How many times have you sat in rage-inducing, morning rush hour traffic, cursing your boss for making you come in early to finish that report, when clearly you would have already had the report finished if you’d only been allowed to write it from home instead of sitting in this car!?

How many times, distracted by your coworker, whose high-pitched laugh while regaling her BFF on the phone about a ‘hysterical’ new Facebook post, have you cringed thinking to yourself, if only I were working from home I wouldn’t have these distractions!

How many times in a week do you find yourself thinking, if only I could work from home I would be so much more productive!

Well, according to last months’ Time Magazine – The Future of Work issue, more and more employees and employers are opting for new and innovative ways to redefine the workplace, the most common of which, is changing it – more specifically from your office to your home. And while I hear upon writing this, a chorus of working stiffs belting out Hallelujah!, before you jump into your new way of life (conference call in your pajamas, anyone?!) – a life free of stress, bureaucracy, and office politics – I caution you to remember the old adage: Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

While without question, if done correctly, working from home will yield more productivity, less wasted time, and generally improve your quality of life, if done incorrectly you will see the exact opposite happen to the point where your job itself, may be threatened. And with the exuberance of being ‘free’ there is the risk that you will throw yourself into your new situation, without proper preparation. Simple upfront planning will ensure your success and increase your satisfaction factor.

1. Discipline: This is the single hardest part of working from home. Looks easy from your crowded cubicle, but simply not true. First you must honestly ask yourself what kind of person you are: Are you the type of person that works better in a structured environment? Or do you thrive with this type responsibility? Remember once you’re working at home there’s no rush hour and no pesky coworker to blame: your performance will be judged solely on you. If you are going to work from home, understand you’ll have to be ruling yourself with a stiffer fist. The general rule of thumb that I’ve found works is: If you wouldn’t do it at your old office (i.e. take 5 calls from Francine about her blind date last night) don’t do at your new office. I have found that the transition from office to home office is made significantly easier if you start working from home on a part time basis, and then gradually make the transition to full time from home.

2. Scheduling: One of the most important and overlooked aspects of working from home is creating a schedule. Just because you’re not required to be somewhere at 9 and can’t leave until 5, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a firm schedule. It is absolutely necessary to write out a weekly schedule for yourself – and stick to it. Working from home can come with many distractions – i.e. all of a sudden that bookshelf you’ve avoided for weeks needs to be dusted right now – and if you aren’t strict about your working hours they will quickly escape you. One of the other pratfalls is that when working from home there is no limit to how much you can be doing – theoretically you could be working 24 hours a day. So it is important to make clear guidelines about where your time will be spent everyday.

3. Create the appropriate space: When working from home, one of the big challenges is keeping your ‘home’ life from your ‘work’ life, otherwise with time both worlds will blur into one, leaving you feeling like you’re always working and never living. If your space allows it, designate one room to be used specifically and ONLY for your office – while it would be more comfortable to sit on your couch writing that report (like I am right now…horrible, horrible, horrible!) it is important to have a concrete spatial divide. If you don’t have the space available, craft out a corner which again is reserved for ‘work’ time only.

4. Separating work from home: Building on creating different spaces, your entire work practice should be separated from your living practice. Though at first it might seem sooo productive to be doing your laundry while taking a conference call, it’s actually not, and most probably both tasks will suffer as a result. Use the time you have allotted to work, to work, conversely use the time you’ve allotted for personal chores, for personal chores. It is also a good idea to get out of your house on designated breaks, i.e. lunch, afternoon break. Go for a walk around the block or eat your lunch outside. Being trapped in your house day and night has many negative long term effects, both personally and professionally.

5. Staying Connected: Just because you’ve said Hasta La Vista to your office, doesn’t mean you should say the same to your colleagues. One of the bigger risks of working from home is becoming isolated and out of the loop. Make the effort to reach out to colleagues you have a good rapport with – suggest a group happy hour drink/coffee once a month. Most jobs and careers still benefit from making connections and having in person relationships. Meeting up once a month will keep you abreast of relevant insider information that will invariably help you in the long run.

