Yesterday, we discussed the reasons why we shouldn’t aspire to work from home. Today, I’m going to share my tips for improving the work from home experience, to avoid your 10 second commute becoming a boring, less-than-inspiring experience.Often, here is how a typical day of working from home may evolve:

9:00am - Alarm sounds. But we don’t get up. We work from home. We can get up whenever we feel like.
10:00am - Alarm sounds again. We’ll get up, but we won’t take a shower or have breakfast. There’s no need. We won’t be seeing anybody today so nobody will know.
10:15am - Humm. We’re still in our night clothes. Oh well. If we don’t get changed now, we won’t have to get changed back in to our night clothes this evening.
10:30am - Sit at our desk, facing the corner of the room with a window behind us. This screen sure is exciting!
12:30pm - Lunch time. That’s convenient… our PC is already in the dining room, and our kitchen is right next door. We barely have to move to eat, and when we’re eating we can still see the computer to check our emails.
3:30pm - The kids come home from school. They tell us about the wonderful day they’ve had, and how they spent their entire lunch break sun bathing with their friends. We suddenly realize we haven’t even stepped outside today and we wouldn’t know what the weather is like if we hadn’t been told.
6:00pm - Time for dinner. Whoops. All our papers are spread across the dinner table because we’ve been working there all day.
10:00pm - Time for bed. I told you it would be convenient. We’re still in the same night clothes, so we can go to bed without the hassle of changing.

You might think that is quite an extreme case of working from home. Maybe it is. Or maybe it isn’t. I’m not sure, but what I can say is that it isn’t made up. It happens to thousands of people each day who are working from home. Until I realized how bad it was, it happened to me each day. Shower? Not until 4pm when the family arrives home. Out of my night clothes? Again, not until 4pm. Breakfast, the most important meal of the day? Bah, I didn’t need breakfast. Getting up early? There’s no point when I work from home!

You Must Climb Out of the Trap!

To avoid your work from home experience becoming boring and stagnant, you must set yourself some ground rules. These rules will often be personal to yourself, dependant on the areas you feel you need help with (self discipline to get out of bed, for example), but here are my eight tips I’ve identified from my own experience that will hopefully help you to improve your home office life.

1. Get Out of Bed Early
However tempting it may be to stay in bed until noon, most people find that they are far more productive if they get out of bed early (9am or earlier) than they are when they rise later in the morning, or God forbid… in the afternoon. Rise just like you would if you had to commute. Waking up at 6am isn’t too much fun for me, but I find I’m much more motivated to work when I do rise that early.

2. Shower and Get Dressed
Wake yourself up with a shower and presume that at some point in the day you will be leaving the house. There’s nothing more successful at draining self-esteem than working on your computer in your night clothes all day.

3. Wear a Suit to the Office
Lack of motivation or boredom is often a result of low self-esteem. I used to work from home in my night clothes or in some old, scruffy clothes (the same type I would wear for a hard day of work in the garden). They didn’t really say “work” to me. I found that when I switched to wearing my suit, I was much more motivated and focused on work rather than the surrounding distractions that are present in all our homes. If you’re not a suit person, wear what you would normally wear to the office. Just ensure it makes you feel like you’re heading to work.

4. Step Outside Each Day
Can you imagine not feeling the fresh air on your face for an entire day? What about two days? A week, maybe? In my early days working from home, I would go days at a time without stepping outside. It eventually became boring. I missed the outdoors. I missed the sun. I missed other people. Which is why I now make a point to be outside for an extended period at least once a day. I’ll go to the gym. For a bike ride. To a meeting. To a coffee shop. Anything to get me outside and in the company of other people, otherwise working from home very quickly becomes stagnant.

5. Spread Meetings Throughout the Week
I know some people who dedicate a full day to meetings and then don’t have any for the rest of the week. It may help with your productivity, but it doesn’t help your morale. I try to schedule my meetings across all five work days to ensure I have an excuse to get out of the house each day.

6. Separate Home from Office
Numbers 6 and 7 are where I really fail. Right now, my office is the corner of my dining room. I have a homemade desk with an ugly computer and large CRT monitor, and a phone/fax machine. Behind me, I have my dinner table and three chairs. It’s a small room that serves both as my office and the place I eat. The family must travel through the room to go outside to the garden, and it’s next door to the noisy kitchen. It’s about as bad as bad setups go. I only do this because we don’t have a spare room for an office. I can’t stress how important it is to utilize that spare bedroom as your office. We don’t have one, but if we did my productivity and morale would instantly jump up several notches. Right now I can’t separate work from home life. If I go to the kitchen, I see my office and all my papers. If I go to the garden, I see my office and papers. If I’m trying to work, I have family behind me in the garden, eating or next door cooking. Right now, at this very moment, I can hear the family using a very loud pressure washer on the decking outside, and next door in the kitchen I can hear the washing machine turning my clothes. There’s no peace, and that equates to a stressful office.

7. Face Your Desk Towards a Window
Again, I fail with this point. Right now, if I look over my monitor I see nothing but the corner of a blue wall (and a spiders cobweb. Nice!). Yet behind me I have two eight foot high glass doors looking out over my 45 foot long garden with BBQ, pond and greenhouse. If you can, ensure you have a view from your desk to maintain your high morale. A blue corner with cobwebs doesn’t count as a view. Back to point five… the eight foot high glass doors just got sprayed with the very noisy pressure washer… I so need a dedicated office!

8. Extend Your Business in to Real Life
Ever wondered why so many conferences related to online technology (Blogging. Web design. Web hosting.) are so successful? It’s because the attendees recognize the online world can only go so far before you eventually have to take your relationships offline with face to face communication. Extend past email and the phone. Occasionally take the time to move your business efforts offline to meetings, conferences and conventions. And if you can’t make it offline, use Twitter to rekindle the connection that exists between emails and blogs. Twitter is almost real time, and reminds you the people you connect with via email are more than just an email address.

The key to improving your home office experience is to treat it like you’re working from an office in town. Only you get a little more freedom than if you were working for a boss.

Do you have any more tips to improve working from home? Let us know in the comments!