Today is the day that I will do the same thing, in the same way, for the same amount of time.

Today is the day I will fight the tide of change by focusing on my goals, not those of my customers.

Today is the day that I will assume the solutions to my problems lie with the same tactics I tried yesterday.

Today is the day I will speak to the same few colleagues, instead of my customers.

Today is the day I will ignore customer research and behavior data, and hope that what I am doing works.

Today is the day I will blame my customers for not seeing the value in what I am offering them.

Or, will you wake up on Monday and think to yourself:

Today is the day I will listen.

Today is the day I will think critically about the needs of my customers, and collect as much data and observe as much behavior as possible.

Today is the day I will start with the need and end with a product – not start with a product and try to imagine a need.

Today is the day I will focus only on tasks and processes that help the customer, and reconsider the return-on-investment of my efforts.

Today is the day I will focus more on giving, and less on taking.

Today is the day that I will remember we are all in this together.

Today is the day I will see my challenges as opportunities.

Today is the day that I will be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Today is the day that I won’t stand on the sidelines, won’t wait for others to come up with ideas, and won’t be the last to volunteer.

Today is the day I will realize that your problems are my problems.

Today is the day that I will not blame – and I will understand that we can accomplish amazing things, if we don’t care who gets the credit.

Today is the day that I will try to make customers and co-workers smile.

Today is the day that I become essential to helping my customers realize their goals.

Today is the day that I will matter.

I work from home full time, and it has improved my career for two reasons:

1. I am wildly more productive.
2. I am dramatically less stressed.

Both of these things make me a better employee, and allow me to focus intently on helping the company I work for succeed. So today I want to look at the reasons why working from home might be able to help you, and share some tips on how to make it work.

When I tell people I work from home, I generally get one of two reactions:

1. Complete jealousy.
2. A sad look of disapproval that says they think I just committed career suicide.

I have worked from home full time for close to two years, and had done so one day a week for a year prior to that. I work in online publishing, in a corporate role that has me working across 40 brands based in 6 major U.S. locations.

The Benefits of Working from Home

• Become a More Productive Employee
  
  When you remove the distractions of a typical commute and office life – you are left with total, complete focus on getting your job done. I find that not only do I do more work, but I am able to complete my projects to the degree of quality they deserve.

  Again and again people tell me that their "plate is full" at work. The implication is not just that they are trying to do too many things, but that they know they are only getting them done to the most minimal levels of acceptance.

  Imagine if you could do more in terms of quantity, and do more in terms of quality – that you are living up to 100% of your potential, or at least something close to it. That is what working from home has given me. Simply put: I am a better employee and better serve my company by working from home.

• Gain Hours Each Day
  
  When I travel into my office, I have an average commuting time of about an hour and a half door to door. Even though the train ride itself takes only 45 minutes or so, getting to the train, waiting for it, and walking to the office once I get off the train adds considerable time. If the train is late, which is not uncommon, things get stretched out even further.

  When eliminating commuting time, I save at least 3 hours each day. When you count prep time in the morning and that first half hour of unwinding when I get home at night, that adds another hour or more of formerly unproductive time each day.

  What’s more: the hours spent preparing for the commute and the commute itself are hours full of distractions, which takes my focus off the things that matter most during the day: helping my company become more successful.

  The benefits of this time extends even further: this is 3+ hours that I can do more work, take better care of myself, focus more on my family, and become a better member of my community.

  I tend to go into the office one day a week for meetings, yet I still gain about 600 hours a year by not commuting the other 4 days. That is literally an extra 25 days a year I just gained!

• Reduce Stress Levels
  
  When you remove the distractions of commuting, of maintaining an office, of the unproductive aspects of office life – it is astounding how much it shifts your mood. I am a very positive person, and usually full of energy and passion for my work, even when commuting. Yet, I couldn’t believe how my world changed when I began working from home.

  Think about a typical workday when I commute:

  • Wake-up, shower, shave, iron, get dressed.
  • Pack my bag for work.

  • Make sure the house is left in decent condition and nothing is left on that will burn it down. (I am paranoid in this regard.)
  • Walk a mile to the train.
  • Wait 5-10 minutes for the train.
  • Find a seat on the train (not always simple.) Sit on train for 45-50 minutes.
  • Be herded with thousands of other people in Penn Station.
  • Walk close to a mile to work, stopping off for a muffin.
  • Unpack my bag.

  • Go to the bathroom.
  • Boot up my computer, say hello to those I pass, get a napkin and cup of water.
  • Just for fun, let’s assume it was raining this day too.
  • NOW, I get to start work.

