Guest Post By:
Joe Pawlikowski

Have your eating habits changed since you started working at home? They almost certainly have. The environment of your home is so different than that of your office that you likely have made many behavioral changes. Now that you have a full kitchen just a few steps away, rather than a shared office kitchen, you have almost certainly changed the way you eat.

Is it for the better?
Working from home provides us with an opportunity to get healthy. Yet so many people who work from home take it as an opportunity to change their eating habits for the worse. With snacks available all the time, and without fear of looking like a pig in front of co-workers, all too many at-home workers indulge themselves a bit too often. The results can be disastrous.

The downsides of poor diet are far-reaching. We all know the risks of high cholesterol. So why would someone who works from home, who has considerably more flexibility than an office worker, choose to eat unhealthily? Here are five tips to cut those excuses and find yourself on a healthy path.

1. Plan your weekly meals

The simplest and most effective way to change your habits is to create a plan in advance. When changing eating habits, that means laying out a week’s worth of meals before the week starts. I do this every Sunday before going to the supermarket. It’s a 10- to 15-minute process that makes a huge difference.

Just grab a pad and pen, creating labels for each day of the week and each meal. Make sure to account for a potential snack as well. Once you list what you plan to eat that week, you can then make your grocery list. At that point you’ll have no choice but to stick with your plan. If you planned for healthy meals, you’ll start benefitting immediately.

2. Discipline at the supermarket

Want to eat the unhealthiest foods possible? You have two choices. First, order fast food. Second, go to the grocery store without a list. There are so many temptations in each aisle that you’ll not only find your cart stocked with unhealthy foods, but you’ll also find a huge bill at the checkout. Discipline, then, is key at the supermarket.

Your list is your first line of defense. The second is one that might seem odd: stay out of the middle aisles. Most supermarkets have their produce and meat departments around the perimeter. Those are your healthy zones. The breads, pastas, and other starchy and sugary foods in the middle aisles will only derail you. That’s not to say you should avoid them altogether. But make sure that you spend the majority of your time looking for whole and natural foods.

3. Prepare ahead

Making a healthy salad for lunch might sound like a great idea, but it can become a chore once lunchtime hits. If you’re assembling a new salad, you have plenty of tasks ahead: washing and chopping lettuce, choosing the ingredients, chopping vegetables, and more. It might not sound like a lot, but it can take 20 minutes. That’s a significant investment for lunch preparation. The solution: prepare meals ahead of time.

On Sunday I like to grab three large tupperware containers and make salads for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Then on Wednesday night I make them for Thursday and Friday. This way when the time comes to eat, I just pull the salad out of the fridge. By making the salads on my own time, rather than work time, I feel better about them. It also ensures that I’ll actually eat them.

4. Simplify meals

Perhaps the biggest obstacle people face when cooking is ingredients overload. Look around the web for recipes, and you’ll see some with six, seven, eight ingredients. Too many ingredients not only means buying all those ingredients at the store, but it also makes preparation time that much longer. Truth is, you can make extremely tasty and healthy food with just four ingredients. This is a nearly universal rule.

Ignore recipes that seem overly complex. Stick with simple ones that require three or four ingredients, plus pantry items such as seasonings, spices, and oils. By sticking with the simple meals you’re cutting friction, which helps keep you on track. Too much friction — i.e., too many ingredients — can derail you.

5. Enjoy leftovers

Do you usually cook dinner for two? You should start cooking dinner for at least three. Cook dinner for four? Add a fifth or sixth to your table. Those extras can go a long way. Just imagine eating a healthy lunch that you simply pulled out of the refrigerator and heated up. Wouldn’t that increase your chances of eating healthy?

Many people scratch their heads when trying to find healthy lunch options. Salads are nice, yes, but many people, especially those with poor eating habits, just can’t eat a salad every day. A sandwich now and then is fine, but sandwiches every day for lunch is overkill. The solution is in last night’s dinner. It’s easy to make an extra serving. Do that and you’ll have a healthy lunch that took you virtually no time to prepare (since you were preparing that meal anyway).

