Measuring Productivity When You Work from Home

Working from a home office has a lot of pluses--low overhead, flexibility, tax deductions, casual attire--but there are also some challenges to working from home: staying motivated and productive being one of the main ones. How do you measure productivity without a boss standing over your shoulder or "team meetings" to attend? Here are some suggestions for measuring your productivity when you work from home:

While some people can hit the ground running first thing in the morning and put in a full, productive day, many of us have times of the day when we work better than others. Try keeping track of your work pace for a few days or a week and see if you are more productive at certain times of the day. It may help you to organize your work schedule so you do the most creative and challenging tasks during your peak performance times and save the more mundane projects for times when you energy is waning. This can help make you more productive overall.

Setting daily, weekly and monthly goals works for many stay-at-home workers. Some even break it down by the hour. If you are the type of person who responds well to checking goals and accomplishments off a master list, then setting quotas for yourself may be just the thing to keep you moving through your work day and less tempted to stray toward distractions.

Staying involved with a professional group or finding a mentor to meet with regularly can also help you evaluate if you are staying on track and relevant in your profession. By comparing the work you are doing in your home office to what is being accomplished in similar work situations and staying in touch with colleagues, you just might find you're more productive than you thought!

Finally, for many, income is the ultimate measurement to how productive we are being in our work. With the home office, however, it can be harder to get a true picture of our productivity because we may not be working regular hours on regular projects. We may find we work fewer hours on one project but another takes far more than the time we originally estimated. Still, setting a financial goal and striving to stay on target to reach that goal is one great way to evaluate whether we are making the most of our home office and maximizing our business.