How To Be Productive At Home

It’s the start of a new week. Are you organised and ready for the next seven days? In this post I’m going to share what I do to give myself the best possible start to the week. Here are five tips for how to be productive at home.

how to be productive at home
Photo by Marcin Skalij on Unsplash

Tip #1 – Track Your Time

For me, a good week begins on Sunday evening. I learned a technique called Calendar Blocking from YouTuber Amy Landino, and I find it really helps me track my time. It also ensures that I am making time for the important things. I literally schedule everything. Mealtimes, exercise classes/gym workouts, harp practice, admin (emails, working on my website etc.), as well as chill time in the evening and what time I start getting ready for bed. Obviously appointments, students and gigs are all on there to begin with. For me, a to-do list is pretty much useless unless I actually put those things on my calendar and plan a time for them.

When you see all the hours of the day laid out in front of you, you quickly realise you probably do have time to get most things done. The trick is to do just one thing at a time, we get more done overall. Trust me.

Personally, I use my google calendar, because that way it’s easy to change things around. It automatically syncs with Apple ical that I use on my laptop, phone and iPad. You may prefer a paper schedule (reminder: it’s 2022) but do whatever works for you.

Tip #2 – Get Up Early, ready for a productive day at home

My aim is to get up at 7:30am every weekday. I have tried many, many ways of doing this (I love my sleep) but currently what seems to be working is to have my Lumie light up ready for 7am, and to have my phone alarm go off at 7:30am. Rest is just so important and I do prioritise sleep. I will admit to often – ok every day – having a cup of tea in bed before getting up and on with the day. We all need to find little pockets of our schedules for little treats and things we enjoy, otherwise – what’s the point?

The important thing is, I’m waking up at the same time each day. I’m allowing my body to get into the rhythm of this schedule because I know that mornings are my most productive time.

Tip #3 – Organise your tasks with intention

My mornings are 100% more productive than my afternoons, they just are.

So for me, I know I need to maximise this time and use it for the more mentally taxing tasks. I’m writing this very blog at 9:30am. Examples of good morning tasks would be:

  1. Practising your instrument
  2. Creating Content
  3. Exercising
  4. Making future plans and taking steps towards them

Not-so-good morning tasks would be:

  1. Checking emails
  2. Housework, which doesn’t require much mental energy and can be done later
  3. Contracts, Invoices and other admin
  4. Taking calls
  5. Checking bank balances (too depressing potentially anxiety-inducing)

I know sometimes we can’t have the perfect day and sometimes we need to reply to emails first thing. But in an ideal scenario, anything where your time is going to be governed by someone else should take place after you’ve spent the morning on your own thing. What’s the point of learning how to be productive at home when we don’t use that productivity to work towards our most important goals?

Tip #4 – Decide when to stop for the day, and actually stop.

When you often work from home, as I do, your work is never ‘done’, there’s always more you can do. But for our own mental health it’s important to have some down time.  Schedule it in and you’ll feel fabulous when you reach ‘Chill Time’ and you know you’ve worked hard and have earned a rest.

I have tried scheduling every single day, seven days a week, and at the moment that is simply not sustainable for me. It’s easy to end up falling off the wagon completely and binging on Making a Murderer at 2pm during the week. Learning how to be productive at home means you have sustainable habits that you can do all the time. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Calendar Blocking Monday-Friday is a good compromise for me and means that I can really relax at the weekend (often just in time for that week’s gig!) but you know what I mean, I’m not on the hamster wheel of practice and admin like I am on weekdays.

Another point on this, when it is chill time, for heaven’s sake don’t start checking emails on your phone. That’s not true down time and you won’t feel refreshed and ready to jump back in the next time your calendar says ‘admin’. Occupy yourself with something completely different. Cooking, reading, netflix, whatever, just try not to have your phone alerting you for work stuff.

Tip #5 – limit social media to be truly productive at home

This is a huge secret when it comes down to how to be productive at home. Quitting social media will probably have an article all of its own at some point. Take those social media apps off your phone and stand back in amazement at how much more you get done.

I am currently doing this and it honestly makes me not want to go back to Facebook or Instagram (I already deleted TikTok and Twitter). Bear in mind that I am saying this as a musician, and people love to tell us how important social media is to ‘get our names out there’ – out where, exactly?

I’d rather not be on there, have the time to practice, make sure my website is boom ting and get work that way. Not to mention the mental health issues social media creates. The way it is threatening our very democracy and putting young people in danger from predators and online bullying is quite frankly disturbing.

So those are my five tips that I personally try to use to have my most productive day possible. Learning how to be productive at home will be different for everyone, try different things and see what works for you.

I hope you find these tips helpful, let me know if you decide to try any of them out and how you get on. I wish I had had these tips when I was in college and freshly graduated. Maybe I wasn’t ready to properly knuckle down and go after the life that I want.

I am now. Are you?
A xx

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Freelancers’ Guilt, and what we can do about it.

