This isn’t about the Apple Watch, so don’t start sighing just yet.
When I started at MartianCraft I did so figuring that working from home wouldn’t be a big shift for me. Most of the time I worked one day a week from home already and I felt confident it would be similar. As it turns out — working from home full-time has a lot of little quirks I didn’t know about.
One of those is often talked about: learning that it is time to work and finding a way to tell yourself it is work time. A lot of articles will tell you that you should set hours, or have a dedicated space, or get dressed in work clothes. I’ve done most of those, but something didn’t click as I still found it hard to tell my body and mind that it’s work time.
Some of the benefits of working from home are:
- Setting your own hours
- Wearing whatever you want
- Working wherever you want (not just from home)
I found that dressing nicely for work everyday is a nice thought, but some days I just don’t want to, and why should I have to?
Somedays I need or want to start late, why should I have to stick to a schedule? Somedays
I want to work from a library or a coffee shop sometimes, not this dedicated work area.
What all these articles were telling me was the same thing: find something that tells you now is time to work. What I had to do is find something that didn’t detract from benefits of working from home.
For me that is a watch.
I rarely put on a watch until I leave the house, until I headed to work, and rarely did I leave without one. So I started putting on a watch every morning when I was ready to start work.
This seems to get me immediately into the work mode. It’s the trigger that tells me it is time to work, time to focus. Just like all the other tips that those articles espouse.
A watch.
For you it doesn’t have to be watch. It could be a wallet in your pocket, keys, pocket knife, or anything else that is something you wouldn’t normally have on you if you were just lounging about your home. Something that doesn’t detract from the benefits of working remotely, but still gets the job done.
So every morning when I am ready to work, I put on a watch.
Of course with the Apple Watch, that might have to change as I will be more prone to use the Apple Watch everyday even on weekends, but we will have to see about that.