The pandemic reality has shown how big a problem it is to find the strength to break away from household chores and work from home. Our brain gets us accustomed to the fact that we work at the office and rest at home. Our attention is often distracted by TV or children bustling around and it turns out that finding motivation to work is currently more difficult than a year ago, when we worked in offices.
However, there are ways to remedy this and better adapt to our new reality.
Plan your day
A good way to motivate ourselves to work and increase our efficiency is a regular schedule of the day. At first, it seemed to us that the freedom and convenience guaranteed by remote work were the best that could happen to us.
The lack of a rigid schedule and regular day cycle at the beginning of work is indeed a lot of convenience. However, this quickly turns out to be a curse for many.
Work at any time or lack of control ends up with postponing tasks all the time, and an irregular lifestyle in the long run only causes us more fatigue and even health problems. Therefore, a good start to increase our motivation is to plan your working day and stick to this plan. Try to get up at regular times as if you were walking into the office, plan by when to do specific tasks and when you can go on break. The schedule is not our enemy. On the contrary, it allows us to maintain good organization and order, and when we are not working in chaos, our motivation to continue working and productivity will increase significantly.
Get ready as if you are going to the office
Not wasting time on morning makeup, spent all day in tracksuits or pajamas and working in bed instead of in the office. No matter how good it still sounds, unfortunately such a style of work is not suitable for many of us. Working at home, which is not adapted to it and so far has served us as a place of relaxation, already disturbs our professional life enough. Staying in places strictly intended for rest and in clothes that our brain also associates with relaxation, can lead to a significant reduction in motivation to work and wasting time procrastinating. So if you work this way and you notice that you are clearly not eager to work, you have problems with concentration and you feel like taking a break after a while, it is worth changing this style. Prepare yourself as if you are going to the office. Change into your casual clothes, get yourself tidy and, if possible, move to work at your desk. As trivial as it may seem, the results will be immediate because our mind will feel ready to work, not rest.
Take advantage of coworking
We already know that our mind needs to be set up and prepared to work in order to increase our motivation. We need organization and control over our working day as well as a change of appearance and surroundings not intended for relaxation. However, not all of this can be achieved at home. Not everyone has a separate space with a workplace in mind, in which we avoid distractions and we do not always perfectly stick to the planned schedule. People also influence our motivation. Being locked at home 24/7 increases the feeling of loneliness, which has a negative effect on our well-being and takes away our energy. In addition, the environment of people focused on work also mobilizes us to work. It is the people who work with us that give us the most energy.Therefore, coworking is a solution worth considering.
When using a coworking space, you still have freedom, because you choose what time you want to work and how much time. You also choose whether it should be a one-time alternative to working from home, a place where you turn up once a week for balance and mindset reset, or your permanent workplace. You can still decide for yourself but also work in a professional office space.
You leave the house as if you were going to the office, with the difference that you will meet specialists from various fields and companies. Mutual commitment focused on working in a professional environment that aims to help you focus, not distract you, arriving at the office in a comfortable but still original form – all this makes us positive.
For both freelancers and remote workers, such a change in the environment can help them find great motivation and, as a result, increase work efficiency.
Best of all, it takes nothing to try out this style of work. At IdeaPlace, you can work from an office in the very center of Wrocław using a free test day.
The right attitude is the key to success
Work efficiency depends on our attitude. Nevertheless, they are already influenced by many factors. In order for our mind to be motivated to work, we need an appropriate environment, organization and also that our body goes in harmony with it.
Thanks to working with other people, we work faster and more pleasantly. By planning and controlling our day, we can more easily resist procrastination, and by separating what has so far been associated with rest with our responsibilities, we gain strength and motivation to act. Therefore, it is worth not to give in to full comfort, and instead focus on order and an environment adapted to work. Harmony of mind is the key to motivation.
Jutta Hutsch-Kasprzyk
Jutta Hutsch-Kasprzyk is an experienced Chief Operation Officer who has focused on optimizing business processes and reducing operational costs throughout her career. She is a talented negotiator, building strong relationships with key contractors and customers. Her skills in managing company affairs, organizing team work, and developing strategies have contributed to the success of IdeaPlace on the business map of Wrocław.