Got any working-from-home advice or stories that can help? Please feel free to comment below! (Only if you’re on a break!!)

Don’t Forget To Follow PickTheBrain on Twitter!

Related Articles:

Why The 9 to 5 Worker Will Soon Be a Thing of the Past

How To Build Self Discipline

Image courtesy of SwittersB
Sometimes, we can feel as though we’re stuck in a rut. The daily routine of work, chores, and family begins to become very “samey”. Perhaps we stop at the same coffee shop each morning, grab lunch from the same outlet each day, and invariably spend the evening slumped in front of the tv or computer.

If you’re trying to get inspired – whether for a creative project, or simply towards life change – a routine can actively work against you. Your mind is comfortable with the small bit of world that you see each day, and you never challenge yourself to go beyond your comfort zone.

Here are some simple ways to take small steps outside your usual routine, to dip your toe into the bigger world beyond the wake-work-home-sleep model, to expand your horizons and get inspired…

Take a Different Route to Work

Do you travel to work (or college, or your kids’ school, etc) every day? My bet is you always take the same route – and you probably feel quite put out if you have to divert to a different one. Once a week, why not set off ten minutes earlier and take a different route? Walk down a street you’ve never been through before, or stop off for coffee in a different part of town.

This is a very easy way to give yourself new input from the world: new sights, sounds, perhaps new people to meet along the way. If you’re lucky, you might even find that your new route is better than the old one!

Another way to mix up your commute is to try a different form of transport. If you usually take the train, can you get the bus instead? (It’s often cheaper.) If you normally drive alone, how about carpooling? You’ll save money and have someone to chat to on the way.

Ask a Friend to Recommend a Book

Most of us are quite conservative in our reading habits. Perhaps we only read crime novels, or wouldn’t touch science-fiction with a barge-pole. Maybe we think “literature” is all boring and worthy, or conversely, that “commercial” fiction is trash. Or, we only read non-fiction, or would never dream of picking up a book of poetry.

Ask a friend or colleague to recommend one of their favourite books – ideally, something that changed the way they think, or that they’ve read time and time again. Get hold of a copy and read it. You might be surprised how it sparks new ideas, or opens your mind to a new way of thinking.

Do Something Different in the Evenings

Are your evenings packed with emails and chores? Or, do you spend the evening hours drifting around the house aimlessly, watching television and pretty much filling time until you go to bed? Neither is especially healthy.

Why not go out on a weeknight, for a change? This can make your evening into an event – you’ll go to bed feeling satisfied that you’ve done something interesting and enjoyable. If your weekends are busy with family obligations, going out on a weekday evening can be a great way to do some things out of your usual routine: perhaps a trip to the theatre, to a gallery, or even a museum.

Take a Day Off

One of the most powerful ways to break out of a rut is to take a whole day off. If you don’t have any leave left at work, use a Saturday or Sunday. Cancel all your usual activities and obligations, and give yourself permission to do anything you want with the day. Go for a long, solitary walk; write poetry; go shopping; read a whole blockbuster novel; lie in the grass and gaze at the clouds…

If you’re one of the many people who find it almost impossible to identify what you actually want to do, that’s a good place to start. Write a list of things you might like to do, see, or achieve. Can you do any of them in a day? If you’re really stuck for ideas, try rolling a dice or flipping a coin. What you do doesn’t matter so much as the fact that you do do something!

Have you ever felt stuck in a rut? Do you follow the same routine, day in, day out? What small changes could you make?

Related Articles:

Why You Should Read Personal Development Books

‘If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.’
Abraham Lincoln

Have you watched TV programs like Downsize Me? I really enjoy watching this! People who lead unhealthy lifestyles are given a ‘lifestyle makeover.’ They usually end up losing weight and finding more happiness by the end of the show. Obviously they do make great strides over the two months they are being followed by the cameras, but I often wonder how many of these people go back to their old unhealthy ways once the TV cameras have left. The trouble is that these kind of programmes focus on external things – diet, exercise, giving up smoking – but they don’t address the inner world of the individuals they are seeking to treat. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with eating better, giving up smoking, drinking less and doing more exercise, but there’s something deeper here.

