It’s January 2021. The days are short, dark and cold. You’d rather be sleeping in or watching a motivational movie, instead of motivating yourself to work from home. But whether it’s school assignments or the work emails that you’re ignoring, you know you would have to get to it eventually.
And after you’ve finally convinced your boss to let you work remotely, it might be even harder to convince YOURSELF to work from home. Trust us, we know!
So we thought we’d list down some of the ways we motivate ourselves to work from home, even when we don’t want to! Because let’s face it, the guilt of not working, clubbed with the anxiety of work piling up through the days is a tougher path to navigate than actually sitting down to work.
So push the quilts away, make a nice cuppa and get to work, you lazy bum.
1. Stop thinking about how much work you have
Here’s some advice for all the winter procrastinators in the work from home era – stop substituting any real work with to-do lists!
Shush that inner monologue that keeps yapping about how much work you have, how you’ll never get on with it, and the many time management skills you lack to make it happen. Trust that once you begin, the satisfaction of ticking things off your to do list on your work desk will make up for the time you spend away from your bed!
2. Baby steps; you’re a grown-up now
You’re not a baby anymore. You sure wish you were, when everything was done for you, and people had to work for you instead of the other way around. But one thing that we can learn from our baby days is to take tiny, baby steps whenever we feel stuck in our adult lives.
Check your work from home to-do list for loopholes. Do you have ambiguous or long term tasks laid down in their entirety? If yes, break them down into doable baby-sized tasks.
3. Begin somewhere
Another challenge of working from home and dreaming of conjuring up time management skills, instead of getting to work is that you still get no work done and waste so much time in the process.
So push thoughts like ‘omg when am I going to finish my work’ away, and acknowledge the fact that there is no finish line, especially when you work from home!
So just start somewhere! Block an amount of time and start work on the task you would enjoy the most – or something that’s easy. Addict yourself to the ticks on your to-do list and you’ll be working through it like the total boss you are!
4. But it’s so boring, and Netflix is asking me whether I’m still watching!
Think about it this way – you’d never have anything to watch if people didn’t get up and get to their tasks with proper time management skills. Even in a seemingly exciting world of entertainment such as a Netflix job, there must be some very boring tasks that people needed to do to get that content out to you. So take inspiration from Netflix if that’s holding you back, and get to work!
If a job is extra boring and you just don’t want to do it, make it exciting for yourself! Stop saying you hate your job and focus your energy on the positive aspects – like working in your PJs!
Take advantage of the work from home lifestyle, put on some good music you can head bang to, and get clicking or typing. The one good thing at the end of all of this is – you can get back to Netflix right after!
5. Think about the rewards!
If you’re a fan of making lists like we are, here’s something you might like to do when you work from home:
- Make a solid time management schedule.
- Make a list of the number of reasons why you need to get the task at hand done.
- Proceed to list down how you’ll feel when you’ve finally done it.
- Make a list of the activities you can enjoy or the movies you can watch once you’ve done it.
Be strict and don’t reward yourself until you complete what you have to. If there’s a lot to do and it will take weeks to finish, learn more about time management and make a plan that allows you small rewards for small tasks everyday and a BIG reward for when it’s finally all done.
Now stop reading articles online already and start working!
Okay, just one more article, you say? Here are funny comics for you if you feel like your brain.exe has stopped responding.
