How to Stay Focused While Working Remotely

Lifestyle

5 - 10 Minute Read

Working remotely is a phenomenon that has blossomed with the advent of compact personal computers and globally accessible high speed internet. It comes in many shapes and forms and is sometimes described using catchy, glamorous buzzwords like digital nomad, WFH (work from home), asynchronous communication, and distributed teams. However there is one thing that is seems to be mentioned very infrequently about working remotely - it is still work.

Since starting a remote job six months ago I have taken advice from other remote veterans and devised several of my own tactics that I use to stay on task during my workday. There is no doubt that the freedom and flexibility of remote work can lead to distraction and decreased productivity, but by utilizing the tips in this article you can develop a system to stay focused and get s%!t done.

Set (and keep) a schedule for yourself

This is probably the most important - and most difficult - tactic that I can share for maximizing productivity and focus while working remotely. When you need to commute you usually don’t have to worry about setting a schedule for yourself. It’s done for you. You wake up, go about your morning routine, and arrive at the office at a certain time, and get to it. When working remotely it can be incredibly easy to forego any type of schedule and go through the day tackling whatever comes up - but this can be dangerous if you have external appointments to keep or big projects that you are unable to get to. It can also lead to non-work related distractions like doing laundry, running errands, or even watching Netflix or playing video games.

Setting a schedule can also help you to focus on different types of work at times of the day. If you’re the type of person whose brain doesn’t function in the morning but comes alive at 11:00 pm, schedule low effort admin work for the morning and tasks requiring higher cognitive activity at night. Personally I am most focused in the mornings, so I schedule my writing and important projects for earlier in the morning and try to leave less important emails and admin tasks for the afternoon. If you are working on creative materials such as writing, design, art, music, making a business plan, or other tasks for which there are no blueprints or workflow processes, this is an even more critical tool. It forces you to spend that allotted time on that specific activity - and if this is your #1 priority you need to ensure that you have that time blocked out.

To get you started here is an example schedule that I set for myself. You can see that I even include items that aren’t related to work - those are equally important to schedule and account for. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ll work on that great idea you have had from 6:00 - 7:00 pm when you know your partner is going to want to eat dinner then or your friends are going to shoot you a text wanting to grab beers.

6:00 am - Wake up (still working on staying consistent here :)

6:00 - 7:30 am - Breakfast, coffee, reading, spend the morning w/Sarah

7:30 - 9:00 am - Clean up work area, Check task manager, review priorities, Write

I try not to compromise the underlined / bolded items. All of these are top priority and to me it’s important to ensure that I do them each day, and I know that if I don’t do them first thing in the morning they won’t get done!

9:00 am - Check email, support queue

9:00 am - 11:30 am - Respond to customers, connect with team, external phone calls, work on longer term projects

11:30 am - 1:30 pm - Exercise, lunch

1:30 pm - 4:00 pm - Complete work tasks, connect with team, external calls, work on projects

4:00 - 5:00 pm - Write, work on website, chill, misc. tasks

5:00 - 9:30 pm - Chill, watch shows, maybe write, hang with other people, dinner, other tasks, chores, exercise, wind down

9:30 - 10:30 pm - Get ready for bed, read

10:30 pm - Bedtime

As you can see my schedule is relatively well structured, but that doesn’t mean that some days don’t look a bit different. One of the great things about life is that the unexpected can and does happen - it’s also important to be flexible and account for things that might come up during the day!

That being said, it’s important to understand which distractions should be allowed and which shouldn’t.

Managing distractions

Spending most or all of your day at home can leave you susceptible to a bombardment of chores, social invitations, and random tasks that seemingly go from being unimportant to your top priority - this can happen because you have to be at home with them all day or simply due to the fact that you now have the choice to spend your time differently when you aren’t working in an office building. There will always be laundry that needs to be done, dishes that need to be washed, people going out late at night, and visitors stopping by your house.