The mind-body connection

The connection between mind and body is becoming more accepted in mainstream medicine. If you think about it, this connection is pretty obvious. When you get excited or nervous or panicky, that feeling starts in your mind but has an immediate effect on your body. When you fall in love, you can feel it in your body. When you watch a sad movie, you might start to cry. When you find out you’ve won the lottery or got an ‘A’ grade on an exam, your heart will start to beat faster and you’ll feel all sorts of other physical effects.

R. Veenhoven carried out a scientific study of the effects of happiness on health and concluded that happy people are less likely to get sick and that they live longer. The difference between happy and unhappy people was comparable to the difference between smokers and non-smokers in terms of life span. Veenhoven’s findings can be found in The Journal of Happiness Studies (yes there really is a scholarly journal about happiness!)

Our autopilot

We all run on subconscious programmes. It’s how we manage to survive in the world. If we had to think about everything we did, we wouldn’t be able to function – there would simply be too much to think about! Our subconscious takes control of much of our life so that, in essence, we are running on autopilot. Examples of these habitual patterns are being untidy, being late and being poor. All these things come from the subconscious mind. Being sick is also a subconscious habit. I’m not suggesting that all sickness has its origin in the mind (though it might, and many people believe this), but we all know people who constantly get sick, and if they were ever healthy for more than a few months, their subconscious mind would find a way of getting back on track by bringing along an illness of some kind.

Our subconscious scripts often come from our childhood and they were developed because they gave us an advantage. The benefits of being sick, as a child, are that (for example) people will pay more attention to you, you might get a day off school, you might get some special treats or you’ll get treated better than your siblings. I’m sure we all remember the sheer joy of days off school as a child because of some minor ailment. When we grow up, these scripts stay with us. Sometimes they can still confer an advantage on us – maybe we still get attention from our family or a day off work – but they may also be problematic and destructive to our lives.

The strange thing is that many of us (most of us, in fact) don’t realize this is what’s happening. We are not even aware of the autopilot and think that things are happening to us, and not that we are controlling the way things turn out. But the reality is that we are in control and we do have a choice.

How to re-script your subconscious

Viktor Frankl wrote that ‘between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’

In that space, we can create ourselves anew. We need the right kind of self-talk. We talk to ourselves all day long, so we need to make sure we are saying the right things. We also see ourselves in certain scenarios in our mind’s eye. We need to make sure these visualizations are of what we want to achieve, how we want to feel and what sort of person we want to be. Ultimately, we are trying to construct a good self image. When we have clear image of the person we intend to be in our mind, then our subconscious will start to run that script and the image will become reality. A change in our mind will work its way out.

We need to take responsibility for our lives. Forcing ourselves to endure exercise and eat salad whilst all the time telling ourselves that we are unhealthy and unable to really change will get us nowhere. We need to do it the other way round – start off with the belief that we are fit and healthy, and this will become part of our reality. Spending a lot of time on our mental preparation makes all the difference to our success or failure. Sharpening the axe will make it a lot easier to cut down the tree.

Michael Miles writes at effortlessabundance.com. You can download his new book, Thirty Days to Change Your Life, at the site.

Related Articles:

Happiness Without The Hype

Achieve Happiness by Creating a Life Lie

I am not sure how many of you are aware of the truly motivating and vastly inspiring story of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy. If you’d permit me, I’d like to share it with you.

Most of Beethoven’s masterpieces were composed while he was deaf. Many of us, me included, might be horrified should we ever become deaf. However, Beethoven would not allow deafness to stand in his way. He had found a way to get over that obstacle.

His love for music strengthened his self-motivation to compose one masterpiece after the other without giving in to the challenge he had. He had music in him, and nothing, not even his deafness, would take charge of him.

And, as we all know, he triumphed over his deafness.

Beethoven set the music to the last movement of the Ninth Symphony to a poem entitled “Ode To Joy”. He strongly believed this poem celebrated the brotherhood of man.

