Hey, everyone. It’s Pat, coming to you live from Western Canada today. I’m on the road, and I am working from a friend’s home office. I want to cover a topic today that I have heard and come to realize, after many years of working from a home office myself, that is timely and relevant, and actually, it’s an issue that’s a challenge for many of you. So I want to cover three of my productivity tips, my success habits. I’m going to share them with those of you who also have a home office, who even on my client group call the other day, we were talking about this, the fact that summer has come to an end and during the summer months in North America, we develop different habits and different work routines.

Many of you deal with children who are out of school. Some of you have aging parents who live with you. Some of you have spouses or partners who might have retired, and so they’re into a whole new routine and regimen. So with all of these issues, and I always attach the mindset part to this, because it all comes down to mindset, we too can get into, let’s say, a laid back style of work from home during the summer months, and part of that mindset is, perhaps, putting goal-setting aside, putting our regular schedule aside. I’m talking daily work hours and so on.

For all those reasons, and all of those comments and conversations that I’ve been having and hearing, I wanted to address this issue today. I want to help you, those of you who are entrepreneurs working from a home office, to increase your productivity, get back in the game, feel as though you are back in the work world and serving people, and giving it your best shot. So I want to give you my three best things. And of course, the first thing is around self-care, and that starts in the mind as well. Self-care needs to be number one.

So how do we relate that and integrate that into working from home? Here are a few of my tips with the focus on self-care. Number one is start your day in a healthy way. So for me, what that means is at the start of my day I focus on me. I’m not one that starts my day by looking at my phone and checking email or scrolling through social media.

My day starts with hydration, meditation, exercise, a solid nutritional breakfast, some time to ground me, and then I come to my work space, and my work space is also set up for self care. I do use my phone, my timer, because I work in 15-minute increments, and the reason I do that is, first of all, it keeps me focused and fresh on the work that I’m doing. It also reminds me, on the timer, to get up and move around. Move around, keep my body going, because otherwise, I can get very focused on something and end up with a stiff neck from working on the computer. Just getting stiff in general.

I want to get away from the computer. I will go to a different room, I’ll spend five minutes of meditation, I’ll step out on the balcony and breathe, I’ll refresh my water. I make sure I hydrate constantly throughout the day. And for sure, as part of the self-care component, I take a proper lunch break when I’m working from my home office. Now that might be 20 minutes one day. It might be an hour another day, depending on my schedule. So where there’s an hour, I’ll have my protein shake at lunch and then I’ll go for a walk. So even a 10-minute walk makes a huge difference when it comes to focus, energy, and grounding yourself.

Those are some of my self-care tips. Now, the other piece around the self-care is I make sure that my environment is set up for success, and what that means is there are only healthy, nutritious foods in my home. So when I get those moments, you know what I’m talking about, where you feel perhaps that you need and want to get away from your desk, and you go what I call “grazing the cupboards,” I make sure that as I’m grazing, it’s appropriate foods that support my health and wellness goals. Because here’s the thing, health is my wealth. It is. When I don’t have my health, I am not a happy, productive, effective business owner. I’m not. And so it’s important and critical for me to stay hydrated, to stay grounded, to stay focused, to stay rested. All of those things. So that’s the self-care piece. Make sure you take care of you first when you’re working from home.

Another piece around that is show up as your best self, which means you’re not working in your pajamas. Get dressed for the job, do your hair, put some lipstick on, get dressed appropriately. For the men who might be listening to this, same thing holds true for you. Put on the proper business attire, because that does affect your mindset and your way of thinking. So that’s the self-care part of it.

The second part around my success habits and increasing my productivity when working from home is to act like an employee or somebody who’s going to the job, because it is part of the job. So set office hours. In the summer, perhaps again, that was laid back, and it was for me too. If it was a beautiful day, I was not staying inside. I was out of here. So set office hours. That, for me, means 8:30 to 5:30 on a typical workday, and so set office hours. The second part of success around that, for those of you who might have others in the home environment during the day, it’s important and critical for you and for them that you communicate your office hours to them. So set the hours, communicate that to them, and then get on with the job and stay focused. Stay in your office, keep your face and nose down, and get your work done.

