The first thing in the working from home is having a fixed dedicated working space. Those of you, who have been working from home regularly, must have a fixed area where you usually work from. Those who do not, need to create one. It is not easy to create such a dedicated working space, specially if your entire family is at home all the time, but it is a necessity.

1.1.1        Avoid distraction

I used to work from the dining table. It used to distract me so easily as I was not comfortable sitting in the chair and the kitchen would always beckon me. I would get up to go to kitchen and take longer breaks than I needed too. When I chose a corner of our living room for my working space, I brought in my computer table to work from there. It took me a few weeks to get used to the corner. Soon I found myself been able to concentrate on work there. That corner represents work for me, without any distraction. A reader of mine is temporarily living at another city and must make do with what she has. She rotates between working from bedroom, dining space, living room and it affects her productivity majorly. I have suggested her not to focus on how temporary her stay will be and create that space for her. It helped to improve my productivity majorly. Upon Having a dedicated space to work means we can discipline ourselves to focus on work when we sit there.

1.1.2        Separation of work and home

Creating a separate workspace not only benefit our work. It also benefits us in a large way. We can compartmentalize our work life and normal life. I try to avoid my working corner, after I am done for the day. I cannot completely leave my work behind, like I can do, when I go to office. This way, I can replicate the physical separation to a small scale. This separation is much needed, specially in today’s time, when we are almost 100% working from home and work is spilling over in life constantly.

This dedicated office corner is not possible for a lot of us, I can understand, and I am fortunate in that. I was already working from home couple of times a week and I already had a set up going. I would still strongly recommend setting aside a corner for yourself, even if it is one chair in the dining table and use it consistently. This improves the productivity majorly.

Image courtesy : Christian . This was drawn exclusively by him for using in the blog and is part of the copyright of the blog. Do not publish without permission.