Restore Productivity with These Home Office Tips

Maintaining a healthy work-life balance can be quite tricky while juggling all the challenges that come with a remote office. While there are many benefits to working from home, various engagements and distractions will pull you in different directions. The blend of personal life and career is a delicate road to travel. Each day, the quality of your mental health and physical health are at stake.

Many employees did not properly prepare for the healthy workspace because they did not expect it to be a long-term adjustment. As a result, home-operating employees see a drop in productivity and overall job performance. So, what steps can you take to restore and surpass your previous level of productivity, all while sustaining your current lifestyle? Here are a few strategies you can start implementing today:

Designate Your Workspace

If you set up your desk and computer in the middle of chaos, you will undoubtedly struggle to find a clear focus for your workday. The space you choose for your home office needs to resemble your work office and offer a level of separation from your personal life. In the scenario that your office set up placed you in a cubicle, it may serve you best to set up a desk in the corner of a spare or multi-purpose room. Just remember to keep any display of family pictures and desk accessories consistent with your workplace set-up.

It is crucial that you understand the ergonomics of remote working within your home office and how abiding by these principles can positively impact your mental and physical health. From proper desk height, monitor height, and office lighting to a quality office chair and an internet connection, the experts at IDG Techtalk reveal all the guidelines and rules to follow when it comes to your home office set-up.

Establishing boundaries is critical in achieving a healthy balance. When you are at home during work hours, you must clarify to others and yourself that you are ‘at work’. Without proper boundaries, you may find yourself working irregular hours and giving leeway to cabin fever, which brings us to my next point:

Get Up & Get Active

Don’t fall into the habit of multitasking during work hours. If you feel overwhelmed or you’ve entered a negative headspace, make sure to give yourself a break. It’s not healthy for anyone to be cooped up in a house all day. 

Take advantage of the time you save not needing to drive to and from the office. Go for a jog or schedule a ‘coffee date’ with a friend. This allotted time is your chance to refresh your mind and body and find relaxation in a new form. During your brief recess or after work hours, make sure you step aside from your designated work area and keep all work accessories out of sight.

Eliminate Distractions & Facilitate Efficiency

Do you get easily distracted during your workday? Whether it is by your family members or roommates in your home or the neighbor’s dog, the noise around can have a tremendous impact on your work output. Some of the quickest and most effective solutions include purchasing noise-canceling headphones or playing white noise in the background. Suppose your distractions stem more from your phone applications or surfing the web for the latest news updates, sports updates, or shopping deals. In that case, you may benefit from setting certain internet restrictions for yourself and muting your phone notifications. The Internet has quite the knack of luring you in for numerous minutes at a time. Alternatively, for the more easily motivated and solution-oriented individuals, write out a ‘to-do’ list for your day and week and keep it in front of you as you progress through the day.

What sparks your headspace for creative thinking? Maybe it is a morning workout/stretches, a full meal, some good music, or simply writing down your goals each day. Regardless of what it may be, opening up these creative outlets is critical to facilitating productivity and elevating your overall wellbeing. 

Wrap Up

Working from a home office can often blur lines between our personal and professional lives. If you have noticed a blend between the two or a dip in job performance, these steps will begin to restore productivity as long as you have the intentionality and initiative to do so. While working from home has strong capabilities in improving upon an employee’s mental health, productivity, and work-life balance, those culminations can only occur when true effort transpires.

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Five Monday Motivation Quotes to Jump Start Your Week

If you are anything like me, you probably spend way more time on social media than you should. For those of you who pay attention to the hashtags themed to a specific day of the week, Monday Motivation is always a popular one to get your week started—as it is always among the top trends (nearly 90,000 tweets as of the writing of this article) each and every Monday.

Though some posts may be cliché to some, there are people out there who really get into the Monday Motivation scene. Since I am one of those people, I felt a good way to help you get your week started would be to share my favorite five from Twitter.

If you feel like I missed one you really like, feel free to tweet them @NexGoal and we will make sure to include your most motivational posts in next week’s article!

Branson, one of the most successful in business in the world, shows a mindset of everything just being part of living. Work and play are not separate entities, they are part of his life.

