Work From Home Goals: Increase Efficiency and Create a Clear Path

Written by Domantas Vanagas

September 15, 2022

The most important way to stay successful working from home is to set daily goals that will motivate you. However, it is common for people to set either too big or too small goals and struggle to stay consistent with their work. This may affect your routine when you work from home and cause serious struggles.

You can use the SMART technique and other techniques you’ll learn about shortly to create workable and consistent goals that make you a work-from-home machine. This article will give you some great work-from-home goal examples that will help you stay motivated and improve your work efficiency.

What is a Great Work From Home Goal?

Creating work-from-home goals is an important part of your work-from-home time management because it helps you have a vision for your job that motivates you to do bigger things. The mind thrives on stimulation, and giving it something new to do will help make your job more exciting and engaging.

We strongly recommend using the SMART technique to set your work-from-home goals. This technique helps you set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound goals every day. Many companies use SMART to create effective and efficient work environments that stay on task. Let’s break down the SMART process in steps to give you a better idea of how it works:

  • Specific: Start by setting specific goals and answering questions like “what needs to be accomplished?” “who is responsible for the task?” and “what steps need to be taken?”
  • Measurable: Find a way to measure your goals with benchmarks, such as meeting specific sales goals throughout the quarter, and define the techniques used to measure this progress.
  • Achievable: All your goals should be realistic and achievable, such as increasing sales by 10% per quarter rather than 100%: setting impossible goals will only cause frustration and anxiety.
  • Relevant: All your work-from-home goals should be relevant to your business and contribute to its success, such as boosting sales in a specific sector to increase your market share.
  • Time-Bound: Set a time frame for achieving your goal, including when your team will start creating and implementing tasks and when this process should be complete.

Many work productivity and time management concepts use the SMART technique to set meaningful goals. You can use it to create practical work-from-home goals that keep you on task and minimize your work waste. Before you start setting goals yourself (we’ll provide some steps to follow below), examining a few work-from-home goal examples is an excellent idea to understand this process better.

Work From Home Goal Examples

The following work-from-home goal examples use the SMART technique to create practical daily goals. We’ll look at three different markets and professions to give you an idea of how to set these goals within your specific market and career.

Betty, the Psychiatrist, Sets Remote Care Goals

Betty provides remote psychological care for her clients, and she sets this goal for one of her patients: a Specific and Measurable goal of improving patient retention by 10%, an Achievable and Relevant goal with a Time-Bound goal of one quarter. She’ll achieve this Relevant goal by expanding her services to include more remote opportunities.

Jack, the Salesperson, Sets a Product Goal

Jack is a salesperson for a new startup, and he sets this SMART goal: a Specific and Measurable goal to sell an Achievable 10,000 products. This goal is Relevant to his sales team and is Time-Bound by two-quarters or eight months.

Yoshimi, the Engineer, Sets a Design Goal

Yoshimi, a software engineer, sets this goal for her day: the Specific goal to increase her efficiency by a Measurable and Achievable 5% during the Time-Bound period of each quarter. She will achieve this Relevant goal by using the Pomodoro Technique to schedule her coding days into 25-minute work and 5-minute breaks.

Why These Goals are Great

These goals are great because they use the SMART technique to create specific goals that are easy to measure, achievable in a day or less, relevant to your company, and bound to a time. When creating your work-from-home goals, follow these examples to get results. They also help minimize work anxiety by creating a more efficient environment and concrete goals you’re more likely to meet.

3 Steps for Setting Work-From-Home Goals

Before setting your goals and improving your time management to enhance your overall productivity, let’s break down this process into three steps. These three steps will help you create work-from-home goals that follow the work-from-home goal examples we highlighted above.

These simple steps fit easily into concepts like the Time Management Matrix and can improve your productivity in many ways. In each section, we’ll highlight why these steps are important and use Ursula, an at-home marketing writer, as a persona for each of these steps.

Step 1: Creating an Objective

woman standing in front of stairs as her work from home objective

 

Start by creating an objective with positive results. The objective is what you hope to achieve with your goal, and the key results are the results that are important to obtain. These work from home performance goals should follow the SMART guideline, including achievable time frames and reasonable expectations.

For example, Ursula sets an objective of completing a certain amount of articles daily for her team, with the key result being higher social media engagement. Her goals include integrating social media tags, producing streamlined and effective content, and proofreading them before posting.

Step 2: Plan Your Goal’s Time-Frame

set work from home goal timeline

When planning your goals, make sure that you work to make sure that your goal fits within a specific time frame. In our example, Ursula’s team needs to produce 1,500 pieces of content every month, and, as the lead writer, she has to produce at least 100 every month.

To meet this larger goal, she breaks down her week into 25-article blocks and chooses specific days when she can write more. Using the SMART method, she decided to produce a minimum of five articles every day to hit that goal. Since she takes 1.25 hours to complete each article, she needs at least 8-9 hours daily to complete them.

Step 3: Execute Your Goals

a man planning and executing work from home goals

After planning your goals and fitting them into your schedule, it is important to execute them properly. For instance, Ursula wakes at six every day and starts writing by seven to produce her five articles. As she completes each article, she gauges how effectively she works and whether it’s sustainable.

She finds that five articles a day is too much for her and adjusts her production to just four. The extra five articles get shifted to a part-time worker who wants more responsibility. In this way, Ursula obtains an achievable goal that contributes to her team’s success without getting overworked.

2 Tips to Make Sure You Complete Your Goals

Now that you understand some work-from-home goal examples and the work-from-home goals creation process, we have a few tips that may help you achieve better results. These tips are simple enough for most people to understand and can be adapted in whatever way makes the most sense for you. They focus heavily on integrating goal setting into your overall time management process.

Tip 1: Plan Around Your Time Management Techniques

Time-management techniques can be a powerful way to achieve your goal. For example, the Pomodoro Technique can help you plan your work in manageable steps and improve your overall success rate.

Make sure you choose the method that makes the most sense.

There are many time management methods, so take the time to pick those that make the most sense for your needs. Options like Eat the Frog and the Time Management Matrix can help you create varying goals with more concrete details, so experiment and have a little fun!

Tip 2: Create a Productive Routine

When planning your goals, try to create a productive routine that makes this process smoother and more efficient.

For example, try to break down larger goals into smaller actions, organize all tasks by urgency and importance, listen to motivational speeches to get yourself excited, and write everything down in a planner to ensure that you stay on task.

These steps improve your productivity and streamline your work-from-home goals.

Conclusion

Creating effective work-from-home goals can enhance your career by improving your vision and producing unique and effective ways of improving your career. What did you think of our work-from-home goal examples? Did they make sense for you and help you better understand how to set your work-from-home goals? If so, let us know! 

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