How To Stay on Task While Working From Home

Event professionals' work hours are rarely spent in an official office environment; instead, they tend to work from home and on-the-go. The work hours of event planners are pretty much 24/7, so learning how to balance business time and off time can be tricky to say the least.

When working from home, the boundaries of "on" and "off" time often blur. Your home is your residence, your shelter, your safe-haven -- and when you spend a great deal of time working in your hearth and home, the risk of losing that sanctuary quality increases quite significantly.

Whether you're just starting out or you're an established event guru, balancing home life and work life can challenging at times. Yet, with a little practice and determination, any event professional can master the art of working from home.

Working from home comes with the perk of having no commute (other than the long walk to the coffee maker), but there are downsides, perhaps the worst of which are the innumerable distractions in your home. No need to worry! Below is some advice on how to stay laser-beam-focused on your business, even when you're at home.

1. Television

Figure out the right amount of television for you. So many times we tell ourselves, “No television while working!” -- but if it helps to watch a little bit in between bursts of work, or to have it on in the background, that's perfectly okay. As long as you’re productive, what does it matter?

However, if you know that you are powerless to the allure of the television, try placing the remote somewhere inconvenient to retrieve; this way it isn’t easy to turn it on and off at will.

2. The Internet

The same goes for the Internet, except that the Internet is trickier than television, precisely because you more often than not need the Internet to do your work -- putting the distraction away becomes infinitely more difficult. As with television, a little bit of time is usually fine. Allow yourself to indulge in Facebook now and then if it helps you to recharge your batteries -- but if you know full well you’ll end up exploring every nook and cranny of your friends’ lives, then it’s best to avoid going there in the first place.

If social media is a huge distraction, a good piece of advice is to remove any bookmarks to social sites, and make yourself type the URL every time you wish to visit. Additionally, make it so that none of your social media accounts remember your login information. You'll have to type in all of your credentials, making it a little bit more annoying to log in. It’s not much, but being forced to expend energy, no matter how small, can help to deter you from mindlessly logging in to these sites. It's just that much more time to remind you that you're wasting time.

3. Break Time

Make sure you take breaks just as you would at an office. Taking a break gives you an excuse for a little distraction (but not too much) without feeling as if you’ve blurred the line between work and home. Set specific break times for yourself and stick to them. Give yourself an hour for lunch -- no more, no less. While you take these breaks, relax! If you’re going to keep that work/home balance you’ve got to be careful to adhere to your set time for each.

4. Work Anywhere but Bed

Keep your workstation(s) separate. First and foremost: don’t work in bed (you know, the place you go to sleep at night). If you stay in bed all day working and then go to sleep, you will have stirred the stress of your work with the peace of your rest. Your bed is sacred; keep it out of your work life.

5. Food and Drink

Eat and drink, but watch yourself. Working at home makes it easy to find food when you’re hungry and drinks when you’re thirsty -- a plus for sure. But if you’re not careful, you’ll find that food and drink often threaten your productivity as much as television, radio, and Internet.

It’s easy to get stressed out over a problem or dilemma, get up, walk to the fridge, and absentmindedly start eating. It’s also dangerous for your health, your weight, and your sanity. Granted, little snacks throughout the day (the healthy kind) can be amazing for your health and for your maintained focus -- just beware of grazing for the sake of grazing.

6. Stretching and Moving

Instead of eating all day, walk it out and talk it out. Speak aloud to yourself. Hearing yourself say something aloud might help you to clarify the murky thoughts of your silent inner dialogue. Do some push-ups or squats. Stretch. Getting your blood flowing can kick-start your brain -- just don’t over do it, as you don’t want to tire yourself out too much.

7. Nix the Outside Conversations

Do your best to keep outside (non-work) conversations at bay. You've heard it before, but it warrants repeating: during work hours your phone is for business only. Put it on "Do Not Disturb" mode, turn off the notifications -- do whatever you need to do to prevent getting sucked into a long drawn-out conversation with a friend (or foe).

As for your family, if they are home while you are working, be sure to (politely) make clear that when you’re working, you’re working. There’s no need to shut yourself up and ignore the world entirely, but it is important that you have space to focus in on your work.

8. A Line In the Sand 

One of the biggest benefits of going to an office is the simple fact that it separates work and home so distinctly -- but this line is less clear when working from home. Ensure that you treat your work hours as if you were at a different office entirely.

When work begins and ends, have something to do to signify to your senses that you have shifted from one direction to another. This can be any number of actions -- if you are able to keep the television off while you work, turning it on when you are finished can operate as a sort of ceremony to indicate you have finished the work day.

There has to be a discernible action that helps you to get in the right mindset for what you’re going to be doing. First cup of coffee down? Time to work. Out of the shower? Time to work. Without these little reminders, you run the risk of your morning spreading a bit too far into your workday -- and vice-versa.

Inspherio, the all-in-one event management program, certainly makes working from home much easier (and much tidier). Because Inspherio is cloud-based, you can work from home, the cafe, the park, the subway -- it's accessible anywhere and everywhere. All of your work can be consolidated into whatever device you prefer, which is a lot neater than file cabinets and drawers full of paper. With Inspherio, it's infinitely easier to switch the work/home gears when needed. Give yourself this convenience -- you've earned it. Try our free 30-day trial today!

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Welcome to the Future: Consolidate With Inspherio

It’s 2015 -- the future has arrived, but we’re all a little bummed that there are no flying cars, hover boards, or little pills containing whole meals. (Okay, maybe the last one doesn’t sound so great, but still, we expected more. Come on future!)

Event professionals know that to compete in today’s day-in-age, being technologically connected is an absolute must. It’s 2015, but there are still many event professionals juggling their records, correspondence, marketing, and accounting in several different programs that are tied to several different devices. 

