4 Tips for working from home successfully for course creators & bloggers | How To Be Productive Working From Home series

Maintaining focus is challenging in our hyperactive world with so many competing activities. To focus and be productive working from home you need a few simple things. Discover 4 tips for working from home successfully for course creators & bloggers:

• Have you struggled with this to be productive working from home?

• The 4 tips for working from home successfully to remain focused & to be productive (easier than you think!)

• How to be clear on your goals and make them meaningful

• Why milestones help you be productive working from home

• How to set your deadlines & priorities to be productive working from home

• How to write down your plan and keep it simple

• Bonus tip: Does multitasking make you be productive working from home?

• If you only have 5 min, read this!

I am going to share with you examples and techniques to bring this framework into action. This blog gives you the framework to maintain focus to be successful in a balanced way.

You haven’t got the time to read the blog! I get it. Just grab your 4 tips for working from home successfully checklist and get ready to see results fast!

Let’s go for it and discover the tips for working from home successfully for course creators and bloggers!

Have you struggled with this to be productive working from home?

You know you want to be successful without overworking.

You are prepared to try new things.

You might have tried already a few things to be productive… Starting a fancy bullet journal? Or going for a zero-email inbox? Or starting your day suuuuuuper early?

However, you have not seen the results you had hoped for… What would be different this time round?

The fact is that we all can soooooo easily get distracted. Try new things for a while and, without noticing, go back to our old habits. We convince ourselves that we are doing fine. That is our comfort zone.

What is that one thing that makes a real difference between those who succeed and those who give up?

Do you know what is the one point in common between a successful online entrepreneur, an elite sportswoman and an astronaut?

Their focus.

Their focus on what they want to achieve and what they need to do to get there.

The recipe for success from an Olympic Games multi-medallist

A number of elite sport people move into leadership consulting for large corporates. What a fascinating profession transformation! And so useful! There are so many techniques that can be leveraged from sports into business.

Some years back, I was invited to one of these leadership talks done by an Olympic Games multi-medallist. Forgive me, I am bad at names, so I can’t remember hers! That’s just me! Achhhh!

She explained to us that, many times, winning or not is not a factor of how good your technical skills are. Interesting... What she meant by that was that if you are an athlete runner, for example, winning does not only depend on how fast you run.

A key ingredient to success is how good you are at remaining FOCUSED.

Obviously remaining focused through the race. But more than that. Remaining focused through all the ground work before the big moment.

Focus is the one thing that will make or break your ability to win. All the training in the world can be waisted if you lose focus.

You can easily lose focus when trying to change habits, trying to do things differently. When things require a bit of effort, because we are not used to them, because we feel outside our comfort zone, unconsciously we drift. We get distracted. We go back to old ways. We lose focus on the end goal.

Oh wow… that sounds quite disheartening… Cheer up!

I have a 4 tips for working from home successfully for you, with easy techniques to be focused as an Olympian.

The 4 tips for working from home successfully to remain focused (easier than you think!)

Nothing better to illustrate how to remain focused than very challenging endeavours. How do you remain motivated and focused when wanting to succeed with huge challenges that looked impossible to achieve?

The going-to-the-moon example

When you want to achieve something big, complex, challenging... like going to the moon, there are 4 fundamental elements that help focus everyone's efforts:

1. End goal(s): Land in the moon by a certain date and come back safely
2. Milestones (important things that need to be done in order to reach the goal):
   • The team of astronauts is selected and trained by [date]
   • The budget is secured by [date]
   • The rocket is built and fully tested by [date]
   • And so on...
3. Priorities: For instance, safety launch test procedures are far more important than deciding the colour of the astronauts space suit.
4. A simple, high level plan: When things should be done, who and what is needed, what could go wrong and how to avoid it...

Would you volunteer to go to the moon without any of these 4 things? You may not be clear how to do this… No worries! I promise it is much simpler than it sounds. You don’t need to be an Olympic medallist or NASA programme manager to follow this framework to remain focused.

