Have You Tried This Simple Strategy for Better Productivity?

Do you struggle to stay focused and productive when working from home? Do you find it hard to switch mentally from “home mode” to “work mode”? This simple trick might help.

The problem:

When you commute to work, you go through a consistent pre-work routine that includes dressing for the job, leaving the house, traveling to your workplace, and entering into your office or workspace. When you work from home, many of those steps are missing. Those missing steps may be hindering you from switching into focused work mode.

Why?

It has to do with habits. A person’s commuting-to-work ritual helps them mentally separate their personal, at-home priorities and attitudes with their job priorities and attitudes. But when that same person sits down on their sofa with a laptop, their brain hasn’t made that transition. Human brains are lazy and will always fall into the habit of least resistance. So when the environment is filled with cues that tell the brain it’s goof-off-at-home time, it can be difficult to get that brain to remain focused on something more challenging.

A motivation ritual can help.

Motivation by itself is not enough to overcome our brain’s natural resistance to creating new habits, such as focusing on work instead of getting sidetracked with a million distractions. People who study habits have come up with various tricks to help us create new habits so we can train our brains to get into work mode when we need to. One such trick is a motivation ritual.

The main concept:

You can make difficult habits (such as getting into focused work mode) more attractive by training your brain to associate them with a positive experience. A motivation ritual is a way to associate the habit you want to grow with something you enjoy. Over time, the ritual becomes your brain’s cue that will help you begin the habit.

James Clear explains motivation rituals in the book Atomic Habits. In the book, the author describes how he developed a pregame stretching and warm-up ritual during his years as a baseball player. He intentionally went through the sequence the same way every time. It prepared him physically, but at the same time it prepared him mentally. He goes on to say:

I began to associate my pregame ritual with feeling competitive and focused. Even if I wasn’t motivated beforehand, by the time I was done with my ritual, I was in “game mode.”

James Clear in Atomic Habits

In similar fashion, a “going to work” motivation ritual can help you clear our heads and get into “work mode.”

I’m not suggesting that you can invent a ritual and it will magically boost your productivity or focus. I am suggesting a well-designed ritual can help you develop better working-from-home habits.

Getting your brain into work mode

Here are some key points to keep in mind if you want to create a helpful ritual to get your brain into work mode:

1. Create specific work-mode cues. The ritual must associate something you enjoy (a writer might start with a fun creative writing prompt) or a series of easy steps (like the baseball warm-up) with the habit of getting focused on work. Here are some possibilities:

• Dress in work clothes to help you get into a professional mindset. Or choose a favorite sweatshirt that can be designated your totally-in-the-work-mode-zone uniform.
• Begin the work day by setting out certain items in your workspace. (The same items in the same order each day.)
• Do five minutes of focused journaling / morning pages to declutter all the private life issues and prepare yourself to think about work issues.
• Designate a specific work space that you only use during working hours. Don’t use that space for personal computer time.
• Create your own personal time card just so you can mentally “clock in” and “clock out.”
• Hang an Open / Closed sign on your office door with posted hours.

2. Avoid existing bad-habit cues. The ritual is not likely to work if the actions you’ve chosen are already associated in your brain with bad habits. (i.e. Sitting down with the laptop on the sofa = checking social media for the next hour.)

3. Control the cues your environment is sending you. If your current home office space is full of cues that distract you, you may need to change up your environment in order to create a new ritual that will point you to new habits. This could mean choosing a new place in your house to work from, or it could mean creating a ritual where you put certain distracting items away to clear your physical and mental space so you can transform fully into work mode. (Sort of like Mr. Rogers changing his shoes.) One silly example might be throwing a blanket over the TV during work hours to remind you not to turn it on.

4. Consistent, specific, and unique. The ritual needs to be repeated consistently, and the specific cues in the ritual should be for work mode and nothing else. The idea is to train your brain to associate the cue with good work habits. For example: “When I put on my noise-canceling headphones, it’s time to concentrate.” Or “When I dress in a work blouse, sit in my desk chair, and put on my purple reading glasses, I become a professional accountant. I’m no longer a housekeeper or pet sitter.”

5. It’s all about attitude. Try to adopt a attitude-based mindset instead of a goal-based mindset. The ritual is not about meeting a specific productivity goal. Creating a work mode ritual is about becoming the sort of person who can sit down and become a professional at their job, mindful and focused on both the good days and the bad days.

Do you have trouble getting into work mode when working at home? Maybe it’s time to switch things up and create a new ritual that will help you create a new, better, more professional working-from-home mindset.