  On the flip side, you have this same scenario reversed on the commute home. Now let’s consider my day when I work from home:

  • Wake up, shave, shower, get dressed.
  • Boot up my computer and start working.

  The difference is mind-boggling. For a morning person like me, it means that I can give my company the most attention at my most productive hours of the day, instead of wasting those hours running around, or sitting bored on a train.

• Avoid the Dilbert Moments of Office Life
  
  I do not mean to sound negative here, because I am a very social person, love my coworkers, and appreciate how the nuances of office life can move business forward.

  But let’s face it, a TV show like "The Office" and comic like Dilbert resonate with so many people for a reason: because they are true.

  I go into the office one day a week for meetings, and it allows the best of both worlds. When home, I can have targeted communication with my coworkers via phone, online meetings or email. When in the office, my days are scheduled completely, ensuring that each interaction has a purpose, and is given the time it deserves.

  There are many good things to office life – such as Google’s belief that small teams that work closely are the best way for projects to move forward. I can’t argue with that, but I can say each role and each company is different.

  Other proponents of office life will talk about the unstructured aspects of bumping into people in the kitchen, and how it creates cross-pollination of ideas. Pixar famously designed their office to promote this.

  In my experience, I have found that many of those kitchen conversations to be pleasant, but don’t do much to move the company closer to it’s goals.

  Please don’t think that I don’t value the social aspects of office life. Anyone who I work with will tell you differently. I make an active effort to reach out to people from different departments and roles other than my own. I believe in cross- pollination of ideas, but am not going to rely on the same 12 second kitchen interaction with the same 6 people to move our company in the direction it needs to go.

• It’s the ‘Green‘ Thing to Do
  
  Yes, the train still runs if I am not on it, and no, my company doesn’t unscrew a single light bulb when I am not there. But, at least I save on the electricity costs of ironing each morning!

  Seriously: technology has provided us amazing communication and productivity tools, yet society still runs in inefficient ways for social reasons. I am not at all asking for a revolution – I realize working from home full time simply won’t work for plenty of folks.

  But what if a company offered this option one day a week to their employees. Could they cut down on electrical costs, commuting costs, emissions, etc by 20%? Perhaps. Maybe it would just be 10%. But that’s a great start.

• More Quality Time With Family
  
  When you remove commuting time, you not only gain more hours to work, but you gain more quality time with family. When you end your workday, you don’t have to start an exhausting commute – you can effortlessly shift focus to family life.

  I have found that my personal life is in dramatically better order now that I work from home. Dishes are done, bills paid instantly, bed always made, carpet always vacuumed, and no piles of paperwork and projects I am trying to get too.

  When considering the extreme demands of managing kids – the affects are even more dramatic.

• Save Money
  
  Commuting isn’t cheap. There are hard costs like gas, tolls, or train tickets. There are soft costs like wear and tear on your car, or how often you go through an expensive pair of shoes on all those walks to the train. If you drive to work – imagine if you drove 15,000 fewer miles a year.

  Food costs also add up (and I would argue, it is more difficult to eat healthy when on the move.) Coffee, bagel, sandwich, snack… it adds up quickly.

  There are costs on the other end of things too, for your company, to light/heat/cool/clean your space.

  I typically go into the office one day a week, yet I still manage to save thousands of dollars each year in commuting and food costs. I estimate I save around $3,000 a year in commuting and food costs.

These benefits might differ for you, based on your role, personal and professional life. But let’s say you are going to try out working from home one day a week – here are some tips to get things started.

Tips for Working From Home

• Setup a Work Area
  
  
  I have heard this repeated by others who work from home – have a space in your home that is just for work. It helps keep you focused, and is a signal to your family that you are not to be disturbed.

  I have a large empty desk that I use. It is always empty, and when I work, contains only my laptop. I went paperless awhile back, so that helps.

  We don’t own a TV, and decorate very sparingly, so the room has no other distractions. Nothing in terms of entertainment, and no personal to-do’s to capture my attention.

  I setup a large mirror in front of the desk that reflects the light from the window, which is important for me – I never liked working in a cave, even if that cave was an office on Park Avenue in New York City. Humans need sunlight, in my opinion.

  The only other thing on my desk is my cell phone, which I use frequently to stay connected with those I work with across the country.

• Create a Schedule and Set Goals
  
  Undoubtedly, working from home requires discipline and a passion for your work. There are no external cues that you are now a "role," and meant to act in only professional ways. Unlike Batman, you don’t get to change into a costume.

  I create a loose schedule each week, and goals each day. I am very strict in judging how much I deliver to my company’s goal’s each week.