It takes discipline and willpower to say no something that is staring you in the face. In her amazing book Growing Gills, author Jessica Abel calls these types of tasks “open loops” - these are basically tasks that will stay on your mind and waylay your focus unless you complete them. If you know that you won’t be able to say no to spending time on something the next day take care of it the night before. Save dinner leftovers so you don’t have to spend time cooking for lunch. Don’t go out to karaoke night at the bar when you have an important meeting or project to work on the next day. Tell your significant other or roommate that no, you can’t swing by the grocery while you’re at home today. The point of all of this is to spend your workday just as you would if you were in an office and not at home. Close any internet tabs that might be a distraction the night before and get to work, dammit!

One alteration on this concept is to build tasks into your routine. I know that I can’t focus if my workspace is messy, so I spend about 15 minutes each morning before getting to work cleaning up clutter, wiping down surfaces, and putting things away. This closes that loop and leaves me free to sit down and focus on the task at hand.

Reduce decision fatigue

Wikipedia defines decision fatigue as “the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision making”. When we wake up in the morning we face the opportunity of making a hundred different choices before we even get out of bed. The majority of these decisions are made subconsciously, but when you actively think about them they start to build up. What should I have for breakfast this morning? Is there anything I need to take care of before I leave? What time do I need to leave, anyways? Do I have my lunch ready for the day? What should I wear?

Most of these are minor decisions, but as a remote worker if you let yourself stay open to all of the different things you could potentially do there is no doubt that you will find it difficult to focus on what you actually need to get done. All of these different skills tie together with each other, and this one is no different. When you have a set schedule, a set routine, this reduces your decision fatigue. All of those questions that you can potentially ask yourself in the morning are answered and present themselves as statements rather than questions and don’t leave you open to a decision. Not only that, but each event that passes or task you complete signals you to move onto the next task you need to tackle. Wake up at 6:00 am, got it. Significant other leaves for work, that’s my trigger - clean up my work area, review priorities for the day, get to work on writing. 9:00 am - that’s my cue to stop writing and check my email…and this goes on throughout the day until 5:00 pm when I close my computer. Almost as important as deciding what you will do at these times is identifying what you won’t do - notice that I don’t check my email first thing in the morning. I know that if I do this I will get derailed by something or someone else and will need to decide between that email and my highest priority, which is working on my writing. When we make that decision once it’s no big deal, but when we have to make it again and again and again throughout the day our willpower is drained and we give into the task of least resistance.

Use a task manager and prioritize activities

The folks over at Art of Manliness made this handy design to help you reference the Eisenhower decision matrix.

For many of us who work remotely, especially those who are working in a creative space, there can be little (if any) direction given on what to do and when you need to do it. Picture this scenario…you sit down to start working on a project that you have been putting off for far too long, when you check your email and see that a customer emailed you fervently with an URGENT(!!!!) issue. Sound familiar? Each day it’s important to review what you hope to get done and determine which tasks (and interruptions) will be lucky enough to get your attention that day.

One great way to ensure you are focusing your energy on the right activities is using a task manager. This can be anything from a piece of paper to a Google Doc to an application or program that you use. I like to do my longer term goals (Monthly, quarterly, yearly) within a Google Doc so I can easily make updates and record history and progress, and weekly / daily goals in Microsoft ToDo. Whatever system you use it’s important to make it work for you and your working style.

Now..about that URGENT customer email you just received. As I mentioned above making too many decisions, using too much willpower during the day can lead you to cave in to distractions that should be put off until later. We need a way to easily decide which tasks are going to get our attention, when. One framework that I love is the Eisenhower Decision Matrix. This decision making framework divides all activities into four different quadrants (in the image above) and urges you to group everything you do into one of these quadrants with the intent to make it easy to choose which activity you are going to focus your time on at that moment. There are tons of different ways to prioritize and structure action; having a decision framework that you can quickly and easily reference with very low effort can save you time and willpower while allowing you to focus on the things that are important to you (Quadrant 2!).

Have a dedicated work area

Before I started working remotely I would romanticize about having my work space be wherever I wanted it to be - on the beach, in airports, in coffee shops. I have spent time working in all of these places, and my favorite place to work is still my desk at home. Here I have everything I need - coffee, snacks, comfort, and a mostly distraction free workplace. It took me some time to warm up to this idea; after all I had just left my cube so I can work in crazy locations, right? This was a big learning experience for me, and I have come to realize that a dedicated workspace, even a simple one, is critical to focusing on what needs to be done.

