Remote work is the best way to take control of your time. However, you might run into some unseen hazards if you’re new to running your business from home – especially in this age of COVID-19, where burnout is common.

If you’ve been trying to adjust with this new environment, here are 10 effective ways to achieve highly productive remote work for you and your team.

Just a caveat: Doing all these tips at once might overwhelm you at first. Instead, try to work on them in the order they’re laid out.

Tip 1: Talk to housemates about expectations

If you live with other people, talk to them about what reasonable expectations are at home. If your companions never experienced working remotely, they might mistakenly expect you to be available during work hours, just like evenings or weekends.

But clearly, you’re unavailable during your business hours – the same way anyone would be busy while at the office.

Holding off this conversation will likely result in situations where your household members will ask/demand you to do something and you won’t be able to fulfil it, which will lead to conflict.

Tip 2: Create a comfy, dedicated work area

Home and work life tend to fuse together when working remotely. This happens because all activities occur in the same space. To avoid the problem and separate these aspects of your life, create a dedicated space where you work.

The ultimate setup is a separate home office. If you don’t have one, look for a desk (even if it’s a small one) that’ll fit in your bedroom where you can primarily set up as your workspace.

But don’t stop at ergonomics; consider improving your work area’s aesthetics as well. Think about colour, texture, art, and plants, which can make the work experience far more pleasant.

Tip 3: Identify and avoid distractions

When working from home, you’re surrounded by activities you normally do during your free time. And when you’re not in your office, you don’t have people around to keep you accountable and on task.

Thus, you need to take up the slack and make sure you’re paying attention to how those distractions are affecting your performance during the day.

Is having Netflix on helping your output? Are you checking your mobile more often? All these distractions can keep you from doing your best, most productive remote work.

Be honest with yourself and find ways to reduce how those distractions are affecting you.

Tip 4: Find a system that works

It’s crucial to make sure that both personal and professional aspects of your life are as organised as possible. If one is in shambles, the other will be affected.

Having a strong organisation system will enable you to properly plan tasks so that they’re carried out at the right time, and not just because you thought of them.

Your organisation system doesn’t necessarily have to work for both aspects of your life; it’s okay to have a separate scheme for each (although it’s great to have just one). The important thing is that both areas are straightened out so you won’t get distracted and/or feel overwhelmed.

Tip 5: Have a solid morning and evening routine

It’s a mistake to roll out of bed a couple of minutes before work starts.

Look, you don’t need to wake up well before sunrise and have an elaborate morning routine. This approach works for some, but it won’t necessarily work for you. But you do need something.

Think about what you need to do as a minimum to ensure that when you boot your computer and you’re ready to start working, you’re awake, present, and can do your job well from the get-go.

This would probably include a routine that includes:

• Hygiene (e.g. shower, brushing your teeth)
• Breakfast
• Your morning beverage of choice (e.g. tea, coffee)

The tasks might take you under an hour to do, but it’s certainly not going to be just 5 minutes.

Morning routines can jumpstart your day, but don’t forget evening routines as well. If you incorporate one, it can make mornings and the rest of the day go much more smoothly.

Here’s an evening routine example:

• Choosing your outfit.
• Getting your notes together.
• Looking at your meeting schedule

Spending just a few minutes doing these at the end of the day before you go to sleep can make the following day so much smoother.

Tip 6: Guard your work-life balance

The major issues that working remote usually cause are:

1. Allowing work to bleed into your personal life to the point where there’s no separation.
2. Being so fearful of not being visible or perceived as slacking off that you don’t take breaks, lunches, and vacations.

Respect your work hours. When you’re running your team, focus on that. When work ends, don’t let it bleed into your personal time, otherwise you’ll burn yourself out and be less effective.

There are some careers that require more flexibility. You may be at a level professionally where being on call is part of your job. But this doesn’t mean you have to be on and responsive 100% of the time.

Tip 7: Find other workspaces

Just because you can work from home, doesn’t mean you have to all the time. If your setup is mobile, you can move around easily enough.

Make it a point to get out of the house and work somewhere else at least two or three times a week to change your environment.

Tip 8: Be deliberately visible

One huge advantage of working in an office is the many opportunities to connect with your team organically and develop relationships. This includes:

• Going out for coffee together.
• Grabbing lunch with your team.
• Meeting at the watercooler.

These are opportunities that working remotely doesn’t provide. So it’s important to find ways to build relationships with your team minus the opportunities that you’d have if you were working in an office.

It may sound contrived sometimes. Like grabbing a team member on chat or email and say: “Hey, can we have a 15-minute call? Let’s catch up.” Then just talk about the same things that you would if you were having coffee together.

Such opportunities build relationships with the people in your team and make you memorable, visible, and valuable.

Tip 9: Get active

One benefit with running your team from an office is that you’re more active than someone working from home. If you work remotely, you need to deliberately incorporate activity into your daily life.

You don’t need to hit the gym for an hour every day. You do, however, should move around. You can start simple like stretching, walking around the block, and standing up at least once per hour.

It’s important to be active because office life is desk-bound as it is; working from home is even more sedentary because you don’t have to walk very far.

Tip 10: Learn to cook

You need to invest invest in your cooking skills when working remotely. When working at the office, you likely have nearby restaurants and cafes to have your meals.

Unless you live in a commercial area, there’s probably no such luxury at your place. Even if you do have culinary options, you shouldn’t rely on it all the time because it’s expensive.

If you can whip up some healthy and tasty meals, remote work is going to feel a lot more pleasant – as opposed to eating processed food all the time.

Bonus tip: Delegate tasks

To significantly boost your productive remote work, delegate your tasks to top talent. And if you want to hire the right people for your organisation, partner with Remote Workmate.

Unlike freelancing marketplaces where you do everything yourself, we handle all the heavy lifting for you, including recruitment and payroll.

You can actually choose from our pool of top candidates right away. Simply click the button below to browse a wide range of profiles on our Hotlist page.