On May 07th, 1824, Beethoven conducted the Ninth Symphony. When the “Ode To Joy” movement was over, the audience erupted in applause. Beethoven, however, did not turn around to accept the round of applause, as he could not hear it. Noticing this, one of the chorus members took it upon himself to step out of line and take hold of Beethoven’s arm to turn him around to face the audience.

But by then the applause had subsided.

As Beethoven quietly looked out into the audience, they all arose, one by one, in standing ovation, their applause thunderous. It is said that a single tear of joy skated down the composer’s cheek. It is also said that a small tear had rolled down the chorus member’s cheek who stood next to him.

This story made me think. I asked myself a few questions, which I will address to you. What do you have that is inside of you, that’s so strong, that it can triumph over your shyness, your fear, your lack of self-confidence or lack of self-motivation?

What will bring your tear of joy? Who will take you by the arm and turn you around when you are down and out, or facing the wrong direction, or on the wrong road, so you may not only see but also hear your standing ovation? The applause, the loud cheers, the simultaneous stamping of feet?

As you think of your chorus member, feel him or her standing next to you, shoulder to shoulder. See yourself achieving, see the new highly enthusiastic and motivated you. See the elated you. Hold your chorus member’s hand tightly and double your elation and motivation.

Hear the applause and the cheers of hundreds of people. Hear them cheering you on, calling your name, loving you and you loving them back. Feel it. Immerse yourself in it. Feel it throughout your whole body. That applause and cheer is for you and you only. Get excited. Accept the applause. Hold on to the cheers. Feel the emotion.

Lift your arms in the air and declare: “I am feeling strong, capable and full of life today.” Repeat this declaration three times as loud and as emotionally as you can. Feel an amazing, lively energy flow through your body.

Feel so motivated that you can do anything, absolutely anything, to achieve your goals and dreams in life. Obstacles can be and will be nothing but sprinkles of dust that you can blow away with a single breath.

I believe in much the same way that success breeds success, motivation must breed more motivation. And the more motivation you have the motivated you will become. It’s like stacking one layer of motivation over another.

You trigger more and more motivation. Here are a couple of ways to breed, stack and trigger more motivation:

1.    Celebrate your motivation attitude. Take time out to remind yourself what you have accomplished and how far you’ve come. Celebrate the fact that you had the motivation to start and finish your task, objective or goal.

Celebrate there and then, immediately upon completion of the task or realization of the goal. And celebrate big!

Rejoice the small and large successes and accomplishments. Honor each one, individually. Allow each success to bring with it its own sense of fulfillment. This fulfillment will give you the added surge of motivation to bring in more successes.

Make it a point to be motivated to achieve as many successes as you can. Size doesn’t matter! A small success is still a success. That’s how the mind sees it.

Motivation is like a snowball – it keeps gaining momentum. Imagine what will happen when you stack one motivation over the other. The snowball will get bigger, sooner.

2.    Reward your motivation attitude. We all love rewards, don’t we? Make it a habit to reward yourself for being and remaining motivated. Have a long bubble bath, go to the movies or a restaurant, buy a pair of shoes, a handbag, a watch. It is important to reward yourself, and as you do, you will look forward to the next reward.

By consistently celebrating and rewarding your motivation attitude you will stimulate and encourage additional motivation. It will be within you waiting to be automatically summoned.

Commemorate your motivation to get you where you want to be. Have a party, have fun and watch your successes escalate.

Hani Al-Qasem is a published author and personal growth specialist. He co-authored Self-Confidence Building in 7 Steps and Establish Powerful Self-Enhancing Beliefs.

Download the free e-book Establish Powerful Self-Enhancing Beliefs and eliminate the limiting beliefs that keep you from enjoying happiness and success. Get motivated and Stay Motivated to achieve more.

Related Articles:

Energy: The Key To Success

How To Achieve Your Goals With Healthy Habits

Have you ever started a project or activity, ground away at it for hours/weeks/years, and wanted to just give up? Sometimes, you know you need to push past temporary difficulties or discomfort in order to get where you want to be. But sometimes, you feel as though you’re chasing after a worthless goal or outcome. Your interest and enthusiasm have hit rock-bottom, and you just want out.

