How to Get Your Best Work Done While at Home

8 productivity tips for freelancers and WFH warriors.

I’ve been working as a freelancer for about 25 years. While there have been up and downs, it’s a decision I’ve never regretted. Still, there were challenges to overcome. One of the biggest was how to maintain productivity.

Even though freelancing and, to a certain extent, working from home offers a tremendous amount of flexibility, nurturing the discipline can be a hurdle for many.

Whether you’re working from home as a freelancer or a remote employee and want to make the best use of your time, these productivity tips may be what you’re looking for.

1. Set a regular schedule.

While flexibility is often one of the main selling points of freelancing, setting a schedule makes it easier to establish good work habits and a steady routine. After a few weeks, you’ll come to love having a set of regular hours. You’ll find it easier to plan non-work tasks, and you’ll be able to your work projects more efficient.

If you’re a remote employee working regular hours — ideally similar to those of your employer’s office hours — you can better coordinate with co-workers and clients.

Finally, setting a regular schedule makes it easier to track your hours. That may be helpful when it comes time to bill a client.

2. Have a separate work area.

Or, as best a separate area as you can manage. Everyone’s living situation is different. For many years, I had a large basement office all to myself. A flooding incident forced me to move, and the recovered area is now used for storage. I had a spare room for a little while. Now it’s my son’s room. These days, I occupy a small corner of the living room, away from the TV, where I have a laptop, lap desk, file folders, and side table. It’s… cozy. And because my set hours are primarily at night after everyone else has gone to bed, I manage to be reliably productive.

Your experience may vary. The idea is to have a spot you can call your own — independent of family members or roommates — where you can work with little-to-no distractions. Lighting should be good — especially if you need to take part in videoconferencing — and free of clutter.

Clutter is a distraction. So is a television. A radio might be okay. See what works for you.

If you work in a field with security concerns such as healthcare or finance, make sure to follow sensible security measures and keep your files locked away when not in use.

3. Have an action list.

Most people call this the to-do list. I like “action list” because when I list each task I need to do, I start with an action verb such as write, collect, contact, render, etc. For me, it makes my tasks more immediate and on-point.

My action list is vital to my staying productive. It’s easy to lose track of things — especially if you’re working on several projects at once. While there are many outstanding project and time management apps out there, I’ve yet to find anything that works as well for me as a simple notebook.

4. Set your phone firmly aside.

Distraction, distraction, distraction. That’s what my phone represents to me.

I don’t need to talk to people to get my work done. E-mail and Slack work well enough. I use my phone more for reading books, news, and social media. These are all activities better saved for later. I’ll even go so far as to turn my phone off entirely, so I’m not distracted by the buzzing or chiming of incoming notifications.

Of course, your job may require frequent phone use. Try to use it just for work calls. Turn off social media notifications. Uninstall YouTube and TikTok if they’re too hard to resist.

You can do this.

5. Work on what you want to.

This may seem a little counter-intuitive, but if you’re feeling like you’re not being productive enough, switch gears and switch to a task more in line with your mood. I understand remote workers may have less flexibility than freelancers when making this decision, so use your judgment.

The idea is to keep forward momentum. If a task is not motivating you enough and you find yourself more and more distracted, try switching to another item on your action list for a while.

6. Dress for the job.

This one took me a little by surprise back when I first started freelancing. Like many, I pictured days working in my robe in slippers, so that’s what I did.

Big mistake.

I don’t know the science or anything behind it, but dressing down like that — being too casual — really hurt my productivity. Once I switched back to proper clothes and, get this, proper shoes, my productivity vastly improved immediately.

If you’re going to be a professional, dress like it.

Dress for the job you have. It makes a difference.

7. Focus on work, not chores.

When you come right down to it, much of this advice concerns hardening yourself against distractions. Household chores count as that, whether it’s laundry, grocery shopping, vacuuming, or whatever. Chores have their own time just as they would if you had to leave the house every day for a conventional job.

If you’ve scheduled a mid-day break of an hour or two, you can do chores then. Or you can do them later in the afternoon when you’ve knocked off for the day. I do most of mine early in the morning after I’ve finished for the night, but before anyone else gets up. Louder household chores like vacuuming or jack-hammering get done in the afternoon when my wife (who works from home) finishes her day.

8. Be kind to yourself.

Go ahead and take a break now and then if you feel you need to. Burnout is a real thing for both freelancers and remote employees. Get some facetime with friends or family. Walk the dog. Go outside for a few minutes.

Take a break.

Then get back to it.

Over time, you’ll get to know yourself better as someone who has built the discipline for remaining productive while working from home, and you’ll know when it’s time to take a break and when it’s not.

We’re often our own most demanding boss. We can ease up a little.

Patience and practice.

Maintaining productivity while working from home is a readily attainable goal. Be patient, and keep at it. This gets easier over time. It didn’t take me 25 years. It didn’t even take 25 weeks.

But the practice has served me reliably for my entire freelance career.

Thank you for reading. I’d love to share more with you via my Bi-Weekly Word Roundup newsletter sent to subscribers every other Sunday. It will feature news, productivity tips, life hacks, and links to top stories making the rounds on the Internet. You can unsubscribe at any time.