Manage Your Time Working from Home-Part II

Continuing from the last article, Manage Your Time Working from Home, let's talk about 'fragmented time'.

I don't know about you but I tend to find myself working more than I usually do while I am working from home. Not necessarily more past 1700 Hrs (5 pm) but more during work hours, due to the fact of not taking breaks.

One solution for this is referenced in my prior article wherein I talked about 'Focus Booster'.

As hard as you may try you will inevitably end up with chunks of 'fragmented time', or shards of unplanned time. For example, you may find yourself with 15 minutes of unplanned time between video meetings.

Most remote meetings we attend are scheduled based upon someone else's calendar and we have no control over what time it occurs or how long it lasts; we are simply attendees. This can leave you with quite a bit of fragmented time devoted to unproductive busy-work.

As an example, let’s say you have ten or fifteen minutes between meetings. How can you best use this time productively?

• You could manage your email,
• you could create a to-do list of all small tasks that you could do during your next slice of fragmented time, or
• you could work on those reports you haven't gotten to yet.

You can see, many options present themselves when it comes to managing fragmented time. The key is to make the most out of it.

The second thing I promised we look at is...

According to a study, only 2% of people are good multitaskers. That means that 98% of us are not good at it and, in fact, are not really multitasking when we think we are. What we are actually doing is switching from one task to another. What's the difference? Our brains need time to refocus from one activity to another. This results in wasting more time refocusing and not performing as well. In fact, research actually shows that multitasking can reduce productivity by 40%.

Stop multitasking. Instead, try to focus more specifically on individual tasks. Again, prioritize tasks so that you can focus on the ones that need your attention first, then move down the list.

Now enjoy the feeling of accomplishment!

In the next and final article in this series we'll discuss surfing the internet and mindset.

Happy goal-reaching.