What’s probably stopping you, though, is the time, money or energy you’ve already invested in this activity. It might be something quite trivial:
•    You’ve read 100 pages of this (very tedious) novel: you might as well finish it.
•    You bought a packet of not-so-great cookies, but you don’t want to waste the money, so you decide to eat them all
•    You started writing a poem which you’re not getting anywhere with. You’ve spent three hours on it, and you feel like it would be a waste of time to give up now.

Or your activity might be something huge – something where quitting it would mean quite a big change in your life:
•    You’ve been following a particular career path for six years, and you’re increasingly feeling that it’s “not you”.
•    Your relationship with your boyfriend/girlfriend has been deteriorating for some time, but you’ve been together for three years.
•    You’ve spent most evenings for the past four years playing World of Warcraft, but you’re starting to lose interest in the game – and you’re wishing you had all those hours back.
•    For seven years, you’ve been writing a novel. The feedback from writing friends is … polite, at best. Re-reading it, you’re not sure it’s so great yourself. You’re also sick of working on it. But you don’t want to lose all the time you’ve put in…
•    You’ve been spending a small fortune on vitamin pills and dietary supplements. But you’re not noticing any real difference after six months, and a nutritionist friend says you really don’t need them. You think of giving up – but then you’d be admitting that you’ve wasted hundreds of dollars.

Whether your activity is a trivial one or a huge one, don’t stick with it because of the time or money you’ve already put in. That time/money is gone: you’ll never have it back. What you can recover, though, is the future time or money you’d otherwise be spending on something you don’t really want.

Quit Leisure Activities That Are No Longer Fun

As a teen, I spent several hours every day playing a small online role playing game. When I eventually realised that the game had become less engaging (lots of players had left) and that I’d grown and moved onto new interests, I was reluctant to quit. I felt that I’d spent a lot of my life on the game – and stopping playing would mean that time was wasted.

What I realised, though, was that there was no point wasting more time. The best time to quit is when you realise you’re not gaining enough from something to justify the time/cash that you’re putting into it, and that the situation is never going to improve.

Your interests naturally change over time, and sometimes, a shift in circumstances can mean that something formerly fun becomes boring. Don’t get tied into things just because you’ve done them for a long time in the past: you’re allowed to quit at any time. If you’ve watched three seasons of a TV show and you’re bored, don’t make yourself watch the fourth “just because I’ve got this far”. If you read half a novel and it’s a monumental effort to keep going, just stop.

Leave A Dead-End (For You) Job

Tim Ferriss tells a great story in The Four-Hour Work Week, which describes the unsuccessful attempt to create a large carb-free cheesecake – and the subsequent consumption of the cake:

“This new masterpiece … tasted like liquid cream cheese mixed with cold water and about 600 packets of sugar. … I grabbed the largest soup ladel with a sigh … I had wasted an entire Sunday and a boatload of ingredients – it was time to reap what I had sown.
… Stupid? Of course. It’s about as stupid as one can get. This is a ridiculous and micro example of what people do on a larger scale with jobs all the time: self-imposed suffering that can be avoided.”
(Tim Ferriss, The Four-Hour Work Week, pg 226)

Perhaps you jumped straight into a job after college and belatedly realised it wasn’t really for you. Whether this realisation comes after a month, a year or half a lifetime, it’s okay to quit. Don’t carry on making yourself miserable just because you feel like all that past misery would be wasted otherwise!

Make yourself, and yourself alone, the judge of what constitutes a “dead end” job for you. You might have plenty of opportunities for promotion within your workplace – but if none of those higher positions interest you, it’s time to get out.

Nothing Is Wasted

Something I find quite comforting when cutting my losses and ditching an activity is to remember that nothing is wasted.  You can always draw something good out:

A leisure activity that you now dismiss as escapism and a waste of time may have helped you through a difficult period in your life.

