How we can better manage ourselves in home office
At the moment, many of us are in home office and have to structure work much more than usual by our own efforts and motivate ourselves. The Chair for Personnel Development and Change Management at the TU Dortmund University is working on the topic of self-management. This includes a series of altogether 9 practicable strategies for successful self-management.
We follow the approach of Konradt and Andreßen, who were the first in Germany to do systematic research in this area.
Several of these strategies refer to motivating with the help of one's own behavior. These are in detail:
- 1. Own goals: consciously planning your own goals
- 2. Self-reward: reward yourself after work (e.g. shopping)
- 3. Self-punishment: being dissatisfied with oneself when performance is low
- 4. Self-observation: making yourself aware of how good your own performance is at the moment
- 5. Self-remembrance: remembering, e.g. through written notes, what still needs to be done
In addition, there are a number of natural reward strategies that can increase the joy of work. These include:
- 6. Natural reward: include work that is fun to do (e.g. watch exciting or funny YouTube tutorials)
- 7. Imagining successful performance: imagine yourself working successfully and how this feels like
- 8. Self-talk: go through the workflow in an inner dialogue
- 9. Evaluating convictions and views: make your own views conscious and improve them in an inner dialogue