Sitting you in PJs with a coffee in your hand ready to tackle the tasks and avoid distractions, and there comes a notification, “I’ll just check it for a second” I have heard this term millions of times but have rarely seen it happen. Work from home distractions aren’t just limited to notifications; your kids, chores, responsibilities, desires, and everything else in the world seem to demand your attention the moment you try to focus and work remotely from the comfort of your home.
If you are also having trouble focusing on work while working remotely, then you are not alone, approximately 80% of remote employees find themselves distracted by children, partners, pets, and other factors that typically don’t pose a problem in a traditional office environment.
In this blog, I will tell you some common work challenges everyone faces, how to get rid of distractions while working from home, and some techniques to avoid these and focus on your work better.
Common Remote Work Distractions and Ways to Tackle
Mixing personal and professional life causes blurred boundaries, increased stress, and difficulty maintaining a healthy work-life balance, which can ultimately lead to burnout and decreased productivity.
Almost 53% of employees believe, that balancing work and personal responsibilities is more challenging while working remotely.
1. Household Chores
Many remote workers get reminded of household chores like laundry, dishes, or tidying up their home during their work hours. These are some most common distractions that are often neglected and are successful in making you step away from your desk and procrastinate.
Ways to Tackle It:
- Schedule Chore-Time: You can avoid distractions while working from home by allocating specific time slots during the day for household tasks, choose either before or after work or during scheduled breaks.
- Stick to Work Hours: You can also do this: think of yourself as you are working in the office. So that you can avoid doing household tasks unless absolutely necessary.
- Outsource Whenever Possible: If you feel some of your household tasks like cleaning the yard are overwhelming to complete all by yourself, then consider taking help or outsourcing or delegating them to others and free up your focus for work and avoid distractions.
2. Social Media and Entertainment
One of the strongest distractions for all work-from-home workers is their mobile. Most of the time we don’t even know why we unlocked our mobiles and when we started scrolling social media. “Just a few minutes” will never be a few minutes but definitely a few hours.
Ways to Tackle It:
- Use Website Blockers: There are hundreds of tools in the market for you to block distracting websites during work hours. You can also suggest these tools to your employees so that they can avoid distractions, stay focused, and be productive as well.
- Tools: Freedom, StayFocusd, and Cold Turkey
- Set Time Limits: Use the time allocation methods to assign specific times in your day for social media or entertainment breaks and use apps or tools to track your activity.
- Turn Off Notifications: If you don’t hear your mobile notification every other second then you will be less distracted from work. So, turn off unimportant notifications on your mobile and computer by visiting settings and then notifications.
3. Family and Friends
Your family or friends might assume that since you are at home, you are always free and available for conversations or any help, leading them to interrupt you frequently.
Ways to Tackle It:
- Set Clear Boundaries: Communication is always key, be it personal life or professional. Make sure you clearly communicate with your family and friends about your work hours and set boundaries to avoid distractions.
- Create a Visual Signal: Try communicating through visual signals so that they understand not to disturb you while working. You can use the “Do Not Disturb” sign to let them know you are busy or wear noise-canceling headphones to maintain focus in a noisy home environment.
- Schedule Breaks with Family: Family time is more important than you think, build stronger connections that boost your emotional health by forming memories to stick in your life, and leave you happier, and more balanced, plan your day to give a dedicated time slot during the day so your family will know when to catch your attention.
4. Pets
No doubt pets can be comforting, but while working from home they are a real distraction. A dog may really want a walk or attention while you’re working. You have a cat that wants to jump on your keyboard while you work.
Ways to Tackle:
- Pre-Work Pet Grooming: Engage with your pets before heading to work. It will keep them busy for some time and lower their chances of disturbing you at peak working hours so that you avoid unnecessary distractions.
- Set some boundaries on your workspace: You can limit the amount of time pets get to spend in the workspace, or even work from a separate room in case you have someone who will oversee your pets because they feel left out if there is no one around them.
- Keep Them Occupied: Engage your pets with toys or activities so that they are occupied and away from your workplace.
Here are some suggestions from our side:
- Use puzzle feeders
- Hide treats around your house so that your pets can go on a fun scavenger hunt.
- Set up a window perch so that your pets can watch outside activities such as birds, squirrels or passing cars. (Adding a bird feeder will surely add more fun)
- Get them a companion so that they can play together
- Create a cozy space near your work area with a comfortable bed or blanket so that your pets can feel close to you.