Being a blogger or a course creator, working from home, and driving all the different aspects of your online business feels at times as challenging as going to the moon, I know! 😂

With these 4 tips for working from home, you will remain focused to be successful in a balanced way:

1. Your goals

2. Your milestones

3. Your priorities

4. Your high level plan

Take these 4 elements as the pillars of your online business strategy, the 4 wheels that will get you to your destination.

1. How to be clear on your goals and make them meaningful to be productive working from home

Before getting crazy busy and anxious about your endless to-do-list, let’s stop and think whether you are clear on why you are doing what you are doing…

This is the right time to just take a few minutes to go through a few simple questions to help you relook at your goals.

Take action

DEFINE YOUR GOALS: Start by answering the following questions (at this stage, do this quickly, in 15min max):

• Where do I want/need to get? What do I ultimately want to achieve?
• What drives me? What is my purpose?
• Why is this my goal? Why am I doing this?

Having clear goals defines what you want to achieve with your online business, your blog, your online course.

Goals give you the reasons and the drive for all the tasks you are doing and all the challenges you face.

Watch out, goals are not just actions you need to get done! Your goals set your destination. They frame your aspirations.

Here are a few examples of goals closer to the Earth (haha!):

Online entrepreneurs goals - some examples

Earn enough from your blog to leave your 9 to 5 job

Grow your business to 6 figures

Be able to work from anywhere, at any time

Become an influencer in your area of expertise

Help your community of clients achieve their goals

Build a passive revenue business to have more time for your family and friends or to travel the world

The list goes on...

A goal is your personal & business destination. The more they are part of your personal dreams, the better. Make your goals aspirational and full of personal meaning so that you find the energy on the long run to remain focused to achieve them.

So now that you see how important is to have goals, let’s have a look at how to use them to be productive working from home. Goals will help you prioritise.

Every day you are bombarded with too many things you think you have to do… plus all the unexpected ones that appear from nowhere that add to your to do list. And… then there are the opportunities that come along, that you are so tempted to jump into. Let’s look at an example:

online course launch example - the overwhelm moment

You started your online business not that long enough. You have launched your website. You have put in place a sales funnel for your evergreen e-course.

You've worked like crazy... not enough hours in the day to get to this point. You are now getting ready for your pre-launch activities: social media teasing in various platforms to get people to register to your free webinar...

And right in the middle of this intense pre-launch period, you get 3 different requests for blog collaborations that would require you to write 3 blogs this week... What??!!!

Plus you know that your website, now that people are going to start subscribing and accessing your pages, does not look as good as you want... Should you do something about this now too before launching the course??!

And because all seems to happen at the same time, you have been invited to a podcast that would give you much needed visibility!

How to decide? How not to make the wrong decision? You want it all.

You now have your first tool to make this type of decision. You can now easily assess what matters most versus what can wait or should not even be done. Why? Because the first tip of working from home successfully is to understand your goals to be able prioritise. You now have those clear. Fab!!!!!

In the example above, there are a number of potential ways forward.

online course launch example - prioritising using goals

Let’s imagine that the course creator’s goal is to go from zero to a six figure income within 12 months (ouf, that’s ambitious!).

By referring to her goals, she knows that she can't delay her launch. Therefore, all her pre-launch activities need to continue as a priority.

Additionally, in order to grow as fast as she is aiming for, she can really benefit from taking on the podcast invitation with another blogger who will give her access to her course target audience. That's a really big win!

She will go back and say "no" to the blog collabs, at least for now.

She'll also ensure that she explains the time constrains she faces at the moment and maintains the connections with the 3 potential collabs, so they can work together at a later date.

So goals are NOT just this thing you define once to feel good about your ambitions.

For a A Complete System To Setting Goals For Success and Make Them Happen Without Overwhelm check out my blog:

There is something that makes having goals even better… This is the piece that many don’t do. How many times people define goals at the very beginning of a project and kind of put them in a drawer… forgotten, not used? Almost as if once defined, that’s it, no need to refer to your goals anymore. That’s where the value of goals is totally lost.

The golden nugget of goals come when you make them consciously part of your DNA and your decision making.

Goals are the light that let you see with clarity the road ahead.

Take action

REFER TO YOUR GOALS ON A DAILY BASIS when deciding your activities.

