Working Independently

Now part of working from home is that you need to work independently, but just because you are working independently, you can still contact people at the office, you can still be part of the team, but you do need to learn the skills of self-motivation, planning your day, and working correctly, and making sure you get things done. So the work independently, we are gonna cover lots of different subjects as the course goes on, to make sure that you understand all the individual problems of working from home, advantages, disadvantages, distractions, things like that. But generally, when you are working at home, is something you need to get the right frame of mind, that is the most important thing. Just because you are working at home, it is not, "Oh, well, life is easy, work does not get in the way anymore." It is not. It is actually harder sometimes to motivate yourself to make sure you get things done. So good, effective planning and time management is really important so you know what you need to do. Making sure you know what is expected of you.

So if you are just doing something like customer support, then it may be that your job working from home is exactly the same as it would be working in the office. Maybe you are controlling online chat, same thing, but there are some jobs that just cannot be done working at home. But as you start developing working at home more, then you will find you will get better and better at the skills required. You are not gonna be wasting so much time, and you will be able to get stuff done much quicker. And part of the planning process can be literally getting a pen and writing down what you are trying to achieve today. So having to-do lists are really good, because you can have a to-do list and then slowly tick items off, but it might be you have to find your own way of motivating and planning your day. It may be having a cork board up on the wall or a white board where you can write stuff down. It might be printing stuff off or having a notepad, anything that you can find that helps you work out where you are within the day because working remotely or at home, you are gonna end up in a situation where you need to plan your day. You have no one else there telling you what to do, so you do need to know exactly where you are with projects and things like that because it may be that your manager phones you up and says, "Where are you with this project?" Or it may be you need to update at a meeting.

So always make sure that you find what works for you. What works for you and works for someone else can be different, but you will soon get the hang of working independently and planning your day well and also making sure you interact back with the rest of your team.