WORK FROM HOME

How to work from home, especially from a country like Pakistan.

This is a free guide on how to start working from home.

If you are a remote worker, or you need to stay at home for personal reasons, or you want to set yourself up to start your own business while working from home, you need certain systems and behaviors. Let us see what those are (and why working from home can be a blessing) 

 

Work From Home Articles

Articles related to Work From Home from the blog

If you are working from home, you have to understand why you need certain systems that you otherwise would not pay attention to.

Ask any corporate office employee, and they will tell you that “it’s not their job” to worry about things like the office WiFi, nor they pay much attention to the floors being clean everytime they arrive at the office. We may not even notice who opens the office in the morning, and who is really closing down the building, ensuring that all this equipment is safe and secure over the night. 

The reason this is so, is because it is the job of a business to provide this layer of abstraction to you. 

It provides you with this because the business wants you to do what you do, and do it well. For that, you need to have certain amneties and systems already in place. 

For example, Peter Drucker in his seminal book, “The Effective Worker TK” talks about how this layer of abstraction is useful for us:

“Quotation or image from the book”

This begs the question: do you need to do all of this to have a productive home office? 

In a lot of ways, yes. And in some ways, no.

You are already running a household. You may not be happy with how it is running, or you may be looking forward to it. If you are not happy with the way your house is set up and run, this “work from home” decision can actually be a great stepping stone to start “organizing” your workspace first, and then taking that “organization” to the rest of the house.

Productivity Can Increase (if you are careful about it)

There has been a study done TK that tells us why 8 hours that we spend in office, we only really do 2 to 4 hours of actual work. We actually first block off the time, and make ourselves available at the office. And during that time, we sometimes “wait” for the work to show up. Offices are designed so that a group of people get together and at least some of them may want to get the work done, for one reason and incentive or the other. So when one start the chain of prpductivity, it becomes easier to join that bandwagon and get some work done. So in that sense, you wait for work to be handed to you. 

Now, while working from home, you may have a set of jobs you need to do. Then you’re already on your way. You now need to find the time and the place for it within your home.

If you are the one responsible for “giving yourself work”, then yes, it has to be said, that you now have the job of first “playing the CEO” and write down the jobs and tasks that must be done by you. And then you wear the “worker hat” and get to work. 

This breakdown of producitivity is necessary to understand why this can work. You need time to first play the CEO, and then you need time to play the “worker”.

And example of a sales guy working from home can be as follows: 

You first allocate a certain time within the day for office. You already have an office space marked out in your home, where your household knows you must not be disturbed. 

Then once you show up to that work place, you sit down and make a plan for yourself. You write down the tasks you need to accomplish during the day.