Self-motivation for work-at-homes

Web Worker Daily is becoming one of my favorite reads, mainly because of posts like “Web Worker 101: Staying Motivated“.

Designed for telecommuters who work at home, “Staying Motivated” offers ways to maintain your focus (which usually means maintaining your self-discipline).

Among the suggestions:

• Packup your laptop and work at your favorite wi-fi hotspot for a morning
• Create virtual co-workers using Twitter (see my earlier post “Twitter as a substitute for co-workers“)
• Use “timeboxing” to force task completion within a timeframe
• Have a nap
• Search out and destroy task avoidance behavior

I have been a work-at-home for almost ten years now, but almost daily, I’m faced with a new challenge. This past week and a half, it has been an almost hourly struggle with Verizon to keep my FIOS Internet pipe functioning, a job that someone else would be doing were I at a bigco as I was before.

Interestingly, the Web Worker Daily post only touches briefly on what has become one of my bigger home office problems: working too much. When the office is in the next room, it is often just too easy to “do one more thing” on a project.

Two hours later you realize that your personal time has been stolen away, never to be recovered. And after all, it is that personal freedom that I am working so hard to earn.