One year into living and working from home, how we can still turn things around to be productive from home.

I think back to life before the pandemic, where I was working for a big corporation, and always thinking if I just had some more free time to myself to work on my side projects I could get so much accomplished. Well in a way, that happened in 2020 when the majority of us were ordered to stay inside. But don’t fret if you found it difficult to be productive and thrive inside, because there’s still time to change your habits around and make this 2nd year that much better for yourself!

So starting out, I’ve always found it difficult to be productive from home. Recently, I’ve mostly lived in cities and thus lived in small apartments that didn’t have dedicated work and leisure spaces. And I’m a firm believer in habit spaces, where we develop different habits based on the different areas in our homes. For example, when a living room is also a workspace, and we’ve intermingled where we relax with where we work it makes a bad recipe for being productive. And don’t get me started on people that try to work from their beds! Talk about a mental pretzel they are putting their minds in.

Imagine being productive when intermingling all these distinct mental habit spaces under one roof:

Relax, Recharge, Work Out, Binge, Focus, Party, Learn, Teach, Zoom, Sleep

So it’s no surprise to me that even in a year when most people were given more free time than ever, that they weren’t thriving and being their best productive selves. Whether it was external worries or external distractions (news) this last year has been a roller coaster where just treading water can be treated as a W.

Turning the page to year 2 of the pandemic we can look to operate a little bit differently and not make the same mistakes as last year as we start being the productive person we envision for ourselves.

First, we need to find what we want to make time for, and two where in our home we’ll do it.

Identifying What We Want to Be Productive Doing from Home

In the first months of quarantine who were the big winners: Home workout classes, TikTok, Animal Crossing, and Tiger King. There were no rules for how we should be spending our time in quarantine. And all of those side projects and new skills now relied on feeble self-will to push forward to avoid collecting dust in the back of our minds. The will to do something can be strong in an external environment where we’re surrounded by like minded people, but very weak when we’re living in our comfy home with a new slate of Netflix shows ready to be binged. Many times I set out to be productive and ended up keeping up with the friends by binging a new show or doing something for instant gratification rather than sitting down and writing this very blog.

Whether it’s fostering a writing habit, building a website, or learning a language, you have to dedicate time to develop your craft. The practice in the beginning is  even more important the outcome. So, identify what is the most important thing you want to work on from home and come out of covid practicing. Once you have your practice identified we can focus on where we’re going to be doing our best work.

Creating a Habit Space in Your Home to be Productive

Like anything in habit change, we need a catalyst that forces the change. Thinking small and practical, I designated one chair in my living room that whenever sat in I would meditate and journal. Now upon sitting down in the chair my mind is already alerting me to put my phone down and start slowing down my thoughts.

Ask yourself the following:

Where do I want to be doing my productive work? What work is being done in that space currently? What feeling is being fostered in that work space?

We want to develop an area that upon sitting, provides us enough social cues to start putting pen to paper, code to text editor, or fingers to ivories. I built a page on workspace design if some additional inspo is needed in how to craft a productive space.

I prefer to have one area for working from home, and another specifically for my side-hobbies like blogging. So if we are unproductive in one area, it won’t completely derail the other practice. Like I mentioned before with having one chair specifically for meditation, having separate areas for separate activities always provides you another touch point throughout the day to engage with that activity. If you tried to do everything from your couch I guarantee you after a year you’ll have caught up on every show from your watch list and still stuck in creating your creative practice.

Give these two a try today and see how it works for you in starting to be productive from home. 🙂