A good first step is to understand what's fundamentally different about working from home, alone, versus working from the office. Some common differences:
- Context shifting into the office can help context shift you to work mode. At home, if you use the same workstation for games and Reddit and work and entertainment, you lose the physical context shift. If possible, try using your company-provided computer for only work, and your personal computer for only play. Even better if you can have them in different rooms. Start training yourself to associate one context with work, and one context with not-work. When you sit down in the work context, it's time to work.
- Accountability can feel lessened when no one can see over your shoulder. This can be misleading in the short term because it's easy to get away with it for a while: You can tell people you ran into unexpected difficulties, or you had to spend time on something else, or any number of excuses that work in the short term. Over the long term, the productivity difference starts to show up in your output relative to peers, so avoid falling into this trap. If your company isn't big on short-term accountability, give yourself some daily accountability. A good practice would be to write a short message to your team's Slack channel with what you're going to be working on for the day. At the end of the day, write a short summary of what you accomplished. Once this is routine and public (within your team) you will feel some of the same accountability you did when your team was sitting in the same room and could see you working (or not).
- Offices provide a lot of social exposure that we take for granted. Slack and Zoom can't fully replace it. Make sure you get out of the house and see other people routinely, even if it's just walking around the neighborhood. Simply seeing other, real human beings goes a long way.
- Track your time. Entering the office in the morning and leaving in the evening are natural delineators for your work day. Try to have some similar start and end times at home. Consider using something like RescueTime so you can see where your time is going during the day.