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5 productivity tips to make working from home more efficient and fun as a digital entrepreneur! welcome to Episode #1 of the Pink Pop Media video podcast.
Today, I’m talking about five really great ideas that you can use to stay organized and productive as you run your digital business from home.
1. Plan Your Next Work Session Before Shutting Down
Before you shutdown your work session, make sure you have a map and a plan for your next day, your next week, your next session, whatever it is that you’re going to sit down to do next. And this can be really, really helpful.
I know for me, sometimes I get stuck working in little chunks throughout the day. I do a couple hours in the morning. I do a couple more hours in the afternoon. BUT if I’m spending like the first 15, 20 minutes of that time, just trying to figure out. What I’m supposed to be doing. So much time gets wasted.
So before I shut down a session, what I like to do is map out the next couple steps so that when I sit down to work, I know exactly what I can start on. It helps that motivation and that feeling of productivity, from the beginning. Streamlining your workload for the rest of the day.
2. Align Your Calendars
If you have other people in your life or your home that you’re needing to plan around, make sure you have a weekly , daily, however often you need to do it, planning session with them so that you can get your calendars aligned.
I know for me right now, this is especially true in the midst of summer. I have kids home, my husband’s a teacher, so he’s home, and our house can get really loud and chaotic at times. If I am trying to record or get some focus work done, it can be really hard.
When my house is not so we sit down, we kind of map out our calendars and our schedules and plans and it helps when I’m sitting down to work on something, I’m not derailed by the rest of our life.
This is true also. If you maybe have roommates or other family members that you’re trying to work around getting on the same page together, even though it’s your business and you’re running it.
involving the other people that share the same space with you is a really important element to stay organized and efficient at home.
3. Set Alarms On Your Phone
Okay. If you want to stay efficient and organized when you’re working from home, set alarms on your phone.
On any given day, I literally have like 13 alarms set on my phone for all kinds of things all day long. And it sounds kind of crazy, But it works really, really well.
I set alarms for if I have to pick up my kids from school.
I set an alarm if I need to make an important phone call or respond to an email or do something that I don’t want to forget. My life, my phone dings at me and it says time to do this. It’s the time that I sit down to do it. I’ve even started setting alarms for posting throughout the day on social media.
If I want to be active, in a really manual way. Because it’s so easy for me to start my day and then just all of a sudden, you’re like, it’s four o’clock and I missed half of the things I want to do today.
Setting alarms can be really, really helpful. It also is really helpful if you want to use it for focus work.
So sometimes if I’m going to sit down and say I want to devote, 20 minutes to really busting out this one thing. I’ll set an alarm for 20 minutes on my phone or a timer. And I know when it goes up that my time is done for that. It really helps me to focus while I’m working and not always be looking at the clock as I go.
So all in all, I highly recommend such a simple feature on your phone, set alarms. It really, will help your productivity at home.
4. Try Task Blocking
Number four, speaking of time at home , instead of time blocking, which I know is very, very popular, try something I like to call task blocking. So this is really cool. You guys, how many times have you sat down to do something, a task or project and you were working in a time blocking sense and whatever it was that you were going to do took, significantly longer or sometimes shorter, mostly significantly longer than you thought it was going to take.
And it ends up throwing your whole like time block system off. This is especially true for us, digital entrepreneurs at home because we’re wearing like all the hats all the time. you could be recording a podcast, you could be writing a blog post any given day. I could be approving ad copy or designing a product.
There are so many different things that we do in our day to day business. Knowing exactly how much time things are going to take you. It doesn’t work.
Instead of doing that, I’ve started to do task blocking!
So what this looks like is I have a task set out to do throughout the week, and I work on those tasks until they’re done.
Task Blocking vs. Time Blocking
Let’s just say I’m sitting down to work in the morning. I work in the morning before the kids get up, and I work from about 5 to 7 most mornings. Just a good chunk of time that I like to work.
I’ll have a task set out for that time. If I don’t get that task done, I don’t need to feel bad about it. I don’t need to do it, you know, anything else.
I just note next time I sit down, this is where I’m starting again. And I work on that task until that task gets done. Once that task is done, then I go on to the next task.
This allows me to be able to accomplish what I need to accomplish in my business, but to do it in a way that doesn’t make me feel constrained to time.
It’s also really great because sometimes tasks do take less long than you think. And this is awesome because then when that happens, you already have another task lined up and you can stay productive with the work time you have.
You don’t all of a sudden are like, Oh shoot, I don’t, I don’t know what I’m doing next with this time.
5. Break Every Project Down
Break everything down into the smallest, smallest steps possible. This is a really, really great way to make sure that you always are staying on task and know what to do next.
Okay, really good example of that is we have these monthly planners that we use and I always do these for every single month. I put some of our biggest goals of the month that we want to accomplish on them and then I break these down into very small steps. So for instance, for the month of May, this is, this is an old one obviously, get product samples for our planner.
So we’re launching a physical planner, which I’m super excited about, but I needed to get some samples for it.
I needed to see, where I was going to order it from, what kind of factory, what kind of paper quality, things like that. If I had sat down and had this on my list, I would have been like, Ooh, okay.
It wouldn’t have helped me. I wouldn’t have known what to do next. And I think a lot of times we do that. We put these goals down on our list to accomplish, and then we end up sitting there not knowing, like, how to actually move forward with this. So, instead of having this on my list, what I do is I break it down and I put these things on my list.
So, for instance, get in touch with Vince. You don’t know who Vince is, but Vince is my three pl contact.
He’s the one who helps us, get product delivered and be able to hold the product so that we can be able to sell it. I need to touch base with him and talk about, shipping rates and sizing and things like that.
The second one was send over complete a draft. We’ve been working on the draft for this. It’s getting copy edited. I’m super excited, but I need to send over a draft. So that I could get samples.
The next one was figure out the binding. What kind of binding were we going to use? We ended up deciding on O-ring, which is very exciting.
Last one on the, on the list is to order them, to actually send the email and order them. So having that, that bigger goal broken down into tiny steps for me really helped me sit down and say, okay, we’ll contact Vince. That’s something I can easily do today.
The more and more you can break things down, the easier it’s going to be for you to be able to accomplish those goals because you’re working in little tiny steps that you can do.
Bonus Tip – Set Up Focus Time
If you have not thought of this, try using focus mode on your phone. I don’t know if you do this, but you can set focus mode or downtime even on your phone. So obviously we use downtime. We have teenagers., but I found that I can use it for myself too. And I can set downtime for when I know that I’m going to have time to work.
And it keeps me focused. It keeps me off social media or off anthropology website or off games or whatever it is that would distract you from getting your work done.
We all have different vices on our phones. It’s true, but using focus mode can be really helpful for this.
I hope these five tips have helped you. And even if you just pick one of them to focus on this week.
I hope that they help you as you work from home and accomplish your goals while also functioning in normal life.