  Likewise, it is important to take scheduled breaks, to get away from that desk during your lunch break. If you want to do personal stuff during your lunch break, do it on your personal computer, and away from your "work area."

  I find I work more and work harder. I set higher standards for myself because I am paranoid about ever feeling "out of the loop."
  

• Stay Connected
  
  People are afraid of "out of sight, out of mind," – that if their coworkers don’t see them working hard each day, that their jobs will be at risk. So you have to actively work to keep in sight, and there is no better way to do this than delivering on your objectives and helping the company reach their goals.

  To stay a part of the office social circle, you have to become an expert communicator. Pick up the phone instead of replying to every email; make scheduled weekly or monthly visits to your office; go out to lunch with colleagues; make it a point to meet new people within your company.

  I am a strong believe in teamwork, and understand how in-person meetings and events can have benefits that virtual meetings can’t. Make it a point to schedule these meetings – to meet with colleagues. But do so efficiently, scheduling them all on the same day during the week.

• Get Active
  
  When you aren’t forced to leave the house each day, you have to be mindful of your health. Take a walk in the morning, at lunch or in the evening. Go to the gym. Eat healthy. You can even consider working from a cafe or park on occasion – people are social animals.
  

I remember having dinner with friends awhile back, and one of them asked with a smirk on their face: "Do you get more or less work done at home?" I could tell they felt I might just be goofing off all day. Before I could even answer, my wife cut in with this answer: "More work!" It felt good to hear that – that she saw the dedication and effort so dramatically.

I think the greatest barriers to working from home are not physical or technical barriers – but social barriers. It takes a certain level of trust between managers and their employees to begin a process like this.

I realize that working from home is not for everybody. But you might want to consider trying it out one day a week to see if it can work for you and your team. Even working from home a single day a week can have a dramatic affect on your career – helping your company meet its goals.

In the past couple of years, I have dramatically changed the way I work. The changes have made me more focused, more productive, less stressed, and overall: a better employee.

Today, I want to take you through four of these changes. Each may not be perfect for you, and I am always working to perfect them myself.

Email is Not Your Friend

It is easy to spend the whole day trying to keep up with email, and yet, accomplish nothing. This is a huge problem for companies, as workers feel productive, feel stressed, yet spend too much time reacting, and not enough time focusing on projects that move the business forward.

Here are a few ways I have changed the way I deal with email:

• Demote the value of email.
  My life is not longer run by the whims of email. It is an essential tool, but I now focus much more on in-person and phone communications – and do everything possible to work on projects that contribute to the business goals – not in replying to email in a split second.

  A couple of weeks back, I talked about the streams of information that inundate our lives. For many people, email is top on this list. This needs to change.

• Reply to emails sparingly.
  Every email I send means I am getting 2 more back. So I try to be efficient and complete in emails that I send, avoiding those long email chains. I have a rule I try to go by: if an email chain gets past 3 rounds of replies, I pick up the phone.
• Embrace the phone.
  As often as I can, instead of replying to emails, I pick up the phone. I especially do this with people that I don’t work with that frequently in order to establish a closer relationship, and humanize our efforts.

  There are also practical reasons for this, For instance, if I am trying to schedule a meeting time between 3 people, it can easily take a dozen emails back and forth. Via phone, it takes 1 minute.

• An empty inbox is the goal.
  At the end of each week, I strive to have an empty inbox. This ensures that I start the next week focused on my essential projects, not on getting to 78 outstanding requests. These are tough economic times: the business I work for needs me looking to solve critical problems, not bogged down in basic requests that I should deal with efficiently.

• Turn off email, and manage it in batches.
  I get the most done when I shut down email for 2 hours. It gives me laser-like focus on the task at hand. In order to ensure I don’t miss any mission-critical communications, I have spent the past 2 years telling people that if they need something: call me. My phone number is blanketed everywhere I can – I am reachable 7 days a week, any time.

  Each day can be slightly different, but an average morning might look like this:

  • 8:30am-9:30am Check email, and take action on those that require it.
  • 9:30am-11am Turn off email and work on a single project. It could be diving deep into metrics, creating a new strategy, implementing that strategy or creating a presentation.
  • 11am-11:30 Work on a different project.
  • 11:30-Noon Check email again.

  It should be noted that my role is all about communication – at any given moment, I can have editors from 40+ brands sending requests to me, or 200+ bloggers who might need my help. And that is just one part of my role. And yet – without being chained to email, I am able to be responsive and helpful – instead of overwhelmed.

