Top 5 Work From Home Work Hacks

As a virtual agency, Mearns & Pike has always been work-from-home since its inception, meaning we earned the right to call ourselves experts on the matter long before COVID. As the world begins to go back to normal and people are now more open to working from home permanently, we’re sharing some of our favourite work from home hacks to turn the last two-year novelty into an effective lifestyle for everyone.

DIY Standing desk

I’m sure since being at home we have all developed some bad habits of sitting at our kitchen, dining or bedside table and the thought has occurred to us “maybe I should buy a standing desk?” – unless you’re prepared to spend an eye-watering amount of money you might want to try a few of these DIY tips first, just to check that it really is something you want!

My personal favourite is to stick a dining room chair on a table and put my laptop on it. It lets me stand, exercise and feel like I’m delivering a really important lecture in zoom calls! Win win! Alternatively, if you want a slightly more hygienic option and you’re more of a book worm, stack some books as high as you like on a table and place your ironing board on it. 

Set yourself a schedule

Sure, working from home is convenient, but there’s also a lot of distractions. My workspace is right next to the kitchen, for example. I can practically smell last nights Chinese leftovers from here as I write this. Working from home also means dealing with distractions and you have to be disciplined in working. At the end of every day I spend about 15 to 20 minutes writing out my schedule for the next day, making sure I set myself no more than an hour at a time per project, and if I can, no more than two separate hours per project in a day. What makes this work for me is setting alarms. My phone goes off all and is constantly reminding me to do something. Sure, it sounds annoying so maybe it doesn’t have to be a permanent change, but if it helps you set some good habits, then why not?

Do the hard stuff first

Of course this depends on when you’re most productive but for me I find if I can do the hard stuff that really takes the effort (maybe I need to send a really long email) then I can relax in the afternoon with a slightly easier task (maybe someone needs a video editing or I need to write the bi-monthly blog post…) and it really makes the afternoons a lot easier! There’s nothing worse than knowing you’ve got a really big job waiting for you in the afternoon.

To tie work hack 2 and 3 together, If you’ve spent all morning at your desk doing some really hard emails maybe try and sit on the sofa in the afternoon to do some lighter shorter emails. It might seem like a small change but the slight change in scenery and just the sitting in a different chair can really liven up your day. Thanks to the last work hack you’ll be able to schedule your day so that the easy stuff falls in the afternoon, and the harder stuff in the morning.

Listen to your work

Everyone knows it’s quite difficult to proof-read what a document really says, especially if you’re the one who’s written it. You could send it to a colleague, a friend or your parents (if you want to suddenly find out your dad is a closet professor…). But there is a better way. Microsoft Word has a built-in feature that will read your document aloud, meaning you can just listen to what it says and this way you’ll pick up if something isn’t quite sounding right, or if something is spelled wrong and your spellcheck hasn’t noticed. Working from home means you don’t even need to use earphones!

For those of you without a Microsoft office subscription, you could copy your document into Google Translate and have it speak what you’ve typed.

Write in White

I’m sure you can relate, one of the biggest struggles I have when writing a document is getting all of my ideas on the page. I find that as soon as I’ve written something, I want to go back, change or edit it because I’ve thought of a better way to say it, which makes the whole process a lot longer. Writing in white means you can’t do that and helps to establish a much better state of flow. Since you can’t read what you’ve written you have to trust your instinct and just move onto the next sentence.

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