Introduction
One of my favorite topic to talk about is the little hacks and tweaks that I do to make my life a little better as a guy who work from home.
There are amazing benefits of working from home but there are real downsides that we must all guard against such as isolation and getting trapped by the feeling having to keep ourselves busy from 9 to 5.
Today, I'll talk about the later because I am so guilty of it.
Mindset Shift and Getting Clear About The Issue
As someone who work remotely, we are not paid to be busy, we are paid for getting stuff done. How long it takes ultimately doesn't matter. If you are able to get everything done within a 2 hour period, theoretically, you should be able to walk away from your desk.
But that's rarely what happens.
We have been programmed, through the education system as well as the normal job market, to work for 8 hours / 5 days week. Its tough to shake this habit out of our system. We can, however, change that habit if we feel like no task is falling through the cracks.
Scheduling Tasks
So what I did, for my particular case, was to take the 12 or so clients that we have and make a list of everything that should be done on a weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis and organize it on an excel spreadsheet.
That took me a lot of time to d since I never done that exercise before. It was liberating. One thing that kept me in front of my desk was to have the constant impression that things fell through the cracks. Basically, I lacked clarity when it came to what I had to get done. Now that I broke down what had to be done, I was able to use my favorite to do list app: Todoist well.
This app as some amazing scheduling capability that I am still discovering everyday. It's truly fabulous. For example, I was able to schedule a reporting task for "every last workday of the month". Boom! I haven't found any other apps that can do something like that.
I completely wiped my todoist and started fresh. Then I created a project for each of my client and decided on what day of the week I was going to place each client. Finally, I scheduled all the repeating tasks into it.
Now that it is done, I'm able to come to my workday, already knowing exactly what I should be doing for that day only.
Conclusion
I know that it is much more difficult if you are in a situation where you constantly work on projects that must be moving forward. For 3 years, I had to do that...but now that all of our clients are in place and running their operation, I can do maintenance and optimization. I love my job more than ever now that I know exactly what should be done to move the ball forward each and every day.