Another perk of having a dedicated work area functions at a subconscious level. To understand it we can take a non-remote working location as an example. You walk in from your morning commute, put your lunch in the fridge, hang up your coat, and sit down at your desk. You flip on your computer and launch into work mode. Something we don’t always sense happening is at work - based on the actions you just went through your brain knows that when you sit down at your desk it’s time time get down to business. This is something called a Location Based Prompt (another reference to an awesome Art of Manliness article) - it’s basically the idea that when we are spending time in a specific location (usually one that we have spent lots of time in before) our minds know what type of activities we usually take on in that space, and it helps us get into the state of mind that we need at that moment. Wow…we really are just extremely smart animals, aren’t we?

Don’t try to convince anyone you’re working - just get to work

If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times…

“Just stay out for one more! You don’t even have to get up and go to work in the morning.”

“Come diving tomorrow! It’s not like you have anywhere to be.”

“Will you be at home at 8 am tomorrow so I can come by and take care of that thing I’ve been asking you about?”

Now don’t get me wrong - I’m all for having a good time and enjoying life. But sometimes in life we also have to put our responsibilities and things we should do over what we want to do. The thing that all of these statements have in common are that they are made by someone who assumes that since you are at home during the day, you don’t have anything to do while you are there. The danger of this mentality is not so much in the fact that it can get to be a bit annoying at times, but that you will start to believe it. This can be a slippery slope leading to late nights, cutting out on your work when it’s not finished, and overall focusing on the entirely wrong things. Don’t worry about what others think about your daily routine - you know what you have to do and what it takes to get it done.

Take time for breaks (and exercise)

Many a time I have found myself staring blankly into my computer screen wondering what the hell I am even working on at this specific moment in time. I’ve got my email pulled up, Lightroom is open and the picture I was working on is half done, I’m midway through reading an article about how we can create new universes by colliding particles in a lab (very practical information for someone in my field) - I have reached a standstill, overwhelmed by the amount of possible things I could be focusing on right now. This is an example of a perfect time to stand up, look away from the computer screen, and take a break.

When you work at home your distractions from your peers are lessened, which is great on one hand - it allows you more time focused on the task at hand. However some of the natural distractions in an office are quite nice; your coworker asking about your weekend, grabbing lunch with a friend, coffee breaks. These are things that you don’t get when you work out of the office. It is important to replace these breaks that you would naturally get during the workday with your own regularly scheduled as well as spontaneous breaks. These can be things like going for a walk, grabbing a snack, reading a book, sweeping the floor - anything to take your mind off of the million tabs you have open and help your brain focus on what you are going to tackle next.

On the same note, I find it to be very helpful to break my day up with an exercise and lunch break. After staring at a screen all morning there is nothing better to refresh the body and soul than a workout of your choice and a healthy lunch (not eaten at your desk or computer!) to follow it up.

Reflect, review, revise

I’ve tried many different variations of the items above - some of these started as an idea that either wasn’t possible or wasn’t a priority at the time to something that was critical to my focus and productivity (dedicated workspace). Other items are strategies I had used in the past, but they were more concrete and structured with much less flexibility (setting a schedule for myself). Over time the only way to learn what works best for you is to experiment, try new things, and stick with what works.

Go against all of this advice from time to time - and forgive yourself after

Each of these tips are not meant to be rules, but guidelines. I understand that many times not all of these make sense. In fact, I encourage you to fly in the face of these guidelines at some point during your remote career. Work on the beach with a margarita in your hand. Stay out too late with friends one night. Take a morning to go for a hike, or a bike ride. The beauty of being able to work from anywhere is exactly that, and every now and then it is good to relish in that freedom and do what makes you happy. Life is meant to be grabbed by the hilt and enjoyed; the world is meant to be explored in real life, not behind a computer screen. Always keep that with you and remember that many times an amazing day with those you love can make you more proud of the time you have spent here on earth than a million of your most productive work days.

When all is quiet on the work front, sometimes you just have to take a Friday morning dive with your best friends.