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6 Bad Remote Work Habits That Ruin Your Productivity, and How to Fix Them

If you are a telecommuter, daily habits or lack of thereof massively affect your workday. Everything you are used to when you work at home becomes a habit that eventually affects your life. Most people have this in their minds and incorporate certain activities for a better result. For instance, you can do some workouts to grow muscles and improve health. Also, life dynamics may compel you to change and drop unproductive habits. Below are some bad habits associated with remote work that you need to fix and see productivity skyrocket.

  1. Sedentary Life and Inactivity

When you work from home, you’re trapped in one position for long periods in front of your PC. Such an inactive lifestyle can reduce productivity and lead to health complications such as diabetes, stroke, and obesity. Therefore, you should minimize this risk by ensuring that you get at least 30 minutes of physical activity daily. This may include anything from brisk walking to cycling. 

Alternatively, you can perform aerobic exercises without moving from your home. You can find various online resources to guide you on which activities are best for you and how to do them effectively. The online resources also guide you on healthy meals, personalized training, and meditation.

  1. Lack of A Plan

While remote work is known to offer flexibility and a degree of freedom, failing to have a proper schedule can negatively impact your productivity. Working from home makes it hard to separate personal and work time. Lack of a plan blurs the line between these times, eventually leading to time wastages on things not related to your work. 

The best way to address this issue would be to create a work-from-home plan. Specifically, you should understand your chronotype to set yourself on the right path and establish a suitable plan for your body clock. Besides, you can utilize various digital solutions to plan your day. Most importantly, you should list all the tasks for the next day before you sleep.

  1. Poor Communication

One pitfall of remote work is the lack of effective communication with friends and colleagues. The pitfall is attributed to numerous factors, such as working from different places, lacking internal communication tools, or working at different hours. As a result, workmates might feel like you are uncommitted, unresponsive, or unavailable leading to tension and reduced productivity in the workplace. Address this issue using software solutions and project management tools for direct conversations and group discussions. 

  1. Extensive Screen Time

Spending much time in front of a screen is inevitable when working from home. However, you can take a few steps to reduce screen time. Note that spending much of the time exposed to blue light might cause blurred vision, eye strain, and headaches, adversely impacting productivity.

To avoid the exhaustion from extensive screen time, regularly adjust the screen brightness or the font size depending on the zoom aspect or the light in your room. Besides, you can use the blue light filter, reduce screen time or take regular breaks between sessions.  

  1. Failing To Prioritize Your Tasks

After learning how to schedule your work for the day ahead, you should have a picture of what you need to do at a specific time. However, all the tasks you need to accomplish may not be equal in complexity and urgency. So, you can’t do them at random. Instead, you’ll need to prioritize what’s urgent and work on other tasks later. Failing to prioritize some of these tasks could be costly as you spend more time on non-essential tasks. In this case, you’re likely to juggle between different tasks without working on each at a time leading to burnout and reduced productivity. 

Overcome this habit by prioritizing your daily tasks to ensure that you work on each one at a given time without pausing for a more urgent one. Similarly, plenty of online apps can guide your on-task prioritization. Essentially, these apps organize your work from the most urgent/significant to the least, enabling you to attain your primary goals on time.

  1. Falling for Distractions

When you work from home, you can easily get distracted as so many things can affect your focus. Most telecommuters easily open unnecessary tabs, TV, or smartphones to check the news feeds. 

It’s crucial to minimize these distractions and maintain focus on your work. One of the most effective ways is to designate a workspace with no disturbance. You also need to set breaks when you work at home to find time to attend to things not related to your work. It’s also advisable to use different devices for your work to avoid checking in social media platforms every minute or at least disable notifications that keep distracting your li1ne of thought.

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