Building Routine

Published Categorized as Administration, Inspiration
Plan for success...

We’ve talked previously about the value of good habits when you’re working from home. One of the points we touched on was the importance of establishing a good routine. Indeed, a good routine will lead you into good habits and drive your productivity. In this article we’ll go over some tips to help you build a good routine.

What happened to flexibility?

The previous articles on the benefits of earning from home talked about the flexibility. And routines and flexibility can be natural enemies. But they are not mutually exclusive. A routine can add some structure to your work day or week but it does not mean you have to be completely rigid and fixed. And because you have a routine does not mean you have to stick to it. You can deviate and change things up when there’s a good reason to. Just so long as you’re not ignoring it for trivial things and follow it most of the time.

Scheduling

The bedrock of a good routine is a good schedule. It will help you organise your day and week. You need to figure out all the things that are important and what you need to focus your time on. This should not exclude important non work things like time for exercise, or for family, or hobbies and even some free time that you can do with what you want. Don’t lose sight of the things that inspired you to work from home in the first place.

Plan for success...
Plan for success…

Schedules are quite individual things. Some people like big blocks of time for a task. Other people like to minimise time on any task so they change tasks to avoid anything becoming too stale. Your schedule will need to reflect you, your preferences and the work you need to do. It might take a few variations to get it right. It’s worth it to keep trying.

Here’s some good tips to help you get a schedule that will work for you.

The right tools to make things easier

Tools exist to make developing and keeping to your routine and schedule that much easier. It is worth taking some time to find some tools that will help you.

At the simplest, cheapest, end of the scale a calendar or daily planner can help you. Even simpler is simply typing your schedule up and printing it off to stick near where you work. Or even just writing it by hand. To do lists are another simple yet effective tool.

If you are working on an on a longer, ongoing, project something like MS Project’s Gantt charting might be very useful.

There’s lots of tools out there that might help you. Give yourself a chance to find them!