Work From Home Jobs // Avoid Common Mistakes
By: Michael Christensen
Tags: Work From Home, Remote Job, Work Life Balance

2020 has been the year of remote working, a.k.a. work from home. As the pandemic took the globe at a storm, most of the global population shifted to work from home. Work from home sounds like an easy and comfortable thing to do.

You are not entirely wrong in thinking that work from home is easy. Once you get used to this mode, it is very comfortable. However, transitioning has a slight learning curve, and everyone seems to make similar mistakes. Please read this article to learn about the common mistakes related to work from home and how to avoid them.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Given below are some of the most common mistakes that everyone seems to make when it comes to working from home. You will also find ways to avoid these common mistakes.

Thinking That You Can Work Endlessly from Bed with a Laptop

As enticing as the thought is, it is not humanly possible to work from your bed and reach utmost productivity. You will have to create a home office for yourself, and it will not appear magically.

An important thing that you need to do is to make sure that you invest in ergonomic furniture. Ensure that the desk and the chair you use are placed so that they do not cause hand cramps and body strains.

Getting Distracted by Household Things and Chores

While working from home, it is important to create a life-work balance. Make sure that you do not get so involved in household chores that you end up putting your work on the back seat. Make sure that you create a work disciple similar to how you’d be working in a company’s office.

A great thing to avoid distractions is to work in such a part of your house where you only have access to office utility items. You could also create a DIY soundproof room or use noise-canceling headphones to get further rid of distractions.

Work from Home Fatigue

While you are in your learning curve phase, it is easy to get overwhelmed with the time you have to spend in front of a screen. Zoom fatigue is a real thing that can burn out productivity easily. Make sure that you set healthy work limits for yourself. With the help of such limits, you can create a healthy balance without overworking yourself.

Not Keeping Track of Work

When you work from home, it is crucial to monitor your productivity effectively. When you fail to monitor your work, you are likely to miss deadlines ad procrastinate. It is necessary to note all the work that you have completed or executed throughout the day. This will allow you to maintain a to-do list in your mind, which will keep you posted with your work productivity.

Negating Health and Hygiene

One of the biggest blunders that most people make while working from home is negating their health. It is easy to lose track of time, miss meals, or much on snacks throughout the day. However, these are extremely unhealthy habits that will lead to long-term burnout.

Make sure that you keep track of your working hours, and therefore, are able to create a healthy work-life balance in a way that you eat healthily and get to exercise. Ensure that you always have water and keep hydrating yourself throughout the day. A morning or evening job will also be helpful to keep you in shape.

Forgetting about Eye-Care

Work from home mode will generally require you to work on your laptop. Therefore, you will have to take care of your eyes and make sure that you do not strain them. You could either invest in a screen-guard that will keep the harmful white-light away or could do basic eye exercises.

Basic eye rotations and shoulder shrugs go a long way to bring activity back into these parts of your body. You could also follow the Pomodoro method, which requires you to work for 20 minutes, followed by a 5-minute break. This method will help your brain, eyes, and other stiffened body parts to get the relaxation they require.

Not Maintaining Availability Balance

One out of the two things can happen when you are working from home. You could either be too available or too unavailable to your coworkers.

If you are too unavailable, you will seem too unreliable and lose out on work productivity. On the other hand, if you are always available, you can risk getting exploited with a lot of work.

As mentioned earlier, the best way to avoid this problem is to maintain a strict work schedule. You can work within the time limit that you’ve set for yourself, but do not entertain office-related conversations unless very necessary in your free time.

Taking Video Conferences Lightly

Just because you are working from home, do not make the mistake of treating meetings casually. They are an important part of your work-life, and they must be treated that way. Make sure that you are seated in a place where you can stream your video without any issues.

Working on the Weekends

If you’re a workaholic, you will be tempted to work on the weekends as well, because, in work from home mode, you can. However, to respect a healthy work-life balance, you must avoid that temptation. Take weekends off to ensure that you get to enjoy your life just like you would have had you been working from an office.

Working every day of the week will surely lead to burnout, which will be extremely detrimental to your productivity.

Working from home can be fun as long as you have some principal basics down. You could either face too much burnout while you are working from home, or you could procrastinate too much. The key to not making too many works from home-related mistakes is to understand how your mind and body seem to work throughout the day and create a disciple around your working hours.