Some day I am going to write a piece titled, “Waitressing in the Time of COVID,” because during the pandemic that’s what I was doing.
I had the sort of job where you either reported to work OR you didn’t work at all because the place where you had been working had been ordered to close.
The restaurant where I worked did shut down briefly. But I live in the state of Georgia and just over a month after our governor ordered restaurants closed, he allowed them to reopen. (Restaurants were, in fact, some of the first Georgia businesses allowed to reopen along with fitness centers, bowling alleys, tattoo parlors, massage parlors, hair and nail salons, and theaters … you know, the essential stuff.)
So me? I spent the pandemic asking socially-distanced, mask-wearing restaurant patrons what they wanted to eat. I didn’t start working from home until 2023, well after the height of COVID.
But for many employees (and companies) COVID provided them with their first remote work experience. While working from home wasn’t new, the pandemic caused an abrupt and sizable uptick in the number of people trading in their company offices for home offices. This massive shift brought new awareness of and interest in working remotely and sparked headlines heralding the shift to remote work as one of the most significant changes in the labor market in recent years.
And then the pandemic subsided.
By 2021 companies were beginning to require employees to return to the office (RTO). Corporate leaders cited improving revenue, corporate culture, and worker productivity as reasons for RTO mandates. Throughout 2022 and 2023, the RTO trend continued. The remote work experiment had failed!
At least in the eyes of employers. But not in the eyes of employees many of whom, having relished their WFH experience, returned to the office with great reluctance … some under the threat of termination. Workers resistant to giving up working from home were branded “lazy” and “selfish” and even blamed by some for the sluggish recovery of the global economy.
Today, claims that RTO-reluctance slowed economic recovery have been widely refuted. But assessments of remote worker productivity remain mixed. Some studies find remote workers to be more productive. Others less.
The psychology of working from home is complex. You may feel isolated without the buzz of colleagues around you. And while, on the one hand, the colleague that liked to lean into your office for a chat is no longer a distraction, on the other hand, the absence of social cues from coworkers can affect your momentum. Procrastination can loom larger when you’re your own supervisor and the lack of a structured environment can decrease motivation.
I know I can sometimes be “unmotivated” and, now that I do work from home (and especially because I work for myself), I have more opportunity to give in when apathy strikes.
I also know it’s possible to be “lazy” at the office. I once had a coworker who used to take clandestine naps under her desk in the middle of the work day EVERY DAY.
The thing is, a lot of us want to work from home, whether for ourselves or as the remote employee of a company.
A 2024 USA Today survey of "remote working trends in the U.S." found that of the 1000 office workers polled:
• 58 percent would like to work from home at least three days per week
• 36 percent wanted to work remotely full-time
• 42 percent would take a 10 percent pay cut to be able to work remotely
• 84 percent would not consider a job that offered no remote working days
And the reason we most often give? Better work-life balance.
Work-life balance suggests a state of equilibrium between work and personal life, each of which can impinge on and adversely affect the other. Working from home can improve work-life balance by allowing for greater flexibility in your schedule, eliminating time-sucks like a daily commute, and reducing stressors like obtaining child care (if you are a parent).
On the other hand, working from home introduces new work-life balance challenges. The need to place robust if somewhat arbitrary boundaries between your work life and your personal life. The need to establish a daily work routine outside the office. The need to manage your time autonomously and effectively.
You may not be lazy.
You may have all the incentive in the world to be productive.
And working from home can improve work-life balance …
… but it won’t do so automatically.
Working from home IS DIFFERENT than working in an office and your old office routine may not fit your new WFH lifestyle. When working from home, you need to make sure you have right strategies in place for staying focused and avoiding procrastination.
Staying focused and avoiding procrastination when working from home.
How to stay focused when working from home
• Create a productive work environment
• More tips for maintaining focus
How to stop procrastinating when working from home
• Time-management techniques to combat procrastination
• More tips for avoiding procrastination
How to Stay Focused When Working from Home
The Glossary of Psychology defines focus as follows: “In psychology, ‘focus’ refers to the ability to direct and maintain one’s attention or concentration on a particular task, activity, or stimulus” ignoring irrelevant information, distractions, and challenges.
Remote workers struggle with different distractions than office workers – house mates, household chores, the pull of domestic life – but distractions are everywhere at home.
Being intentional about the setup of your home office is a good place to start when it comes to minimizing distractions and maintaining focus.
Create a Productive Work Environment
Create a productive work environment by designating an area exclusively for work. This signals your brain that it’s time for business, not leisure. Physical boundaries play a huge role. If a separate room isn’t feasible, even a distinct zone in a quiet corner can make a difference. Consistency is key; work in the same spot every day or, at least, the same spot for a given task.
