How to Be Productive if Your Sofa Has Become Your Office

It’s no secret: the landscape of traditional jobs has changed forever. Once ‘impossible to be completed from home’ jobs have migrated out of the office and onto the sofa.

Equipped with a laptop and copious cups of coffee, employees are transitioning to at-home working with relative ease (video call interruptions: optional). With the relocation of the formal office comes the introduction of ‘soft’ offices, together with a working wardrobe swapped in favor of tracksuits and sweaters.

But this change doesn’t stop at our clothes: some remote employees are dropping rigid office desk setups altogether, making sofas their ‘new normal’.

Working on your sofa, much like working from bed, doesn’t naturally breed productivity and motivation – it’s more likely to make you feel sleepy, relaxed, and pulled towards yet another boxset on Netflix. However, from the most prestigious medical malpractice attorneys to the most creative marketing professionals, many of us are working from home now.

So, if your new office setup features more cushions than it does tables, here’s how to keep your work ethic in check.

Remove distractions

There are some things you just can’t move – the TV, for example. But distancing yourself from the remote is something you can do.

Moving distractions out of your eye line does wonders for focus. So, a starter for ten – make your phone invisible. Keeping your phone in your pocket or just out of reach isn’t enough. The temptation to scroll and tap in idle moments will make you reach for it.

Put your phone on silent and in another room. This will stop you from breaking your spurts of work for some needless scrolling, and help you keep focused on the task at hand (which isn’t scrolling through Twitter).

Wear shoes

Hear me out – this is a vital point if the only place you can work in your home is your sofa. Wearing shoes inside the house might seem backward, but that’s exactly why this works.

The first thing you want to do when you get home from work is kick off your shoes and relax, But what do you do when you work from the place you live? Start your day as normally as possible, so put your shoes on. Then, when you have to work from the sofa, it’s not as easy to curl up under a blanket.

It adds routine and rigidity to your bodily experience, making the sofa just another place to sit and complete work. Once you’re finished for the day, throw off your shoes just like you would when you finally walk through your front door and relax into the evening.

You’ll feel more accomplished during the working day and your time to wind down in the evenings will feel satisfyingly separate and all the better for it.

Working from home is something we’re all having to get to grips with, and we don’t know how long this will go on. What you can be sure of is how you approach the situation and by employing these working techniques you can ensure you’re supercharging your working week to get the most out of your 9-5, even if the full eight hours are spent on your sofa.