A relationship that didn’t work out will have shown you something about yourself.
A job that is going nowhere for you will have taught you some useful skills. These might not be directly related to the actual work: one of the most useful things I learnt as an employee was to get over my dislike of answering the phone!

New friends and contacts will probably have come into your life during your activity. Today, I have close friends who I initially met through playing the online game that I quit years ago. I’m still in touch with colleagues from my former job.

At the very least, you’ll have learnt something about yourself. Maybe your failed attempt at freelancing has taught you that you need the structure of an office environment in order to work effectively. Perhaps all those unfinished novels have convinced you that you’re never going to enjoy historical fiction, however often your friends recommend it.

What activities are you currently engaged in that you want to quit? Why are you sticking with them – is it because you really will gain something at the end, or out of a misguided sense that you don’t want to lose the time/money already invested?

Image courtesy of Shutter Hack

Have you settled for less in your life, when you used to dream that something bigger, something grander, was possible? Not only possible, but you knew for certain it would happen, didn’t you?

Then something happened…

You got responsibilities.

You had to be practical.

But you don’t have to follow the herd anymore. You can make your heart and your mind work together. You simply have to realize that this so-called “collective wisdom” is really a collective assumption.

Any of these old sayings (sleep walking mantras) sound familiar?

• Get a real job.
• Welcome to adulthood!
• Grow up.
• Keep your head down.
• It’s called work for a reason!

These are all fine and dandy. They may have been more applicable in say, your grandfather’s time. Labor was expected for the larger part of sunlight and there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to follow your passions (unless you liked mining coal).

Read the rest of this article »

Image courtesy of NaPix

You’ve got a lot of different things on the go. Some of them are New Years’ resolutions that you’re determined to stick with, this time. Some are projects that have dragged on for years – an unfinished novel in your bottom drawer, or the refurbishment of your basement. Others are things you’ve started and given up almost straight away: these have left their legacy in the form of unread textbooks, boxes of craft materials, dusty computer gadgetry, never-played language CDs and more…

Read the rest of this article »

Image courtesy of Superbomba

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” – Steve Jobs, in Commencement Address to Stanford students

What would you do if you were told you had five years left to live? I prefer to use this rather than Steve Job’s single day, because most of us, with a day or week left, would spend them seeing family and saying goodbyes.

But five years is different. Five years is long enough to accomplish almost any goal you might have, however ambitious. And you wouldn’t want to spend five years partying hedonistically, or eating your favourite meal every night.

Would you finally get around to writing that novel that you’ve been planning for more years than you want to admit? Would you quit your job and set up your own business – secure in the knowledge that your retirement fund is no longer a problem? Would you find the means and the money to travel to places you’ve always wanted to visit?

Read the rest of this article »

Image courtesy of wonderlane

The internet has forever changed the way we gather information. In the past obtaining information could be tedious. If you wanted to get the financial report of a company and learn about its business, most probably you would need to visit the company personally to collect the financial reports and talk to the management. Now, with the help of the internet, anyone can easily learn the history of Walmart by googling it or searching for it on Wikipedia.

So the internet had greatly reduced the time it takes to gather information, but has it really made us more effective and efficient?

Read the rest of this article »

Image courtesy of  Wili Hybrid

Our western puritan work ethic has taught us that hard work, industry, struggle and effort are necessary prerequisites for achievement. I respectfully but passionately disagree. In fact, I believe that the opposite is true, that struggle and effort are vices, unhealthy addictions and pathologies. They only tire us out with struggle and they get us nowhere, like the fly caught in the spider’s web enmeshes itself all the more by its attempts to work its way out.

The Taoist notion of ‘Wu Wei’ refers to a state of action where there is little activity on our part, and yet a great deal gets done. Wu Wei is not apathy or passivity. It is not laziness or torpor. It is like swimming with the current, sawing wood in the direction of the grain or sailing with the wind. There is action, but little effort. In other words, it is ‘going with the flow.’

The world can be ruled by letting things run their course; it cannot be ruled by interfering. (Lao Tse)

Read the rest of this article »