Comfort is also essential to focus. Have you tried staying focused when you’re not comfortable? Plus, an uncomfortable chair or desk may not just distract you. It may cause long-term health issues.
Consider investing in ergonomic furniture such as an ergonomic chair or a height-adjustable desk. Ergonomics is a marketing buzzword and ergonomic furniture and equipment may sound like something that only a big corporation can afford, but ergonomics simply means designing spaces and tools to promote productivity, health, and comfort. Keep the fundamentals of ergonomics in mind and invest in what makes YOU comfortable and keeps YOU healthy … and focused.
In addition to creating a designated and comfortable area, here are a couple more things that contribute to a productive work environment.
Proper lighting. Lighting is a factor often overlooked. Natural light boosts mood and energy levels, so set your desk near a window if possible. If that’s not an option, ensure ample, bright lighting to ward off eyestrain and fatigue.
The right technology. Technology can be your ally. Use productivity apps for task management and time-tracking. Block distracting websites during work hours. Embrace noise-cancelling headphones if a quiet environment is out of reach.
A touch of the personal. Personalize your space in a way that promotes focus. This might be a plant, a picture, or a motivational quote. Keep it professional and clutter-free, as visual noise can turn into mental noise.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Human Resources Center offers 14 ideas for staying focused during the workday, including "Keep quotes or poems on your desk that make you feel good."
More Tips for Maintaining Focus
Establish boundaries. Make it clear when you are working. Put a sign on the door and make sure you have lovingly explained to your housemates the importance of respecting it. You also need to respect your own work boundaries. If you are meant to be working – work. Don’t get up and wander around the house to see what others are doing.
Not all boundary breakers are physical. Some are mental and emotional. Anxiety and stress make concentrating difficult. I have found that, much as I might wish, worrying about something seldom resolves it. On the other hand, trying to silence a worry can result in it being more persistent. Use time-management techniques to put boundaries between work and worry. Work with focus for 25 minutes and then allow yourself a 5 minute worry break – go for a quick walk and think freely about your troubles. Write them down. Then get back to work knowing that in another 25 minutes you can think about them again, if you wish.
Write down what you plan to do tomorrow. Before you end your workday, write down what you plan to do tomorrow. Deciding the night before will help you know exactly where to start the following day.
My ability to focus wears down over the course of my workday. But usually even when I no longer have the mental energy to complete a task, I know what I want to accomplish next. So before I knock off work, I write this down. Sometimes I’ll even carry my notes around in case other ideas come to me. The next morning begins productively, without my wasting time trying to figure out where I should start.
Practice a time-management technique. The 25 minutes of focused work I mentioned above are a nod to Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Technique. The Pomodoro Technique (and other time-management techniques) are typically thought of as methods for increasing productivity. Productivity – a measure of performance that compares work input to work output – is built on time management and focus.
Perhaps a rare few who have devoted their lives to meditation can focus for eight hours straight, but for most of us, that’s impossible. However, most of us can develop the ability to focus intently over smaller intervals of time, say 25 minutes. So doing, we improve our ability to produce high-quality work at regular intervals.
Take breaks. Athletes know that rest is essential to training. By alternating physical exertion with intervals of rest and recovery, athletes grow stronger and improve their athletic performance.
The same principal applies to your work. Taking regular, intentional breaks allows you to return to your work refreshed and refocused, perhaps even with new perspective or insight.
How to Stop Procrastinating When Working from Home
The Elsevier Reference Collection in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology defines procrastination as “knowing one needs to perform a task, but not motivating oneself to do it within a defined amount of time” noting that procrastination negatively correlates with “intrinsic motivation” and “confident feelings of control over one’s life.”
Procrastination reinforces negative feelings about the task at hand … and yourself. The mental burden of putting off a task can induce depression, guilt, and anxiety. Now the task seems even less doable. You fear failure. You have lost control of your time. Your workday drags out, but you don’t accomplish much; you sit at your desk out of guilt. When you finally do end your workday, the nagging thought of unfinished work invades your personal life.
You’ve saved all this time by not commuting and, uhm, possibly not showering. Do you really want to give it all back to procrastination? Or would you rather give it to dinner and a movie with your family?
The latter, please.
Working from home means learning to manage your time. Effective time-management techniques will not only improve your efficiency and productivity, they will also help you maintain a good work-life balance, the reason you want to work from home in the first place.
For a thorough discussion of time management and working from home, please see my article, “Time Management And Working From Home.” For now, here are a few time-management techniques to combat procrastination.
Time-Management Techniques to Combat Procrastination
Procrastination – postponing what we need to do – is generally more about starting work than doing work, explains James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones.
