Working online can be a way of balancing work and personal life. Remote working can only be effective if you are in charge of your time and disciplined.

Advantages of working online

Remote working is a natural form of work for some occupations. It is often chosen by e.g. web designers, property managers and translators. Remote work is also often done by call center consultants. Thanks to the fact that they work from their home office, they can:

• It is easier to combine professional and private life – take care of a child, cook lunches and eat regularly, and during a break from work, do some business in the office, take a dog out or do some shopping.
• You can freely adjust working conditions to your needs – for example, work from a comfortable sofa, arrange a work corner so that it helps to focus or inspire you.
• Sleep longer, instead of standing in traffic jams in the morning – time to travel can be spent in bed and get up more relaxed, full of energy to work.
• Work any hours (unless the contract specifies fixed working hours) – you can organize your working day in such a way that during the hours of highest intellectual efficiency (usually 8.00-10.00 and 16.00-18.00) you perform more difficult tasks, and in other cases those less demanding or related to private life.
• The success lies with oneself – you have to rely on yourself. Along with that you are independent. This requires a lot of discipline and ambition, but does not set any limits. Once you’ve earned your first Euros over the Internet, your motivation increases and you’ll quickly realize how encouraging this kind of work is. Said Shiripour offers a prime example of the success of an online business that covers a variety of topics. After the first measures worked, new opportunities were immediately opened up.

Disadvantages of working on the Internet – how to deal with them?

Unfortunately, the specificity of work over the Internet makes almost every advantage of it a disadvantage. People who decide to work via the Internet sometimes complain about the fact that it is difficult for them:

• motivate yourself to work
• concentrate on your work,
• to maintain order in the workplace.

They sometimes postpone tasks to a later date, and lack of contact with their superiors and co-workers means that they are not up to date with all project requirements. A way to deal with most of these problems can be to develop a few habits related to managing oneself over time.

Managing yourself over time – a few tips for those working on the Internet

• Set priorities
• Write down a list of tasks related to the work you need to do on a given day. Divide them into four groups:
• Important and urgent tasks,
• tasks of little importance, but urgent,
• an important task, but not urgent,
• minor and urgent tasks.

Perform tasks from each group in this order. Start with tasks that are important and urgent on a daily basis. You can leave tasks that are not important and not urgent for the end or even for the next day.

Use task schedules

Specify the approximate time needed to complete each task and record the hours at which you intend to complete them. Remember that for the most difficult tasks it is best to predict the time during the hours of the highest intellectual efficiency. Don’t forget to plan breaks and clean up your workplace. Include tasks other than those related to work in the schedule, their time must also be specified so that they do not get out of control. You can set up notifications on your phone or computer, which will inform you that the time for a given task is coming to an end.

Consider the 60/40 rule

We should plan our professional tasks for a given day in such a way that they fulfil 60% of our time. The remaining 40% is time that we will certainly have to devote to unforeseen, impossible to plan tasks. So if you assume that you want to spend 8 hours on work, plan the tasks as if you had only 5 hours for them. If you don’t finish your work within these 5 hours, you will always have 3 spare hours. If, however, you make it within those 5 hours, you can spend the remaining time on tasks with less priority or just finish the work and enjoy your free time.