• Don’t use email defensively or aggressively.
  There is a whole high-school social structure to email that people rarely talk about. Some people want all communications to go through email so that they have a written account of everything. The theory here is that you can never accuse them of doing something wrong – or that they have proof if you do something wrong. In my opinion, this creates negative relationships with coworkers and business partners – and the serendipitous moments that occur in conversation never happen in electronic media like constant email.

  Second, there is a tactic that people use to "put the ball back in someone else’s court." So, if there is an email in your inbox that you don’t have time to get to, but don’t want to seem unhelpful, you can get rid of it by asking a question or making a request of the other person. This buys you time, yet makes you seem responsive. You can stretch out tasks for weeks by doing this.

• Flush the Blackberry.
  The social constructs behind Blackberry usage are fascinating. We all want to feel needed and essential, and the Blackberry fuels this desire. I would catch myself going to check my Blackberry at the oddest times: 5:30am on a Saturday morning; while on vacation; while at lunch with a friend. Why why why?! Who do I think I am? What do I think happened in the half hour since I left my office? Who is having an emergency at 5:30am on a Saturday, and decided to send an email, but not call?

  So, I have established some loose rules around Blackberry usage:
  Don’t check blackberry in the evenings or weekends: People should know that I am happy to help any day, any time: but that phone is the way to reach me. This means they are connecting with me instead of dumping work on me. I love chatting with bloggers I support on a Saturday morning – this isn’t work to me, because I truly want to help them.

  I am up extremely early 7 days a week, and stay up late enough to be able to answer the phone at any reasonable hour. Call me: 973-981-8882.

Clean Out Your Work Space

I am a huge fan of organization guru Peter Walsh who talks about people’s emotional relationship with stuff. I come from a family of "collectors" – we were stamp dealers in the 70′s, baseball card dealers in the 80′s and each of us has had more collections of stuff than I can remember.

For about 5 years now, I have been on the road to minimalism though – I simply got tired of dusting all my stuff, and spending my free time buying or selling stuff. Life should be lived.

I believe these issues come right into our work lives as well. I love walking around offices and seeing how much stuff is in people’s offices and cubes. There are several goals to this stuff: to seem busy and essential, and to make the space reflect each individual’s personality.

Here are a few things I have done to clear my desk, making room for the thing that matters most: getting things done.

• Clear your desk.
  I know that some people work well in chaos – their minds are wired differently than others. But for most people – all the junk on your desk is useless, and simply serves to get in the way of your future accomplishments.

  I work from home full time, and have a desk that is completely empty. When I am not working – nothing is ever on it. When I am working, only my laptop is on it. My files have been reduced to two thick folders, and even those, I am working to digitize.

  For years, I saved every paper – for fear that one day I would need it. But through several office moves, I realize something: it’s all garbage. So, that’s where I put it all. Unbelievably, in 2+ years time, there has never been a single instance where I would have needed anything in the files I threw away. This rings true for all the books I had in my office, extra office supplies, etc.

• Go paperless.
  To do this, I had to change a few habits, because it’s not easy to go paperless. Instead of relying on notepads to take notes in meetings or work through ideas and strategies, I now keep my iPhone or laptop with me to do these via digital files. The beauty of this system is that it is searchable – something my paper files NEVER were.

  When I ask colleagues for copies of presentations, I always ask for a digital version – and am diligent about going through any paperwork I do receive. Piles are the enemy. They don’t just clutter your desk – they clutter your mind.

• Keep things clean.
  This is about your health as much as simple good hygiene. Have you ever sat at someone else’s desk and been afraid to touch there mouse because it was just filthy? I have. Crumbs embedded between every key of their keyboard, rotting food in their drawers, dust everywhere. This is not healthy. This is not professional. Once a week, go through the papers on your desk, run a wet wipe across your keyboard, mouse, screen, and desk. It takes 5 minutes. Why do your hair each day, put on a nice outfit, only to sit in a filthy office?
• Don’t chain yourself to your desk.
  People seem to be training for an Olympic event of "logging in hours at their desks." This is a pointless exercise that makes some people feel superior, even though they don’t necessary get more done that their counterparts.

  Occasionally, work from a park, from a cafe, from a comfy chair, or from home. Work hours that make you the most productive. For me, I am a morning person, I have a ton of energy and ideas at first thing, so I tend to start work ASAP in the mornings. The fact that I work from home means that I get to spend my most productive hours working, instead of sitting through a stressful commute or – even worse – ironing.

  If you are in a competition with co-workers to get in earlier and leave later, then you need to reconsider the priorities of that work environment. Is the goal of the company to find real business growth, or simply log hours?