One good strategy for combatting procrastination is to make tasks more achievable, Clear writes. Break tasks down. Smaller tasks seem easier and are therefore easier to start and enjoying a sense of accomplishment at frequent intervals will help you maintain momentum.
Here again you may recognize the Pomodoro Technique. (I can’t say who influenced who, though I doubt Clear influenced Cirillo as the latter predates the former by decades. That said, there is considerable cross-pollination in productivity literature and both authors may be independently drawing from common sources.)
Cirillo, then a college student, describes facing the first chapter of a sociology book he needed to read in preparation for an upcoming exam. In the preface to his book The Pomodoro Technique: The Acclaimed Time-Management System That Has Transformed How We Work, Cirillo writes:
My mind had been drifting from one direction to another like a small boat at the mercy of a storm. “I need to pass the exam. I have three books to study. There’s not much time until the exam. I’ll never make it. I can’t focus. I’m always getting distracted. Maybe I should stop studying and postpone the exam. Maybe I should stop studying and do something else.”
To combat these feelings, which could easily have contributed to procrastination …
Maybe I should stop studying and postpone the exam.
… and were likely also spawned from a certain amount of procrastination …
I found myself in a slump, a time of low productivity and high confusion. Every day I went to school, attended classes, and returned home with the disheartening feeling that I didn’t know what I’d been doing, that I’d been wasting my time. The exam dates came up so fast ….
… Cirillo set himself the challenge of studying – really studying – for ten minutes. He didn’t give himself a date on the calendar to be finished with his sociology text or even an hour by which to finish one chapter. Instead, he set a kitchen timer shaped like an Italian tomato – a pomodoro – for what seemed a doable ten minutes and focused. He didn’t make it ten minutes on his first attempt, but he immediately gained the sense that he could “do it” and the motivation to continue working.
That’s the power of making tasks achievable – it makes them easier to start. And, once started, easier to continue. Momentum naturally overcomes procrastination.
More Tips for Avoiding Procrastination
Time-management techniques may be conceptually simple, but mastering a time-management technique isn’t necessarily easy. I took a shot at the Pomodoro Technique. I read Francesco Cirillo’s book. What I learned both from reading Cirillo’s book and attempting to manage my work in focused, 25-minute time blocks, is that the Pomodoro Technique takes practice. More practice than I was willing to devote at the time.
That’s not to say I won’t give it another go at some point. Even though I have yet to fully apply the Pomodoro Technique, I did get much better at breaking large projects into smaller building blocks and estimating the time each task would take. And that was huge! Cause nothing deflates motivation like setting unrealistic goals. If something is unrealistic … constantly unattainable, why bother doing it?
So check out a couple time-management techniques and see if one suits you. Your bound to learn something valuable and applicable even if you don’t adopt a technique in totality. I give a short list of popular and well-regarded time-management books, including Cirillo’s and Clear’s in “Time Management And Working From Home.“
In the meantime, here are a few more tips for avoiding procrastination from James Clear.
Tie something you love doing to the thing you are putting off. Clear offers as an example, “[G]et a pedicure while processing overdue work emails.”
The idea is to make the long-term rewards of your getting-the-job-done behavior more immediate.
Up the ante on accountability. Writers, for example, often belong to writing groups. Participating in writing groups helps writers remain accountable to their writing goals because real people expect to see their progress on an ongoing basis. (Much like members of a book club expect everyone to have read the book.) This provides a “consequence that happens if you don’t do the behavior right now,” Clear writes.
Use visual cues. If it’s not in you face it’s easy to “lie” to yourself about your progress. Visual cues keep you honest. Visual cues also motivate. “The more visual progress you see, the more motivated you will become to finish the task,” writes Clear.
Clear gives as an example something he calls “the paper clip strategy.” The idea is to have two jars on your desk – one filled with paper clips and one empty. Every time you complete a task relevant to your work move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty jar until all the paper clips are moved. At any given moment you can see the paper clip jars and visualize your progress.
Final Thoughts
Working remotely isn’t anything new. Technology made the anywhere office possible well before the pandemic.
According to Hilary Silver's 2023 paper, "Working from Home: Before and After the Pandemic" approximately 7.3 percent of the U.S. labor force (11 million people) worked from home before the pandemic.
But working remotely is different than working in an office.
Staying focused and avoiding procrastination when working remotely entails adopting strategies suited to the WFH environment. Understanding and practicing these strategies is fundamental to maintaining that good work-life balance that made you want to work from home in the first place.
Any questions? PLEASE send them my way in the comments below. Do you have a book on productivity that you’d like to recommend? Or a favorite time-management technique? PLEASE SHARE your recommendations.