5 Ways To Help You Stay More Productive When Working From Home

Are you one of those workaholics sitting in front of the work desk 12 hours a day? Do you feel that although your working hours are around the clock now, the real value you add is just 4 to 6 hours? Well, you are not alone. Post covid, almost half of the global workforce feels you.

No matter what your profession is, whether you are a corporate executive or a start-up founder, productivity is the number one concern for all post-pandemic. Work-life balance is a thing of the past.

A study by Martec Group shows a whopping 42% of employees reported having stress levels with telecommuting jobs.

But all hopes are not lost. If you can give covid-19 a tough fight, you can totally tame productivity issues.

Here's how?

5 KickAss Ways To Stay More Productive In Work From Home

There is nothing that you can't solve with an efficient strategy. While devising your productivity strategy you need to touch all the points of vulnerability, areas where you are most likely to lose time.

These are the points that will help you discover optimising opportunities.

So without further delay, let's dive in.

1. Time Management

Time is the most valuable resource that you have. Mastering time management means optimizing all of your available resources. There are tons of tactics you can utilize here. From Eisenhower matrix to Batching, Timeboxing to Pomodoro method, adapt to the method that suits your needs the most.

The following types of time management tools can help you master this art.

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• Time Trackers:  Knowing your working hour's time per activity distribution can save a lot of valuable time.

With a time tracker, you get exposure to analytics data that give you a clear picture of where your time is getting invested. This means the scope for a streamlined process, decluttering the unrequired activities, and much more. This means there is a high chance that you do not need to succumb to overtime, delayed deliverables, and efficiency.

Rescuetime is an excellent option to consider to take back your life in control.

• To-Do Lists: One of the best ways to stay on top of your activity is by preparing a daily task list. Having a clear understanding of what your day looks like and how much you have to achieve can prepare you for the work toil. Microsoft To-Do is a cloud-based task management solution that can do this for you effortlessly.

What's even more exciting is it’s flexible solution enables you to connect and share your task list with your team members. This means your tasks are now always aligned with your team members.

2. Business Development

If you are a founder or a business developer, you do not need an introduction to how difficult it can become to keep up with the process. From critical decision making to business model optimization to your next marketing campaign, there's a lot of work to do. Utilizing the following types of tools can share a significant amount of your work.

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• Workflow Automation: Automating your workflows can add real-time value to your system. From efficiency to productivity, accountability to analyzing everything gets a boost.

But watch out. Deciding on automation means you are now diverting your focus from high importance-low value tasks to high importance-high value activities. This means your software has to perform consistently every time. One link failure, and everything will stop working.

Zapier is the market champion when it comes to workflow automation.

• Marketing And Sales Automation Your great product needs an equally great marketing campaign. Gaining those initial customers is the stepping stone of your business. But to grow, you need your customers coming again and again.

Marketing and sales campaigns are an integral part of achieving so. But here's the thing. Keeping up with the endless number of marketing campaigns can take a toll on your team. But you have help in hand.

With marketing and sales automation tools, you can leave all the to-do work for the machines to focus on your campaigns’ quality. Using marketing automation and CRM for your customer base means equal attention for everyone without making it complicated. As a result, you have increased customer experience,  productivity for teams, more creative campaigns, and more.

3. Product Development

Great marketing cannot fix a shitty product. This means product development automatically becomes the make or break point of your business. Given marketing is super important. But, to create a winning product, both marketing and product have to work hand in hand.

Product development is innately tricky. Several challenges occur at various points in time, from product viability to product-market fit, driving your target audience to the product. These problems can be minimized if you start keeping your target audience at the heart of everything you do.

Here are a few tools that can help you achieve so.

• Research Tools: If your product is power, research is your superpower. The right set of information can ensure your product can make your product development easier and improve your end-user experience.

But making the data easy to consume is another task altogether. Infographics are a great way to visualize consumer data. Other tools that can help you streamline your consumer’s overall experience with your product are UX research tools.

• Project Management Tools: A key role in successfully developing a product goes to efficient project management.

Here's why?

When several stakeholders are involved in the successful launch of a product, communication often becomes unmanaged, and deliverables tend to deviate from timelines. A project management board ensures the team lead can track the progress in real-time. It makes devising strategies to upscale the process easier. Trello, JIRA, and Basecamp are a few competent SaaS applications for project management. But all these applications have their unique strengths. If your project needs are simple yet agile, Trello is your best choice. But if you are looking for an integrated solution, then  Basecamp is your answer. JIRA is made for all software development teams in mind.

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Pro Tip: Using a project documentation tool alongside a project management tool can be even more robust. You can refer to a project documentation example here.

4. Communication

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Teamwork is the key to the successful execution of any business process. If you are not tracking your communication performance already, now is the time. Investing resources on how your team communicates not only will boost productivity but will keep major hassles like misinformation. 

Here are a few methods that can ensure clear communications among your team members.

• Use illustrations as much as possible while asking questions.
• Use a communication strategy for the entire team.
• Keep your messages precise and to the point.
• Utilize standardized communication channels to get through your team members.

However, to optimize this often missed superpower, you need to invest in 2 kinds of tools.

• Real-Time Messaging  This will help you to get answers to your queries in real-time. Whatsapp and Slack are good options to consider here.
• Data Heavy Messaging  Emails are perhaps the best way when you need to share data-heavy files.
• Knowledge Transfer  Having common questions that arise from time to time is a natural part of any business process.

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A knowledge base is a smart way to answer all of them without one-on-one conversations. Atlassian's Confluence internal wiki system is one of the industry leaders here. What's more, it lets you add tags to ensure you get to your answers as soon as possible.

5. Crisis Management 

Being inside a business landscape is innately risky. When you are dealing with extensive processes, a lot can go wrong. Your operating servers may shut down, or you may strike a sudden data threat. Whatever is the issue, keeping yourself prepared is what can ensure you don't break your spine.

Here are a few tools that can help you with this agenda:

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• Data Security: The digital space is always susceptible to threats. From malware, ransomware to trojan horses, your data is vulnerable to various cyber-attacks. Investing in data security solutions will ensure you do not always have to worry about your data getting tampered with. IBM Security Guardium is one of the pioneers of cybersecurity systems.

• Data Recovery Losing on gigantic sums of critical data that you collected from years of activity can push your venture back by months. In some cases, you may lose all of them permanently. It is critical to invest in data recovery solutions for this emergency. Having your data backed up in a storage server always proves to be helpful.

Pro Tip: Keeping your data on-cloud is a smart move here. It not only makes your database easily accessible but ensures higher data security. IBM Cloud Recovery And Backup is one of the best solutions when it comes to data recovery.

Parting Notes

Remember, the goal here is to ensure you reach your peak performance most sustainably. Sure, tools and applications will make your lives a lot easier.

But is your work landscape static? Do you work the exact same way as you did five years ago? If not, then tools alone cannot give you your best performance. You need more. Tracking your performance here becomes integral for a sustainable productivity-boosting strategy.

The above tips and tricks are sure to give you a massive boost in your overall productivity state in 2021. But remember, there is always room for improvement. A small, delta change in the overall way of how you approach your work can be a massive game-changer for you. But for this to work, you need to be hyper-conscious.

As James Clear said in his best-selling book ‘Atomic Habits’ "Small habits don't add up. They compound.