5. Unscheduled Visitors and Deliveries
A ringing doorbell to collect a delivery package or a neighbor calling by to chat with you for a few minutes will easily snap you out of your concentration and destroy your workflow, taking longer to get into the right focus again.
Ways to tackle:
- Inform Neighbors: Avoid distractions by reporting your working hours to your neighbors so they won’t bother visiting you during working hours.
- Delivery Alerts: Give delivery alerts and schedule off-peak work hours when possible.
- Intercom or smart doorbell: Use devices such as video doorbells that might enable you to manage your visitors without necessarily getting out of the workspace.
6. Noise
Noise from construction, neighbors, or kids playing will continue to divert your mind in a shared accommodation. This constant distraction can make it challenging to focus on your work, leading to decreased productivity and frustration.
Ways to tackle:
- Make use of noise-canceling headphones: Avoid distractions by buying good quality noise-canceling headphones to effectively make the background noise void and to create a work-focused workspace environment.
- White Noise or Ambient Sounds: Noisli or SimplyNoise are apps that provide white noise or soothing background sounds to avoid distractions.
- Quiet Work Hours: If you have full control over your schedule, then you can move the noise level as it will be easy to get to work during some quiet periods.
7. Multitasking Temptation
One obligation of remote work is juggling multiple tasks at once—like sending emails, sitting in meetings, and taking care of family responsibilities. This often leaves you feeling overwhelmed and makes it tough to focus on what really needs your attention.
Ways to deal with it:
- Apply time blocking: Instead of doing multiple things at once, apply the strategy of time blocking to schedule a specific time to do all things.
- Prioritizing: Have a ‘to-do’ list for each day and prioritize the activities according to importance so that you do not flip-flop between too many things in one go and avoid distractions effectively.
- Track Your Tasks: Use apps such as Trello or Todoist in order to track your tasks to avoid doing more than one task at a time.
8. Procrastination
Procrastination is a major challenge of remote work. Without an office environment to hold you accountable, it’s easy to delay important tasks. This lack of structure often leads to missed deadlines, and sometimes even growing stress through piling up work.
Ways to Tackle:
- Break Big Tasks into Smaller Pieces: Large tasks can feel overwhelming and lead to procrastination. Divide them into smaller, manageable parts.
- Set Personal Deadlines: Create your own deadlines even if the “official” ones are flexible to keep yourself challenged while doing the process.
- Use the Pomodoro Technique: Work for 25 minutes in focus and then take a break for 5 minutes. This will keep your productivity levels high and avoid distractions.
9. Lack of a Dedicated Workspace
The more you work from your bed or couch, the worse things get because we associate such places as being comfortable and rest paradises. Over time, it can also blur the boundaries between work and rest, making it harder to unwind after hours. A dedicated workspace really helps avoid distractions by redefining a clear distinction between work and relaxation.
Ways to tackle:
- Designate a workplace: Even if you cannot have a whole home office in the house, dedicate a section of your home to a desk or table for working purposes.
- Ergonomic Setup: Your workspace should be properly equipped to avoid physical discomfort. The chair and the desk should be well positioned without any form of discomfort that might arise from poor posture, time consumed in fidgeting, or unnecessary stress.
- Keep work out of relaxation spaces: Avoid distractions by not working from your bed or from your couch. This helps keep such spaces free from conflict between work and play or simply the removal of a feeling of confinement.
Create a professional work from home setup with our top essentials
10. Urge to Shop Online
Accessibility to online shopping websites has become very easy, and the temptation to browse around for deals or to buy something online might be too enticing for a worker to resist during work hours. The shopping sites attract people by giving tempting limited-time offers that are like a cherry on top of the cake, which makes your employees browse extensively even during work hours to find the perfect product with a perfect deal.
Ways to tackle:
- Block Shopping Sites: Implement a browser extension called StayFocusd to block online shopping sites during work hours.
- Wishlist: If you find yourself shopping online, add items to the wish list and come back to it later, instead of buying at work.
- Limit Browsing Time: Allocate a certain time of the day for browsing, such as when you take a break or right after work is over so you don’t disturb other times of productivity.
Enhance Focus and Minimize Distractions with Time Champ
Implementing tips to minimize your remote employee distractions is a good idea but tracking the progress and measuring their productivity is a game changer.
If you are looking for software that helps track employee activities and measure their productivity then you are at the right place, Time Champ helps you track your remote employee activities during work hours, measures their productivity, and provides you with insights into their performance.
By using Time Champ, employees can track how time passes. You can ensure they don’t get distracted by configuring idle time alerts (pop-ups) for every few minutes, reducing the likelihood of wasted time and helping them complete tasks within the allocated time.