Kobe Bryant recently retired from the NBA and has a few words to say on how he will move to his next passion.

In the first of two Bennett posts from the day, adversity is something we all will deal with. You just have to be able to dig out.

Growing up, we are often taught to weigh risks in order to determine if they are worth it. For some, this causes us to not take risks at all…which is the root of this quote. You fail everything you do not try.

Going back to Bennett for the final quote, you cannot achieve your dreams if you do not try to achieve them. This is pretty simple and applies to everyone.

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How Job Seekers Can Stay Motivated During a Job Search

Since starting our Motivation Monday series, the staff here at NexGoal has provided motivational quotes, success stories and more to get your week started. If you have missed any of our previous articles, head on over to the Motivation Monday page and take a look at some of the great posts.

As the calendar gets ready to turn to May, job seekers may find themselves with less of a desire to sit in front of a computer screen and apply for jobs with the nice weather outside—and who can blame them? Many of you are currently spending eight-plus hours at the office, the last thing you want to do is come home and sit in front of a computer screen for another few hours while it is beautiful outside.

At this point, many job seekers will be caught between a rock and a hard place. That new amazing career opportunity you have been seeking is not going to just show up at your door, but at the same time the great weather is not going to wait for you either. If only there was a way to balance both.

Luckily for the job seekers reading this article, we have come up with three ways you can stay motivated when it comes to your job search and still have time to enjoy the beautiful weather in the coming months.

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Develop a Job Seeking Plan

This was mentioned in our “Three for Thursday” article as an important trait of job seekers, so it is important to start here. Developing a plan of action when it comes to your job search is the most important way to stay motivated. If you set goals to meet each week when it comes to jobs applied for, people to network with and follow-ups to send after applying and interviewing, it will help you stay on task and reach your goal of a new career.

The best thing about developing your plan is the ability to schedule when you want to perform these tasks. Instead of heading over to the local fast food restaurant for lunch, pack a lunch and do some job searching on a personal device during your lunch break at work. Want to spend time after work enjoying the beautiful weather? Schedule 30 minutes before bed to apply for a few of the jobs you identified in your research during lunch.

Do you need to be applying and searching every single day? Absolutely not. But if you have a solid plan of action and goals you want to reach, it will help keep you motivated for your job search.

Ignore Employment Hiring Statistics and Reports

One of the biggest deterrents for a job seeker is rejection. The second biggest deterrent is turning on the local news and seeing some random report stating companies are not hiring at this time—because it is simply not the case.

If you have been doing your research and following your plan from above, you know there are plenty of jobs and opportunities out there for you to achieve the next career challenge. Cutting out the background noise was likely an important part of your routine as a former athlete, do the same when it comes to your job search.

Watch This Motivational Video

Raise your hand if you do not enjoy a good motivational video. Yeah, that’s what I thought—nobody raised their hand, because in the era of YouTube and Vine, we all love a good motivational video.

Your motivational video this week is courtesy of the University of Connecticut’s Center for Career Development, and UConn poet Zachary Johnson. Though you are not a student at UConn, this video has a lot of good suggestions to get you ready to attack your job search like a pro.

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Kamerion Wimbley Prepared for Life After NFL Before He Retired

Too often when it comes to professional athletes, we hear stories of downward spirals when their playing days are over. One of the most powerful stories delivered to drive home this message was in an ESPN 30 for 30 titled “Broke” that debuted a few years ago.

However, what you do not hear often enough is the story about the professional athlete who was able to find success off the field during and after their career. Well today, that is exactly what you are going to read in regard to former first-round NFL Draft pick, Kamerion Wimbley.

Since NexGoal is based out of the Cleveland area, many of us are very familiar with where Wimbley’s career started—as he was the No. 13 overall pick in the 2006 NFL Draft by our very own Cleveland Browns. Wimbley spent the first four years of his NFL career here with the Browns before he was traded to the Oakland Raiders in 2010.

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The Florida State product would then spend two years in Oakland (2010 and 2011) before signing a five-year contract with the Tennessee Titans for $35 million in 2012. Wimbley would only play three years of that five-year contract with the Titans, deciding to retire from the game in May of 2015 at 31-years old.