Goals are a great framework to ask yourself:

• Why am I doing this now in relation to my goals?
• If this truly getting me closer to achieving my goals?
• Would this activity move the needle?
• Am I drifting into 'stuff' that actually keeps me busy but doesn't truly help me get closer to what I want to achieve?
• Could I be doing something else that gets me closer to my goals?

To make it easy for you, I have included the actions in this blog in a simple checklist. Get here your 4 tips for working from home successfully checklist:

2. Why milestones help you be productive working from home

Fantastic! You now have goals and have a simple set of questions to use your goals on a daily basis. Of the 4 tips for working from home successfully, having and using goals on your day-to-day decisions will make a real impact to your focus and productivity.

The #2 step to be focused and be productive working from home is to define milestones. Miles… what?

Milestones are key achievement stages in your journey to achieve your goals. I know, this is a bit too theoretical… Let’s just look at a few examples of milestones.

For example - A course creator launching her online course

Let's continue with our example of a blogger who has decided to sell online courses, driving traffic using content marketing.

Some of the milestones to achieve her goals are:

Blog content planned for the next 12 months by [date]

Website launched by [date]

Email marketing system set up by [date]

8 blogs published in 2 months by [date]

500 email subscribers reached by [date]

Course launch plan defined by [date]

Course market research completed by [date]

Course outlined by [date]

Free webinar (lead magnet) launched by [date]

Beta course launched by [date]

Online course launched by [date]

...

When you define milestones, you are defining what specific key outputs you need to have by when. When you complete a milestone, you know you are making real progress, because a milestone completed gets you closer to your goals.

There is always an array of actions and tasks to get completed under each milestone. Based on the example above, let's look at the difference between tasks and the overarching milestone:

for example

MILESTONE: Website launched by [date]

Associated TASKS / ACTIVITIES to achieve the milestone:

Define personas for website users

Brainstorm website name

Buy domain

Create mockup board for website

Test with target audience for feedback

Decide hosting services

Define structure of site

Build pages...

...

When you reach a milestone, it is also a moment to reflect and analyse what has gone well and what has not gone as expected. This reflection helps you assess whether you need to make changes to the rest of your plan for the future. Simply put, milestones enable you to look at lessons learned and adjust your journey as needed. In programme management, the best plans are those that adapt from the learnings. Milestones create the opportunity to assess those learnings.

Milestones are the #2 of the tips for working from home successfully, to keep you very focused.

Without milestones, you end up with a long list of things to do without much of a framework. Milestones let you focus on the next important thing to achieve. It becomes so much easier to track real progress.

Take action

DEFINE YOUR MILESTONES for the next 3 months:

• Define the important OUTPUTS you need to achieve.
• Set WHEN you need to have them done.
• Include them in your CALENDAR.
• Ensure the output is SPECIFIC enough.
• Define how you will MEASURE success for your milestone.
• WRITE them down and put them somewhere you see them easily (in your phone, as a print out in your desk... whatever works best for you).

Milestones are also super useful to set priorities and plan workloads to be productive working from home.

3. How to set your priorities & deadlines

So now that you have goals and you know your key deadlines (your milestones), you can easily prioritise your activities… It feels great, isn’t it!!!

Forget endless to do list that capture all you need to do.

Forget fancy bullet journals that take too long to keep tidy and beautiful.

Just follow a simple approach:

Take action

Define your weekly deadlines and daily priorities, based on your next milestones to reach.

AT THE END OF EACH MONTH:

• Block time in your calendar at the beginning of each day.
You will use up these blocks of time for your priorities later on. These ensure that you don't end up fully booked with activities and haven't got time for what really moves the needle to your goals.

AT THE END OF THE WEEK:

• Look at your next milestone this month.
• Set your deadlines for next week. What do you need to get done that gets you closer to your next milestones?

AT THE END OF EACH DAY:

Look at your deadlines for the week.

Define your top 3 priorities for the next day (no more than 3).

Use your blocked time to get your priorities done.

The importance of having deadlines and priorities is that they enable you to divide big milestones into do-able, meaningful activities that make you really progress. That way you don’t get overwhelmed and you see what you need to do to get closer to your goals.

