Tips to Working from Home

While large amounts of people in the UK are now working from home - possibly for the first time.  It is very easy to get caught in a loop and feel as if you are wasting your days.  While everyone at Aspen of Hereford usually works in the office, some of us do sneak the occasional day working from home.  We had a quick ask around and these are some of our top tips

Prepare

There is nothing worse than setting up to work and realising all the spreadsheets and presentations you needed are on your machine at work.  If your work place offers cloud storage see if you are able to access it from home and if not see if they are happy letting you take a pen drive, hard drive or even the laptop / pc home with you.

Routine

It is very easy to get caught in a loop when working from home, suddenly finding it is 3pm and you are on your couch eating popcorn and the Netflix screen of shame – “Do you want to carry on watching?” has popped up!

Shower when you would normally, get dressed and have a separate work area set up if possible – while it is nice to work in the living room, come the evening you will not want to be surrounded by work.  If you change into comfy clothes when you get home from work carry on doing that as well, this signals to your brain that the workday is over.

Make the Most of Lunch

There must be some upsides to working from home?

Make the most of your lunch breaks.  Have Sundays left over roast for lunch, take the dog for a walk or catch up on an episode of your favourite show.

Wake up a little later, with no commute to make it through you can try and sneak an extra few minutes in bed.

Keep the Team Going

It is easy to end up feeling like you are missing out.  So get a chat going, Microsoft teams has this built in or you may have some work WhatsApp groups – send round some of the silly articles you would have chatted about and try to not always discuss work (Rudi the resident office dog is a very popular feature of the Aspen of Hereford chats – I think he might get mentioned more than work!).

We often find people get more done without a barrage of little jobs it can be easier to focus on the bigger more in-depth jobs. So if you like it tell your boss – it might be something you could keep on doing in the long run