Now some of you might have younger children at home, and one thing I learned from one of my very first coaches, and this was relevant to many people – not to me, I didn’t have little ones at home – but a technique that she used for the younger children, she would take a piece of just blank paper, like this, and where she might be on a series of phone calls, she would put an unhappy smiley face on the paper and put it on the door, and close the office door. So if the little ones came to the door, they knew and understood, if it was after school, even during the day, that you were on the phone, and you were not to open the door and come in. The minute that shifted and she was off the phone, and was somewhat available and accessible, she flipped that over to the happy face, which meant I’m available, so if you need me, come on in.

So a few little tips like that, but set your office hours. Communicate the office hours. Now, you need to be responsible and stick with that. If you set the office hours and then you’re found roaming the house or doing laundry or something throughout the day, that’s on you. You need to be consistent and professional with respect to that. Show up dressed as professional. Set those office hours.

The third piece I want to add around that is if you want to increase your productivity, stay off social media. Stay off social media throughout the day. You don’t need to know what’s going on in the world every 10 minutes or 15 minutes. For me, I go on social media three times a day. I handle email three times a day. I’m not a heart surgeon. It’s not like people need me immediately. It’s not that critically important to get me. So three times a day, morning, noon, and end of day, I go onto social media, the platforms that are relevant for me, and I’m in there for 15 minutes. I’m in a number of groups, I host a number of groups, I show up every day, I participate, I’m engaged, I comment. And that’s just a little side note. Don’t just be scrolling through. Don’t be a lurker. If you’re committed and when you’re committed to certain groups, pages, for your own, then get in there as your full self. Comment, share, support, and so on. And so 15 minutes, I put on the timer. If I haven’t finished what I wanted or needed to do and the timer rings, I’m done. I’m out of there and back to my work.

It’s the same with email. I handle my email three times a day, and that would be from 9:00 to 9:30, 1:00 to 1:30, and 5:30 to 6:00. That’s it, I’m done, and you get very proficient at handling email when, again, you put on the timer and you go in there with clear intent. Handle the stuff that needs to be handled and then move on.

That comes to another point in your productivity. When you’re working from a home office, you need to set those boundaries. For me, I’m typically done between 5:30-6:00. I shut down. I close the office door. I transition into life, and I go and live my life. That might mean going for a bicycle ride, it might mean just going down to the exercise room, but there’s a transition period that takes me away from work. Now, for many who work at home, it’s very easy to have your work leak into your home life. Often it’s because you’re carrying your phone around, and you have your email on your phone and everything else. You’ve going to stop that. It’s not that important. What is important is taking care of yourself, taking care of your relationships, maintaining your friendships, also recharging.

The battery in your phone goes dead or gets low often, especially with overuse, and so you charge it, right? You need to do that for yourself, and then you become much more fun to live with, much more effective with your work, and much more productive. So start developing some solid habits when it comes to social media and your work. Keep work at work, and then close the door and get on out into life, and recharge, rest, refocus. Go have some fun for crying out loud. Many of you just aren’t fun to be around anymore, and so that’s another key piece.

My productivity habits are really very basic. They’re very simple. I know that there’s a lot of other ways and other things that you can add to your daily regimen and routine to increase your productivity, but for me, it’s taking care of me first, it’s focusing on the fact that work is work, and when I’m there, I’m fully focused. I’m not running off to the grocery store. I’m not doing laundry and so on. I’m not in and out. I’m in for the duration. I’m dressed like I’m in and I bring my full self, and then thirdly is do not let the business leak into your personal life. Again, a lot of it comes down to communication. That needs to be with your family. It needs to be with your children, your aging parents, with your clients, your team, and then it’s up to you to be consistent and be the professional that you know you are.

Implement some of these tips, leave comments below, let me know what you think, which ones you’re going to grab and run with, and implement. Let me know the results. But please also hit the share button because there are many others out there who aren’t with me live right now, but who certainly would benefit from this. So let’s share the news, let’s share the tips, and let’s watch productivity increase because the end result is business will get better, but business only gets better when you get better. So take care of you. All right, got to run because my work here is done.

Thanks for joining me. Bye, everyone.