You can also track the time your employees spend on tasks, and you even get to see the productive levels of your in-office and remote employees no matter where they work.
You can categorize apps as non-productive based on your employee job role. Whenever employees visit such websites, their activities are captured and listed under non-productive usage. You can also see the URLs they access and how long they used every single application.
Methods to Focus on Work and Avoid Distractions
Avoiding distractions and focusing on work can be tricky at first, here I have mentioned some of the techniques to help you get started.
Use Pomodoro Technique
If you can’t focus on a task and distractions always make their way towards you then try the Pomodoro technique. You just need to set a timer (you can get Pomodoro timers manually or make use of some websites and apps that provide Pomodoro timers for free) and work for 25 minutes, do not think of anything even if you get distractive thoughts, save them for later. After completing the 25 minutes take a break for 5 minutes.
Take a walk, have a coffee, or let your distractions take over you for the next 5 minutes and get back to your work immediately. This helps you avoid distractions during work time while addressing them during break times.
Use Time Allocation and Limit Multitasking
If you struggle to work on a single task at a time and always end up multitasking then, try the time allocation method. In this method, you make little chunks of your time depending on your schedule and assign a task for each time block. Assigning won’t be the end here, you need to only focus on the dedicated task for the entire time block without shifting focus to other tasks.
You can also use timeboxing, which is completing a task within the dedicated timeframe.
Here are some steps to follow the time boxing:
- Set a Time Limit: Decide the time limit for each task (e.g., 30 minutes, or 1 hour) to focus on a task.
- Work Within the Box: Only focus on the task and eliminate all other thoughts not related to the task.
- Stop When Time’s Up: When the time allocated is over, stop working on the task, even if it is not done. You can check progress and decide if more time is needed or if it’s time to move on to the next step.
- Evaluate: After the time box, assess what was achieved and if another time box is required to continue or finish the task.
Find more about time allocation here.
Also read: Time Booking: What Makes It Essential for Your Business?
Use Time Blocking
If the distractions are external, try time blocking and block your calendar for particular tasks so that others are less likely to set unnecessary meetings that take most of your time and are not productive at all. You can easily start blocking your calendar with the help of these simple steps, just follow along.
How to Implement Time Blocking:
- Plan Your Day/Week: Before starting your day or week, write down what you plan to accomplish.
- Allocate Time Slots: Assign specific time blocks for each task based on its priority and estimated time.
- Set Clear Boundaries: During each block, focus solely on the assigned task without multitasking.
- Review and Adjust: At the end of the day, assess what worked and what didn’t, and adjust your schedule accordingly for the next day.
We have covered this topic in detail, know more about timeblocking & time alloction.
Here are some time blocking templates for you.
Conclusion
Distractions for sure are inevitable, mostly when working from home, but you can avoid distractions by taking the correct measures. Setting boundaries with your family, creating a distraction-free workspace, or using time management techniques are some tactics that can help you stay focused and productive when working remotely.
Remote work requires self-discipline, and being aware of your common distractions and systematically working at them helps create an environment for the desired concentration and high performance.
Effectively manage work from home distractions with Time Champ’s remote productivity tracking solutions
Learn more about productivity trackingFrequently Asked Questions
The most common distractions include household chores, social media, family interruptions, TV, and phone notifications. In addition to that, the physical absence of a structured work environment contributes to procrastination and the waste of time. Pets, neighbors, or unwanted visitors can also be distractors. Comfort at home may tempt workers to take too many breaks or change over to personal work.
Before the meeting starts, turn off or mute other notifications, close unrelated tabs, and avoid distractions from your environment. Stick to the meeting agenda and limit off-topic discussions to keep the meeting productive. You can also set expectations among the participants on when to use “mute” when they do not speak and minimize multitasking during the meeting.
To avoid distractions, apply mindfulness techniques, such as deep breathing, meditation, or short walks, to clear your mind and pay attention. Maybe you just need to journal or write down whatever messes in your head before you start working. Break the tasks into pieces, and that would prevent feeling overwhelmed and reduce many attempts to daydream or overthink.
Keep taking regular breaks so you do not feel overheated throughout the day, this can include standing, stretching, or getting some air. And of course, it is absolutely essential to drink enough water and consume snacks that will maintain high energy levels. Moving your workspace or taking part of the day in another room can have a refreshing effect on your focus too. Even scheduling varied tasks can keep the day engrossing and prevent boredom.
