5 Hacks to Improve Your Home Office Productivity

5 Hacks to Improve Your Home Office Productivity The experts at GlassDoor.com have put together a list of suggestions to improve your working-from-home productivity! The independence is priceless but the distractions are endless- these tips will help you make the most out of working from the couch or coffee shop in your sweats.1. Have an Office SpaceThe couch is your enemy when youre working from home. No, hear me out! The couch is where you watch TV, read, snooze, cuddle with loved ones, put your feet up. Your brain is wired to unspool when you feel its comfy embrace.Even if its just a basic dining room chair and a laptop desk, try to carve out a dedicated office space in your home. My husband and I each have ownership of a corner of the living room, and I rearrange my desk and bookcase configuration every 6 months or so to keep it fresh since I get tired of staring at the same walls all day.2. Schedule Your Work WeekThis one has been huge for me as I start a full-time freelance and teaching  schedule- I have to plot out deadlin es for my classes and fit freelance writing and editing projects in around those. If I dont know whats coming, I wont know when I need to pull a late night and when its okay to knock off early.Every week, take a few minutes to plan ahead- its vital time well-spent that will save you stress and scrambling down the line.3. Have a Regular RoutineThe beauty of working at home is that if I wanted, I could work from noon to 8 p.m. and lounge around every morning. But  Ive found that while I am the worlds crankiest morning person, getting up early, walking the dog, having breakfast and coffee, working diligently from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., and then doing smaller, less demanding projects in the afternoon hours is the way to go.Come up with some rituals that replace the morning commute (mine is an extra long shower), and reward yourself with a trip to the kitchen or the corner store when youve accomplished your goals for the day.4. Know Your MotivationThere is something about noise-canceling he adphones that immediately puts me in a ready-to-work mindset. Even if the apartment is quiet, confining my senses to my immediate surroundings helps me zero in on the work at hand.Figure out what motivates you to buckle down. Is it consistency? Variety? Do you need a different coffee shop table every day of the week or are you better off wearing a groove in your home office floor from sitting in the same spot?5. Get in a Working MindsetA tricky part about the omnipresence of Gchat or texting when you work from home is that you can actually stay just as connected to your friends at work as you could when you shared office space. Sometimes my husband works from home and I wind up relocating to the bedroom because Ive gotten so used to the empty space around me.Figure out how to filter out the distractions that might derail you- and remember, you are the only one responsible for getting your work done! Be gentle with yourself as you adjust, be realistic about what you can take on, and dont be afraid to draw firm work-life boundaries. Just because your home office is right next to your couch station is no reason you have to be on call 24/7!And truthfully, working from home isnt for everyone. There are likely co-working spaces near you where you can set up shop on a weekly or monthly basis if you find you need a background hum of things happening.

Good Pandora Stations for Homework and Studying

Good Pandora Stations for Homework and Studying Almost everyone has a smartphone these days, and with it comes the ability to rock out to music whenever the mood strikes. Since Pandora Internet Radio is probably the most well-known place to grab free music on the go, and tons of students love to listen to music while they study, it only stands to reason that people might need some advice about choosing the best Pandora stations for studying and homework. Genre Pandora Stations When you log in to Pandora, you can choose an artist, a genre, or a song to get started. A musical genre is simply a style of music. Rock is a genre. So is punk. So is jazz. Pandoras site does have genres such as country and classical and hip-hop, and it also has a set of genres that have more to do with the overall emotional flavor of a collection of music rather than a particular genre. Pandora has a comprehensive and frequently updated genre list that you can browse to get started. Since researchers are at least agreed that quieter music without lyrics is the most conducive music to study to (barring no music at all), here are a few genre Pandora stations that may be ideal for you to study by. Some are instrumental only, and they cover a wide range of musical styles. Instrumentals Fifteen million listeners cant be all wrong: in Pandoras Instrumentals genre youll find everything from Dr. Dre to bluegrass to techno to jazz. These instrumentals are basically tracks from some of the top names in the business without the words to mess with your brain space; theres even a specific station called Instrumentals for studying. Quiet Tracks Willing to risk some lyrics? Pandora has three muted genres that might work for you. Pandoras Wind Down genre includes a collection of stations such as the Buddha Bar, with surreal lyrics, modal harmonies, and a slow-moving bass line. The Chill genre contains stations that are mostly acoustic playlists, with an emphasis on calm, sedate music. Styles range from coffeehouse-style folk music to pop music versions to classics, country, and indie channels. Pandoras Easy Listening channels include the light side of movie soundtracks, show tunes, cool jazz, solo piano, and light rock. New Age and Classical Pandoras New Age genre has several channels perfect for taking your anxiety over that deadline down a notch or two. Here youll find music suitable for relaxation, spa, ambient, and a whole range of subareas of New Age music types: instrumental, acoustic, solo piano, and beats. Just dont fall asleep. The Classical genre has a number of good channels that might trip your studying trigger: classical guitar, symphonies, renaissance, baroque. A  Classical for Studying Radio  channel promises a New Age aesthetic and an overall meditative sound. and a channel for Work might also do the ticket. In the End, Its All Between the Ears Its quite possible that some people do better with background music: people have different tastes, different study habits, and different ways of handling noise and distraction. Surveys of students themselves often say music helps them concentrate, keeps them company, alleviates boredom, and helps them learn faster. With free music sources like Pandora and Spotify, selecting the exact music you need might actually be a distraction in itself. Is Music While Studying Even a Good Idea? A few scientific studies have been conducted on the effect of music or other background noise on maintaining concentration. Most report that the best studying environment of all is silence. Since all music processing uses cognitive capacity, the theory goes, listening to music could impair task performance involving your brain. Most of the studies, however, have been relatively unsystematic and somewhat inconclusive, because so much depends on an individual students preferences and study habits, and the enormous number of musical genres available. If students study with music playing, they seem to perform better when the music is calm and they dont engage with the music. In other words, dont sing along, for example, or dont pick music that you either dont like or like too much. Your emotional response to music does add to the distraction value: music that is too stimulating or too sleep-inducing will also be a distraction. So: if you are the kind of student who needs music as a background to study, to act as white noise to keep other peoples voices or the radiators banging or personal worries out of your head, keep it low enough that you wont actually pay much attention to it. If you find yourself singing along, change the station. Sources Cassidy, Gianna, and Raymond A.R. MacDonald. The Effect of Background Music and Background Noise on the Task Performance of Introverts and Extraverts. Psychology of Music 35.3 (2007): 517-37. Print.Furnham, Adrian, and Lisa Strbac. Music Is as Distracting as Noise: The Differential Distraction of Background Music and Noise on the Cognitive Test Performance of Introverts and Extraverts. Ergonomics 45.3 (2002): 203-17. Print.Hallam, Susan, John Price, and Georgia Katsarou. The Effects of Background Music on Primary School Pupils Task Performance. Educational Studies 28.2 (2002): 111-22. Print.Kotsopoulou, Anastasia, and Susan Hallam. Age Differences in Listening to Music While Studying. 9th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. University of Bologna, 2006. Print.Kotsopoulou, Anastasia, and Susan Hallam. The Perceived Impact of Playing Music While Studying: Age and Cultural Differences. Educational Studies 36.4 (2010): 431-40. Print.Umzdas, Serpil. An Analysis of t he Academic Achievement of the Students Who Listen to Music While Studying. Educational Research and Reviews 10.6 (2015): 728-32. Print.