Where are the magic pills for the event industry?

The advantages of consolidating your information into one program are manifold. If you are wasting time jumping from program to program, with client and event information strewn across platforms, then you are going to fall behind the competition. 

Consolidating your information frees up a lot of time and energy better spent improving your business, expanding your customer base, and advertising your services.

We may not have meal pills yet, but we do have Inspherio, which consolidates all of your event planning needs into one easy-to-use, cloud-based program. Think of all that information you carry around for your business -- how are you carrying it? How many programs do you currently use to manage your business?

Inspherio takes the weight of multiple programs off of your shoulders and gives you the power to create, access, and edit all event related information from your fingertips. Manage your leads, events, accounts, contacts, marketing, correspondence, payroll, and more in one convenient location. 

Here are just a few of the many useful features Inspherio offers:

• Leads - Create, import, and manage potential clients -- and keep their contact information all in one place.
• Events - Keep track of all of your past, present, and future event information, including contracts, package pricing, itinerary, appointments, and more.
• Accounts - Manage all of your invoices, payments, credits, refunds, and more -- all of your financial records accessible in one place.
• Marketing - Reach large audiences with email marketing campaigns and create convenient email templates for whatever purpose you like.
• Reports - View a variety of detailed reports concerning your account activity, your contact information, and your event history.

It’s 2015. Isn’t it about time you had a program that does it all? Try out our free 30-day trial and give the future of event-planning a try.

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What Successful People Do With the First Hour of their Work Day

Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk

The following article was written by Kevin Purdy and first appeared in Fast Company

Remember when you used to have a period at the beginning of every day to think about your schedule, catch up with friends, maybe knock out a few tasks? It was called home room, and it went away after high school. But many successful people schedule themselves a kind of grown-up home room every day. You should too.

The first hour of the workday goes a bit differently for Craig Newmark of Craigslist, David Karp of Tumblr, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, career writer (and Fast Company blogger) Brian Tracy, and others, and they’ll tell you it makes a big difference. Here are the first items on their daily to-do list.

Don’t Check Your Email for the First Hour. Seriously. Stop That.

Tumblr founder David Karp will “try hard” not to check his email until 9:30 or 10 a.m., according to an Inc. profile of him. “Reading e-mails at home never feels good or productive,” Karp said. “If something urgently needs my attention, someone will call or text me.”

Not all of us can roll into the office whenever our Vespa happens to get us there, but most of us with jobs that don’t require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization and single-focus work. It’s an idea that serves as the title of Julie Morgenstern’s work management book Never Check Email In The Morning, and it’s a fine strategy for leaving the office with the feeling that, even on the most over-booked days, you got at least one real thing done.

If you need to make sure the most important messages from select people come through instantly, AwayFind can monitor your inbox and get your attention when something notable arrives. Otherwise, it’s a gradual but rewarding process of training interruptors and coworkers not to expect instantaneous morning response to anything they send in your off-hours.

Gain Awareness, Be Grateful

One smart, simple question on curated Q & A site Quora asked “How do the most successful people start their day?”. The most popular response came from a devotee of Tony Robbins, the self-help guru who pitched the power of mindful first-hour rituals long before we all had little computers next to our beds.

Robbins suggests setting up an “Hour of Power,” “30 Minutes to Thrive,” or at least “Fifteen Minutes to Fulfillment.” Part of it involves light exercise, part of it involves motivational incantations, but the most accessible piece involves 10 minutes of thinking of everything you’re grateful for: in yourself, among your family and friends, in your career, and the like. After that, visualize “everything you want in your life as if you had it today.”

Robbins offers the “Hour of Power” segment of his Ultimate Edge series as a free audio stream (here’s the direct MP3 download). Blogger Mike McGrath also wrote a concise summary of the Hour of Power). You can be sure that at least some of the more driven people you’ve met in your career are working on Robbins’ plan.

Do the Big, Shoulder-Sagging Stuff First

Brian Tracy’s classic time-management book Eat That Frog gets its title from a Mark Twain saying that, if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, you’ve got it behind you for the rest of the day, and nothing else looks so bad. Gina Trapani explained it well in a video for her Work Smart series). Combine that with the concept of getting one thing done before you wade into email, and you’ve got a day-to-day system in place. Here’s how to force yourself to stick to it:

Choose Your Frog

"Choose your frog, and write it down on a piece of paper that you'll see when you arrive back at your desk in the morning, Tripani advises."If you can, gather together the material you'll need to get it done and have that out, too."

One benefit to tackling that terrible, weighty thing you don’t want to do first thing in the morning is that you get some space from the other people involved in that thing--the people who often make the thing more complicated and frustrating. Without their literal or figurative eyes over your shoulder, the terrible thing often feels less complex, and you can get more done.

Ask Yourself If You’re Doing What You Want to Do

Feeling unfulfilled at work shouldn’t be something you realize months too late, or even years. Consider making an earnest attempt every morning at what the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs told a graduating class at Stanford to do:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

“Customer Service” (or Your Own Equivalent)

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark answered the first hour question succinctly: “Customer service.” He went on to explain (or expand) that he also worked on current projects, services for military families and veterans, and protecting voting rights. But customer service is what Newmark does every single day at Craigslist, responding to user complaints and smiting scammers and spammers. He almost certainly has bigger fish he could pitch in on every day, but Newmark says customers service “anchors me to reality.”

Your own version of customer service might be keeping in touch with contacts from year-ago projects, checking in with coworkers you don’t regularly interact with, asking questions of mentors, and just generally handling the human side of work that quickly gets lost between task list items. But do your customer service on the regular, and you’ll have a more reliable roster of helpers when the time comes.

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