Things that Block Productivity For Work from Home Bloggers

Last time when I wrote about the Problem with working from home, I mentioned some issues which many of us would face in the long run when you work from home for a long time.

It’s been almost 4 years that I have a home office (Not something that I’m proud of, time to get a real office)… and I realize my productivity level down with time.

Today, I looked back and trying to figure out what all could be reasons for bad productivity.

Learn from my Mistakes and Improve your Productivity

No Home-office:

I’m in a 3 bedroom flat, where one is my personal room and I set another room as my office.  Whenever I work from the home office, which is just a simple setup with a table, chair, Printer, whiteboard and tripod,  my productivity level goes up.

I can work with little distraction and feeling lazy, but when I get up with a lazy mood and start working from my room, believe it or not, my productivity level falls. I don’t enjoy doing hard work (Technical stuff, new work), when I’m working from my bed but it’s the other ways when working from home based office.

Lesson learned: If you are one of Work from home kinda guy, set up a small office in your office. Treat it like a proper office and keep it distraction-free and noise proof.

Stop Multi-tasking:

Multi-tasking sounds good when you talk about laptop, iPad or any technical device. But for human, we have one mind (One powerful processor) and it works best when we are dedicated to one thing at time.

Usually, it takes 2 hours for me to write a detailed tutorial but when I’m multi-tasking, time increases by 2X-3X for the same article. What a Waste of time!

Usually, I get distracted by Facebook or Emails. Lately, I cut down my Facebook browsing habit and especially the habit of keeping my Email tab open all the time. And when I’m doing writing or video shooting work, I put my phone on offline mode and it helped a lot to get the work done faster than earlier. Try it something and let me know how it worked for you.

Health is Wealth: And I mean it

Lately, I started getting little health issues, which are usually back pain and feeling tired. It’s again a cost I’m paying for my untimely schedule of eating and glueing my eyes to the laptop screen for long hours.

Solution: This is something I still have to work on. Have to believe on “Health is wealth“. I made two failed attempts of going to Gym and work is my priority I failed. I tried working out by getting up early morning, but my love to work at the silent hour of the day (I.e. Night), put me away from it. Hopefully I can remove this road-block in August and get back in time and shape 🙂

Work Priorities: 24 Hrs a day is never enough…

Earlier I had this habit of replying to all Emails, Fb messages, twitter DMs and it was a good habit. But with time, the number of such Emails messages increased, and it’s increasing every day and because of this habit, I always missed out on priority work. From last 2-3 months, I cut down on this habit and start putting more energy on work which needs more attention and priority.

Now, I start my day by writing an article, working on client projects, start filtering Emails and replying to important Emails first, Social media updates and spending time with other Blogger friends on Phone or Skype. Not replying to all the messages made me look like a mean blogger but honestly, I can’t do much about it.

I would really like to help everyone but for that I need time and by the end of the day, I always get exhausted and my bad with all unreplied Facebook messages, but there is no excuse apart from “I was busy working on things which were more important to me”.

Though I often try to get back to all messages once in a while, but believe it or not, Facebook messages are one of the worse ways to make the first point of contact or to ask for help.

Here is a nice read from Nytimes regarding, what peoples truly mean when they say I’m busy. For common Emails like Guest posting, advertising enquiries, I started using the Email template feature, and it also helped me to save lots of time.

One Project at a time:

I’m enthusiastic about learning and doing new things, and it’s always a good idea. This lets me create almost 9 blogs in one year, but it was a terrible decision.

After the success of SML, I started creating many niche blogs but now with time, I feel it’s better to have 3-4 blogs only and where I can write regularly and keep them updated. I’m trying to push only 3 blogs in my network and working on a few niche blogs which don’t need over 6-8 hrs of work in a month.  For other blogs, I’m taking the help of post scheduling and adding not more than 2-3 articles a month.

Tip: If you are managing more work than you can do alone, start outsourcing work. There are many outstanding people who can get work done in time and at a reasonable cost. The hard part is finding them, but once you have it, start outsourcing work. If not, in coming days you will find it hard to keep a balance between all the work and this will hamper your productivity.

Also maintain a to-do list, You can use To-Do-ist, and make a list of things you need to do ASAP. Sooner you get rid of pending tasks, you will find yourself more relaxed and you can get other things done quickly.  I concentrate more on getting priority things done first and then concentrate on other work.

It’s been a while since I have updated this personal Blog and hope I can write more often here. Meanwhile, also check out my earlier article on SML, : How to transform your life today.

If you are also one of the work from home guys and you have also faced problems or roadblock to keep up with your productivity, do let me know.