While many people were judging whether or not 53.5 sacks in nine seasons in the NFL was enough to consider his NFL career a success, Wimbley was focusing on setting himself up for success off the field. In fact, he was preparing for life after football before he was even drafted by the Cleveland Browns in 2006.

According to an article from the NFL Player Engagement website, Wimbley found his inspiration from watching other Florida State alumni and NFL players (Peter Boulware, Corey Simon and Andre Wadsworth) do the same in their careers. Wimbley stated, “All three of those gentlemen were successful at some point in their football careers and were able to transition to life after football and still be successful. I watched the way that they did it and followed the blueprint that they put out there before me.”

Kamerion Wimbley Career Transition

Kamerion Wimbley began making his career transition long before his NFL days ended. Image Credit: NFL Player Engagement

Why did Wimbley begin setting up life after the NFL before he even started playing?

“It was very important for me to leave the NFL on my own terms,” Wimbley said. “I think in a lot of cases you’ll see guys who were not ready to leave the game of football and they have a tough time dealing with it afterward. There are some challenges that exist in transitioning from the NFL into civilian life.”

Wimbley continued, “For us in the NFL, a lot of stuff was productivity based. So even when you’re not playing football you still need, well, at least for me, I’m highly competitive, I needed a place where I could compete and let some of that competitive energy out. For me it just happened to be being a business owner.”

Ready to begin your transition to a career after sports? Start here! 

For an athlete with a competitive drive, Wimbley did not settle to win in just one business area either—he chose three. He owns a restaurant in Wichita called “Wings and Things,” a barbershop called “Twice as Nice” and a company that provides education and documentation for dogs known as Bully Breeds called the “Bull Breed Coalition Registry.” On top of  all of those ventures, he has the Kamerion Wimbley Foundation which is “focused on developing character, literacy and general well-being of the young and young adults in Wichita,” according to the article.

Why was it important for Wimbley to have this plan laid out for himself? Well, it was simply a numbers game for the former Seminole.

“I knew that the lifespan of an NFL player, in terms of their playing years, is very short. They used to tell us we’ve got pretty much an average of a three-year time span. Once you’re done with football, a lot of people don’t know what to do. I wanted to get started early so the foundation would already be there when I was done and I didn’t have to try to build everything from the ground up. It would already exist and so I could basically just walk right into it and get started.”

How Wimbley’s Story Can Motivate You

One of the keys in the entire article, which you can read the full version of here, is that Wimbley recognized his first career was not going to be his only one. He took steps to secure his future early on in his professional career, and set up a transition plan for the day he decided to take off the cleats and walk away from the game of football.

While you may or may not be a former professional athlete, the message is the same. We all need to prepare for our future one way or another. Whether that is outlining the career path you want to take, having a proper financial plan or some other aspect, you cannot simply live in the moment anymore when it comes to your career.

Like Wimbley, you may have passions aside from your daily job—and these passions could one day become that daily job if you do things correctly. It is never too early to start planning for that future, and having that plan laid out is the difference-maker when it comes to preparing for your life after sports.

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How Inky Johnson Found Motivation After Life Altering Incident

Usually in our Monday Motivation article, the team here at NexGoal writes an in-depth piece breaking down some aspect of the workplace and how you can utilize it to find motivation and take your career to the next level. These posts have been great, however, our inspiration comes from another source this week.

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While scrolling through Twitter over the weekend, the below video was retweeted into my timeline. It was the story of how former Tennessee Volunteer standout defensive back, Inky Johnson, was on a hopeful path to the NFL—but one hit would change all of that and alter his life in a way he never expected.

Writing the story out does not do his story justice, so you should take the time to watch Johnson tell it in the video below. But as you are watching, I would like to drive home a few key points from Johnson’s story that can apply to your own life.

• No matter how big of a life-blow you are dealt, you have the power to come back from it.
• If a work task seems too challenging at first, take a step back and a deep breath and look at where you can start to accomplish it. Johnson did not get to where he is now overnight.
• At any point if you do not like your current situation, you have the power to change it with hard work and dedication.

We hope you enjoy this video and Johnson’s story. If you would like to share your own motivational story or form of inspiration in your life, email us here.

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