While more and more companies are opting to allow employees to telecommute a wise decision considering the productivity boost that can result working from home isn’t for everyone.
I’ve been doing it for nearly 10 years, and honestly, I can’t imagine ever returning to a traditional office environment.
Still, it’s easy to get distracted when you’re effectively your own boss when it comes to time management. Since no one’s clocking my productivity, it’s up to me to ensure everything gets done promptly and at a high level of quality.
Here’s how I keep myself focused and disciplined while working from home.
Number of EU nationals working in UK falls sharply
It was the biggest such fall in two decades and builds on a decline which was already being seen earlier this year, reversing a trend that had seen the numbers increasing until 2017.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said 2.25 million people from the EU were in work in the three months to September, 132,000 fewer than for a year earlier .
That was the largest such fall since comparable records began in 1997 and was the result of a fall in the number of workers from the eight eastern European countries including Poland and the Czech Republic that joined the EU in 2004.
The number from those eight countries which also include Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia declined by 154,000 compared with last year, to 881,000, down from a record high of 1.05 million two years ago.
Over the same one year period the number of UK nationals in work rose by 448,000 to 29 million.
The figures were published alongside wider labour market data that showed the UK unemployment rate rose for the first time this year in the three months to September to 4.1%, up from 4% the month before as the number of people classed as unemployed rose by 21,000 to 1.38 million.
That was up from 3.1% recorded the month before and the highest rate of wage growth since the three months to December 2008.
In real terms, stripping out inflation pay was up by 0.9%, the highest rate since the end of 2016.
ONS senior statistician Matt Hughes said: The labour market is little changed on the previous three months, though still stronger than it was at this time last year.
However, real wage growth is below the level seen in 2015, and real wages have not yet returned to their 2008 levels.
The recent uptick in British nationals in work and the decline in workers from the so-called A8 eastern European countries both seem to be accelerating.