This week’s post is addressing something I think a lot of freelancers feel.  That is the guilty feeling hanging over us, telling us we’re not doing enough, should do more.  

I hate the word should, I should get up earlier, I should be doing this or that, I shouldn’t go out because I should be being productive, eugh, it’s awful.  It SHOULD be banned from our internal monologue (I know we all have one).  

I have some theories as to why we feel this (I’m assuming I’m not the only one).  Here they are:

  • We often work from home, so there is little work/home separation.
  • There are no immediate negative consequences for getting up late/having an unproductive day.

Obviously long term there are consequences for lack of productivity – but there is a time delay – we pay for laziness later in ways we often can’t predict.

  • There is never a point that we can say ‘I have finished everything I have to do!’  There is an infinite amount to be done, freelancers are never finished, sometimes it can feel like a huge mountain to climb each day.
  • If there is nothing set in the diary, it’s easy to feel we can start later and before we know it, the day has gone.
  • With constant interruptions from phone calls/emails/technology/social media – it’s very easy to get distracted and not realise how much time is passing.  

What can we do about this?  Now I’m no expert, I only graduated a couple of years ago but I’m learning a few tricks that help my productivity immensely.  This is obviously written from the perspective of a musician.  These tips may work for you or they may not, but when it’s really important that I get as much as I can done, here’s what I do:

  • Write a schedule for the day, the night before.  Begin by listing everything that needs doing (I include things like ‘pay electicity bill’ and ‘laundry’ as well as ’emails’, and ‘admin’).  Decide when to get up and what is going to be done each hour.  For musicians – don’t just write ‘Practice’ actually write what is going to be practised, be specific.  This helps because if you have scheduled 3 hours for practice, it doesn’t seem to matter so much if you miss one.  But, if each session has a specific purpose, you’re more likely to get it done, as it might be the only chance you get that day to look at that certain piece/section/excerpt.
  • Set an alarm and put it far away from your bed!  This helps so much I’d actually say it’s the most effective way to increase productivity.  When the alarm is right next to the bed, it is too easy to snooze, then before you know it hours have passed and you’re still in bed.  Great.  This has another advantage as well, for most of us, our smartphone is our alarm – by placing it on the other side of the room it means we don’t google/facebook/tweet away half the night and can actually get to sleep a lot quicker.  I am a real sleepaholic (sleepophile?) so this one is difficult for me but it is so worth it!
  • Actually stick to your schedule.  Hopefully you’ve made it realistic and given yourself plenty of time to do what you wanted to.  Tick things off as you do them, and if you get ahead of schedule – great!  Time to chill later.  I generally do mine in hour blocks but half an hour can work too.
  • (This may be controversial) Keep your phone on ‘Do Not Disturb’ during working hours and set a time in your schedule to ring/text people back or listen to voicemails (put your email address in your voicemail greeting so people have another way of contacting you).  This also has the added bonus of stopping your phone going off every time something happens on Facebook – a potentially huge time-sap.  If you need to – schedule an hour at the end of the day purely for social media – particularly for freelancers who are trying to build an online presence.  
  • Try and get up at the same time each weekday.  For those of us who work from home (can be a blessing or a curse) it’s good to have a routine.  For example, you could get up at 8am every weekday, 9am on Saturdays and whenever you fancy on a Sunday… that way the weekend still feels like the weekend rather than each day feeling exactly the same.
  • If you can work somewhere else, do.  It is one of my dreams to have a separate bedroom, office and music room.  Three rooms.  Or maybe even an out-house where I can go specifically to do admin or practice.  Unfortunately this is the real world and I live in a small flat.  My bedroom has my harp and all my music in one corner and my desk and laptop in another.  It takes self-discipline to go to one zone and not get distracted when everything is just there – being all distracting.  You just sit down to practice but oh! laundry needs doing, ooh so does this morning’s washing up – ahh while I’m here I may as well tidy the kitchen… you can lose days like this so we must be strong and do one thing at a time.  Schedule a time for housework and do it later.

*My mum will be reading this and realise that I am in fact, turning into my father – I’m so sorry*

So these are the things I try to do, but I also try and remember the following:

  • Nobody is perfect.  We’re all just trying to make a living.  Let’s all just do the best we can, get stuff done then get on with enjoying ourselves.  None of this ‘should’ nonsense.  No more guilt.  You Only Live Once.
  • Mealtimes are rest times – no emails/phone calls during mealtimes.  It seems like ages but I always try to give myself an hour for each meal – it spreads the day out and gives time to prepare something vaguely healthy.
  • All hail wondrous coffee – there’s nothing like it to regain focus if you’re flagging mid-afternoon – or just struggling to wake up mid-morning.  I bought my first coffee machine a few weeks ago and have been more or less wired ever since.

So there we have it – freelancers, how do you increase/maintain productivity?  Please share tips & tricks in the comments!  

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