This is very different to managing your time with a to do list. To do lists become endless and, more importantly, when you tick things done they give a false sense of achievement.

There is no point in doing plenty of things in a to do list if they are not the right things.

You now have 3 out of the 4 tips for working from home successfully. Let’s see what is the glue that makes it all come together: tip #4.

4. How to write down your plan and keep it simple

You know your goals, you have defined milestones, deadlines and you can easily now define your priorities.

Wow!!! This is just great progress. Your #4 step to focus and achieve your goals is a simple step.

Writing down your plan. You have now most of it now:

• your goals

• your key milestones for the next 3 months

• your deadlines for the next 30 days and short-term priorities

The other pieces are simple and important:

• who and what you need (contributors, team, tools, investment…) - without these people & things you can not make it happen.

• what risks & opportunities you face and what do you depend on - this will help you mitigate your risk and leverage your opportunities.

Take action

WRITE DOWN your plan, including

• Your goals
• Your milestones for the next 3 months (important outputs to be achieved)
• Your deadlines for the next 30 days and priorities
• Who & what you need
• What risk and opportunities you face & what you depend on

REVIEW YOUR PLAN at the end of each month to define your deadlines.

ADAPT your plan as needed.

Have you noticed? I’ve said “write down” your plan…

Yeap! It is actually important to keep you committed and accountable to your own plan to be able to refer to it easily and regularly. Writing it down truly helps achieve this.

The worst tips for working from home is to only work on time management for time management sake. Save time here. Save time there. I might be controversial with this, but hear me out…

The best practice to be productive working from home is to make you feel better, less overwhelm, more aligned, by having and following a framework that makes you achieve your dreams.

More time is useless if you are not doing the right things to achieve your dreams. Focus to achieve more. by doing less to gain time for the right things is priceless. You can now chose to use your gained time by being productive working from home to pursue further opportunities for your blog, your online courses or your online business, or alternatively to have more time with your family and friends. Up to you!

Bonus tip: Does multitasking make you be productive working from home?

Now you know how to schedule your day to tackle your top 3 priorities.

You have a Do not Disturb Code in place (check out my blog: “How To Be Productive Working From Home Series - Set Yourself Up For Success”) to avoid interruptions.

You are very conscious that being productive working from home is not a complicated thing with the right system.

You have the most important: your mindset. You know you want to change because you have it in you to make it happen!

This is the perfect time to share with you this bonus tip. Something you need to watch out for as it is a big time waister…

Multitasking.

Surprised?

Did you know?

Today's nonstop multitasking actually wastes more time than it saves and there's evidence it may be killing our concentration and creativity too.

Clifford Nass, Stanford University

A number of recent scientific studies across the world have clearly concluded that our brain is unproductive when multitasking. When we are doing a number of things at the same time, switching to one to the other, the brain needs a bit of time to refocus into the next task in hand. So each time you move, while multitasking, to do another thing, the brain consumes time to move on.

Moreover, the more the tasks are complex, the more time the brain requires to switch backwards and forwards between tasks and get going again. And that is all time waisted.

The studies have even measured how inefficient we become when multitasking… Are you ready for this?

Did you know?

You can waist as much as 40% of your time when multitasking depending on the complexity of the task!!!!

On average 28% of your time becomes ineffective when you multitask.

This means that in an 8-hour work day, more than 2 hours are lost if you have been multitasking constantly.

Most of us have been brought up to the belief that multitasking is a great ability to develop. So I must admit I was shocked to discover all this while researching for this blog. I could not finish it and not share this finding with you!

I have since reflected on my own ways of working, and I have concluded that when I do demanding tasks, I always go into a bubble of concentration, only working on that one thing. In fact, without knowing it, my brain rejects multitasking.

In fact, blog writing is one of those things that benefits enormously from not multi-tasking.

I have now understood why writers are pictured in so many books and films working in their dedicated spaced, in the garden shed, the cellar or the hidden office, isolated from interruptions! It makes total sense.

So if multitasking wastes on average 2 hours (and up to 3.2 hours) in a 8-hour working day, wouldn’t you love to have those wasted hours back for something else?