About The Author
Joe Pawlikowski has worked from home for the last six years, and has changed his eating habits for the better. He sometimes writes about food on his personal blog, A New Level.

Guest Post By:
John Gower

For many people, working from home is the holy grail of career freedom and luxury. Being able to tackle your workload while staying home with young children or taking breaks during the day to get groceries is the ultimate in workplace independence, not to mention the lack of a commute.

But making the transition from working in a more structured, sometimes rigid, office environment to working steps away from your ever-inviting bed or sofa can be difficult. While it can be tempting to work in your pajamas all day simply because you can, not everyone can perform without a solid routine.

Keeping yourself on task and as productive as in-office employees is essential to making a work-from-home arrangement feasible.

To help ensure your home office stays as efficient as the actual office, here are a few tips to make your work days at home more industrious.

Find and Perfect Your Work Space

Having a peaceful, tidy area that is dedicated strictly to work helps create a boundary in your home.

Using an extra room that you can dedicate to work is ideal, but not every home affords such a luxury. If space is more constricted in your home, find a corner somewhere that you can devote just to work. Set up a desk and supportive chair, and consider placing a partition between your workspace and the rest of the room.

Keeping your work area free from distractions is essential to maintaining productivity at home. While setting up the laptop on your bed may be tempting, just think of how easy it would be to turn on the television, recline and doze off from that position.

Create a strict boundary between work life and home life that you can cross only at designated breaks to maintain a working mindset.

Set Strict Hours

The temptation to sleep in is high when you don’t have to shower, look your best and commute to work in the morning, but sleeping in can be a slippery slope. Sleeping past normal work hours, usually 8 or 9am, can have adverse effects on your body clock and work ethic, and can end with you working well past work hours to make up unfinished assignments.

Setting a work schedule should be the first step in the transition to a home office. You may not have a boss waiting for you to walk in the front door in the morning, but chances are you still have co-workers waiting for your work.

Be sure to discuss your new arrangement with your boss and co-workers to understand when they expect your assignments to be in their inboxes. They may also want you to be on call for meetings, Skype calls or other random communications throughout the day, so be sure to keep your phone on and make yourself available during work hours.

Establish a Routine

Once you know whether or not you have to stick to the standard nine-to-five schedule, you can create a daily routine that will keep you on track.

Some people can wake up, plop down in front of the computer and hit “go” on their work days immediately. Not everyone is able to make harsh transitions so easily, though.

One helpful trick is to give yourself time to get ready for your work day in the morning, even if the office you go to might just be a desk next to your bed.

Your body and your mind need time to adjust to being awake and alert. Take a shower, make breakfast, drink your coffee, read the newspaper – give your brain a chance to wake up so that you can be sharp when your morning routine is over and it’s time to get to work.

Another crucial pattern to establish is a set break schedule. Not everyone needs breaks at the same time. Experiment to find out when you need to take breaks to be the most productive.

Maybe the standard 15-minute break in the morning and afternoon with a half hour lunch suits you perfectly. Or you might find that you work best with an early lunch and another half hour break in the afternoon. If timing is less of a factor, maybe you can give yourself an hour in the middle of the day to tackle housework, and then work an extra hour at the end of the day.

Whatever schedule turns out to suit you, stick to it; your body will adjust to the new habit and your co-workers will have a better idea when they can reach you.

Communicate with the Office

There is much debate over whether or not telecommuters are as efficient as in-office employees. Keep yourself available for check-ins as much as possible to let managers and co-workers know you are on top of your work even though you are not in the office.
Aside from keeping your cell phone handy at all times, consider also leaving your instant messenger or G-chat lines open so that it is easy for those working in-office to shoot quick questions your way.

Similarly, don’t feel that you have to wait for others to approach you. Be proactive in communicating with co-workers. Ask questions as they arise throughout the day, or simply send a “Good Morning” message to your boss over G-chat so that he or she can see you are at your computer and ready to work.

