You had your breakfast and it’s now time to begin working. Then you just have a quick look on Facebook, maybe someone posted something important for you during the night. It is just going take a minute. Then you check Twitter, just another minute, maybe there is something super useful to your work from this technical guy that you are following. Then you read a quick blog post from Github, because you know, their blog posts are always useful. One minute here, one minute there, it all adds up. Moreover, it’s never one minute. At the end you are one hour late and you finally begin working feeling guilty that you lost one or more hours while you could have done so much. Then you need to work until late to compensate for it, which interferes with your other plans that you had for the day.
If you are paid by the hour, for example as a freelancer, then you know you’ve lost one hour that you could have billed for, and this feeling of guilt for this lost hour actually interferes with your work.
I do this all the time. I’ve been working from home for the last 4 years, yet I still occasionally fall into this trap.
Wouldn’t it be nice to begin working without procrastinating when you want?
- No more wasted morning hours.
- No more guilty feeling.
- No more lost money.
This is something that you, me and anyone working from home, encounters at some point. However, there are a few things that you could do about it. The first thing is to put yourself in a work mode. The second is to focus on your work.
Putting yourself in work mode
The best way to do it is by building a habit. It could be as simple as beginning to work at the exact same hour. Another can be to do the same routine everyday at the same time, after which you start to work. Like maybe doing some exercise. You will find that at first this can be hard, but the more days you do it without interruptions, the better you will be at it. There are actually some mobile apps which can help with this.
Know in advance what you are going to work on
Even if you are already in work mode, it is easy to get distracted if you leave your mind to wonder. That is why it is a good idea to plan your day in advance. At the end of the day, you can note down what you are going to work tomorrow and then on the following morning just look at what you have written. You can focus immediately on the task at hand.
I’ve used these techniques successfully and I’ve also seen other using them, too. They’ve produced very good results, and when I fail to follow them I’ve fallen again into the trap of procrastination.
