Strategic People

Working from home can be an opportunity to focus and be even more productive aswell as having that extra time to yourself where you would usually be doing the dreaded commute. But some people can really struggle to focus and even put a pen to paper. 

People who tend to procrastinate often think that they simply cannot work from home, but this isn’t the case. It’s just a matter of putting a little more effort in than others who find it easy to work from home. 

The temptation to waste time and muck about when your superior isn’t watching is often one of the main causes of procrastination whilst working from home. A wiggle of a mouse every so often can keep you out of your manager’s radar. Even when you do manage to get your head into gear and get some work done, your least favourite tasks get pushed to the bottom of your to do list and often never get completed.

The Nitty Gritty

The theory is, that people who have a lower frustration tolerance are much more likely to procrastinate. These are often the people who go for extra coffee breaks or toilet breaks when working in an office. Here, avoidance is used as a coping mechanism for these frustrations. 

There is a scale which can be used to predict somebody’s job performance, called the ‘Big Five’. Extroverts especially dislike remote work as they thrive off a social environment. You may assume that introverts can thrive in a life of working alone from their home, but introverts will struggle with things such as video calls with the team and speaking up in group chats.

If you do have a tendency to go and do something else when you’re faced with an obstacle whilst working, then it’s important to recognise this in your behaviour and try to correct it. This will enable you to create good habits with work and become more productive. A trick you can try is counting to five or taking five deep breaths when you’re feeling like you want to get up and do something else. Then you can reevaluate your tasks at hand and break them down into smaller tasks, making your workload more manageable. 

It’s All About The Boundaries

Another reason why you could be procrastinating is because of your work space. If you’re working from your bed or your couch which is also where you relax, the lines can start to be blurred for you and there is no change in environment that can swtich you physicslly and mentally from chillax mode to work mode. There is a lack in cues for you to behave in a certain way because your environment hasn’t changed. You could create these cues for you to switch into work mode very simply, by knowing that as soon as you finish a cup of coffee you’re back to work. Another way is to create a working space on a spare table, or even an office with a spare room in your house if that is something you can facilitate. Just so that when you’re clocking off, you can leave this area and create a boundary between work life and home life.

Becoming distracted is one of the most common issues with working from home, and what is more frustrating is when your colleagues are flying through their work being hyper-productive and you’ve hardly made a call all day. Now you know how to work through these urges to procrastinate and you will be able to recognise it and address it moving forward. You will truly flourish working from home. 

We recently conducted a survey about how people are finding it working from home, check out our results.

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