Not only do little acts and gestures like this show that you are being productive while at home, they also work to keep you connected to the rest of the staff, maintaining a team feeling even when all the players are not in one place.

About the Author
John Gower is a writer for NerdWallet, a personal finance website dedicated to helping consumers find the best cd rates, free checking accounts, rewards credit cards and more.

Guest Post By:
Gabriela Acosta

Telecommuting, the act of reporting in for work and performing work duties from a location other than your company’s main office, is on the rise. One study showed that 83 percent of respondents work remotely for at least a part of the day, up from 43 percent in 2009. Most workers, when asked, consider working remotely a major perk and would rather have that option over perks like company-sponsored meals or extra vacation days. With the advent of relatively ubiquitous high-bandwidth internet connections, real-time collaboration software such as Skype and GoToMeeting, and fast smartphones, working remotely is definitely a major trend of business conduct in the 21st century.

Working remotely definitely has its challenges, though, and concerns about lost productivity, distraction and poor accountability do have merit. But there are some tested strategies that can help mitigate these concerns; here are some of them:

1. Create a Productive Space

One of the best ways to get in the zone is to make sure you have a dedicated workspace in your home office. It is critical that you choose a room with a door that you can shut, without access to your home phone, with clear expectations from your family members and housemates that this is your office space. It’s best to consider the office (even if it’s just a desk in the corner) a completely separate part of your home and to set that expectation firmly. Distractions from pets, doorbells, home phone calls, kids and spouses are all major issues that telecommuters face and mitigating them is the key to success. It can be especially challenging with toddlers and young children who simply can’t understand that when mommy is in her computer chair, it’s work time. Having a spouse or caregiver (even off-site) might be the key to making it work. Either way, having that special place in your home is crucial.

2. Calculate Success and Failures

There are some things that just don’t work as well remotely as they do in-person or face-to-face, and identifying those things is critical to telecommuting success. When you’re honest with your supervisor about what does and doesn’t work, and you have willingness to show up to the home base when required, it could make the difference between permission to telecommute and the dreaded “this isn’t working out.”

On the flip side, there are things that work much, much better remotely, especially for those who thrive with blocks of quiet focus time. It’s important to be able to clearly articulate to your supervisors why working remotely is beneficial to both you and your organization, beyond just “because I like it better.”

3. Set a Game Plan

It is very important to have a clear and concise telecommute plan, and to proactively communicate that plan with management. This could be as simple as a shared calendar that you are filling out regularly, to advanced task management and time-tracking software. Ask management to be proactive about helping you with this; when they know that you truly want to be accountable in order to keep your telecommute privileges, they’re much more likely to sign on to it.

4. Tackle the Hardest Tasks First

Working without the atmosphere of accountability that an office provides can bring some interesting new psychological barriers. It can be very easy to slip into the mindset that you can just knock stuff off your list in any order at your leisure. Often, the result is that all the easiest, least time-consuming tasks get wiped off your list and you feel super accomplished, even while experiencing looming anxiety at the big project that you keep putting off. Managing distractions is definitely important to mitigate this, but more important, just tackle the big things first. From that point on, it’s all coasting downhill and following through makes you look like a hero and helps you feel much more accomplished. Consider it saving the best for last!

5. Set Time Limits

It’s very important to personal and family health that people leave the office at a set time every day, and for most people that works well, but don’t forget to keep to the same regimen at home. It can be very simple to slip into the “I’ll just get this one last thing done” mindset, and before you know it, you’re sitting there in your pajamas at 11:30 at night “wrapping up.” Give yourself a firm schedule at home just like you would at the office, and stick to it.
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Telecommuting is a drastic change in the traditional business model, and as a society, we’re all still figuring it out and getting used to it. But the benefits are clear — as long as you make it work for both you and your employer.

About the Author

Gabriela D. Acosta is the community manager for the MSW@USC, which is one the University of Southern California social work programs. She also works closely with Social Work License Map, a guide on how to become a social worker. She is passionate about social justice, community development and empowering individuals to learn the skills necessary to be successful in their careers.