all the difference to get organized! By the way, here’s a really cool tip to optimize your lunch: plan healthy lunchboxes so you can eat well without having to cook every day, order delivery or, worse, eat frozen food.
Communicate with people in your home
If you share your house with other people, it is important that there is a dialogue so that no one disturbs anyone. Not only for the concentration that can be affected if they keep talking to you all the time or invading your space, but also for practical reasons to get organized.
For example: let’s say you need to make a video call with someone on your team, your boss or even hold an online meeting , if there is no communication between the people in the house, chances are you will be interrupted and disturbed, it is very large. Dialogue is important to establish things like: “today I will have a meeting at 3:00 pm and I will need silence” or “I will work from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm and I will need concentration, ok?” or “Can you do this while I’m working and then I’ll help you out?” Believe me, having this sorted is essential!