Take action

Just simply SINGLETASK.

• Concentrate and do what you are doing for an allocated amount of time
• Once finished, move on to something else.

Avoid multitasking as much as you can.

Multitasking is a habit that can be difficult to stop, so persevere. You might find yourself multitasking even if you were trying not to.

I have seen a significant difference since I have implemented this. Give it a go. Easy!

If you only have 5min, read this!

Have you struggled with remain focused to be productive working from home? So many distractions, competing priorities, interruptions, long to do lists…

Focus is the one technique that elite sport men and women constantly use to compete and win.

Why does focus matter? Because it helps you achieve your dreams in a balance way!

And it is easier than you think.

The 4 tips for working from home successfully to remain focused

Remain focused to be successful in a balanced way with these 4 tips for working from home:

1. Your goals

2. Your milestones

3. Your priorities

4. Your high level plan

1. How to be clear on your goals and make them meaningful to be productive working from home

Your goals will create direction and alignment.

• Define your goals. Use the following questions to help you:

  • Where do I want/need to get?

  • What do I ultimately want to achieve?

  • What drives me? What is my purpose?

  • Why is this my goal? Why am I doing this?

Goals are living things. Do not define them and put them aside!

• Refer to your goals daily when prioritising what you do. Goals are a great framework to ask yourself:

  • Why am I doing this? Does doing this truly gets me closer to achieving my goals?

  • Am I drifting into 'stuff' that actually keeps me busy?

  • Could I be doing something else that gets me closer to my goals?

2. Why milestones help you be productive working from home

Milestones are key achievement stages in your journey to achieve your goals.

• Define your milestones for the next 3 months:

  • Define the important outputs you need to achieve.

  • Set when you need to have them done and add them in your calendar.

  • Define how you will measure success for your milestone.

  • Write them down and put them somewhere you see them easily.

When you reach a milestone, take the time to assess what has gone well and not that well. Review you plan.

3. How to set your priorities & deadlines

Define your weekly deadlines and daily priorities, based on your next milestones.

• At the end of the month:

  • Block time in your calendar at the beginning of each day.

  • Use these time blocks for your priorities.

• At the end of the week:

  • Look at your next milestone the month.

  • Set your deadlines for next week to get you closer to your next milestones?

• At the end of the day:

  • Look at your deadlines for the week.

  • Define your top 3 priorities for the next day.

  • Use your blocked time to get your priorities done.

4. How to write down your plan and keep it simple

• Write down your plan reflecting:

  • Your goals

  • Your milestones for the next 3 months (important outputs to be achieved)

  • Your deadlines for the next 30 days and priorities

  • Who & what you need

  • What risk and opportunities you face & what you depend on

• Review your plan at the end of each month or when you reach a milestone.

• Adapt your plan as needed.

Bonus tip: Does multitasking make you be productive working from home?

Multiple scientific research studies have proven than multitasking is very far from productive.

On average you can waste 28% of time when multitasking and up to 40%.

So just simply single task. Eliminate multitasking as much as possible to be productive working from home.

• Do one thing for an allocated amount of time

• Once finished, move on to the next.

Multitasking is a habit that can be difficult to stop. You might find yourself multitasking even if you were trying not to. So be patient and develop the awareness that you are multitasking.

And plan what you want to do with the time gained by single tasking! Cool!

Put it all into action today

Now it is up to you to put into action.

As you have see, the 4 tips for working from home successfully aren’t complicated! Implement them this week and will feel less overwhelmed and super focused.

You know you can do it! Just give it a go. So that you can easily refer to the actions in this blog, I have summarised them in a free 4 Tips for Working from Home Successfully Checklist for you.

Don’t forget to comment!

Please let me know in the comments

• Do you set yourself deadlines?
• How difficult is to define your priorities?

Enjoy the journey to gain a whole 1 day of your time back weekly to spend as you want… in your blog, your online business or your family!

Being productive from home is not about working more is about working smarter.

Thank you so much for your time. It feels fab to know you are reading these blogs.

Don’t forget to grab your free checklist!