Be Aggressive About Task Management

Like everyone else I know – there are any of 200 things I should be doing on a given day. Each will make me feel productive, and meet someone’s expectation of me. But only a handful of these things will actually deliver results that will drive my company’s business forward. Here are some ways I have shifted how I reprioritized my tasks and projects:

• Stop doing 80% of what you do.
  I’m serious here. A couple of years back, I hit a point where I loved my job, but felt that I wasn’t accomplishing all that I was capable of. There was so much on my plate that I was never able to do anything 100%. I was doing 200 things, each of them just 70% as well as they should be done. It was horrible – loving what I do, but not feeling like I was living up to my own expectations.

  So I made some hard choices.

  I reviewed everything I was tasked with, and thought about the next 5 years. Where did my company need to be in 5 year’s time? What do I want to accomplish in my career – which projects will allow me to grow? Which processes seem essential, yet if I had to be honest – really aren’t?

  I read a quote recently that graveyards are full of people who are absolutely essential to their jobs. I don’t want to be one of those people who felt essential, but was not delivering all that I could to my company. I want to over-achieve.

  Dump projects that don’t deliver measurable results. If you aren’t measuring the value of each of your tasks in hard numbers, then you need to start doing so.

• Create a list of goals for each week, and each day.
  It’s so easy to get off track on business goals by responding to email, management fires and any of 100 other things. Set goals, and create an ever-evolving list of priorities for each week.

  This also helps set expectations with your manager. The last thing you want to do is work hard at your job, only to find out that your manager is disapointed because you didn’t meet his or her expectations. Understanding their priorities will make it easy to set your own.

  Perhaps you feel that your manager has given you 100 items, all of which are of equal priority, and would be impossible to do fully. This is your chance to reshift the conversation – to identify whether your career is better off doing 100 things poorly, or 20 things incredibly well.

• Keep track of your accomplishments.
  Each month, keep a list of your accomplishments. This serves several purposes:
  • It challenges you to have accomplishments. It also allows you to visualize a month ahead: what do you want to say that you have done in the next 30 days. What will make you essential to the business?
  • It feels good to look back at the month and see a list of everything you have contributed.

  • Send this list to your manager each month. It ensures that they are aware of your value, and helps them communicate their team’s accomplishments up to their manager. Whenever you can: share credit with as many people as possible – you don’t want to seem too self-serving here.
• Rethink your job every quarter.
  The world is changing quickly – and depending on your job, it is hard to stay relevant. Do you want to simply be employed, or do you want to be someone who stands out as a star performer at the office.

  Most people think that to do so, you need to log in more hours. That is the wrong mentality, and often the one that people follow most often when trying to get ahead.

  Instead of focusing on quantity at work – focus on quality. Instead of logging in more mindless hours, focus your resources with greater efficiency on the right projects.

  Don’t allow yourself to be defined by the mundane things you do to "keep the lights on." Push yourself into new areas. Find out what ideas your boss is most excited about, and work on pushing your skillset to delivering on them.

Be a Human Being, Not a Role

The people you work with are the most important people in your career. Treat them that way. I realize that every office can have a social and political culture not unlike The Office TV Show, but don’t get wrapped up in arbitrary boundaries that mimic High School.

Each of us has run into others who base their interactions as a cold process that you might not fit into. It is times like these that I remember one of my favorite quotes by Scott Johnson: "Caring is a powerful business advantage."

If you define your interactions based on your responsibilities, then you are missing out on creating relationships that will serve your business, and move your career forward.

Here are a few ways I have tried to be more helpful in my job:

• Meet new people often.

  Whenever I work with new people (which is frequently), I make an effort to learn about them – their personality, their needs, their goals, and their challenges. People that are particularly intriguing, I try to meet them for coffee, breakfast or lunch. Being forced to sit with someone for an hour takes conversations in wild new directions – and I have found that they are always meaningful places.

• Network within your company.

  People talk a lot about "networking," and I think that the biggest opportunity to do so is within your own company. What’s great about this is that it allows you to better serve your company, as you will have a deeper knowledge of the people, their roles, and how you can evolve your role to serve them better.

• Help.

  Help everyone you can. If you aren’t making people smile each day, then maybe you need to rethink your career.

• Never complain.
  Not about people – not about projects – not about things you are afraid of. I think it was Woody Allen who said that 99% of the things we worry about in our lifetime never actually happen. So stop complaining about them. It doesn’t make you seem more important, and won’t do anything to advance your career.

I hope some of this is helpful. Feel free to share your own productivity advice!