Productivity and utilization are typical buzzwords in the management circles, but they make sense even if you work for yourself, in the comforts of your home. Productivity, along with quality, is what proves your mettle as a medical transcriptionist. Utilization ensures that you have time for yourself and family at the end of the day. Thus, you need to make sure that your productivity is consistently high and you utilize every minute of the number of hours you have scheduled for your work. Simple, isn’t it? Far from it, actually.

Contrary to general belief, home-based professionals struggle maintaining their productivity levels. Home brings along distractions. Several. Not everyone is disciplined enough to handle the flexibility that working from home provides. Most people abuse the flexibility, spoiling their own work. Let us look at what you and I can do to ensure that we are our productive best, at most times.

Let’s stop accessing social networking sites and checking out news and movie sites while we are working. Instead, we will reward ourselves with an hour of surfing once we have finished our work for the day. Doesn’t sound like a bad deal, does it?

Let’s not attend to domestic chores during work. From now on, let’s attend to our domestic responsibilities either before we start work or after we have finished. I prefer doing it after I am done with my work.

Let’s stop taking random breaks between work. Instead, let’s take logical breaks on completion of a set of tasks. This will keep us fresh and motivated. And yeah, I won’t watch TV or check my mails during these breaks. I will stretch myself, look out of the window, or take a walk in my backyard. What would you do?