My 5 Tips for Staying Productive When Working from Home

When you work from home, it can be difficult to stay productive – there are a lot of things that can distract you.  There are several techniques that you can use to stay productive though.  I’ll mention my favorites in this post.

1. Get up early – One of the things I do to make sure that I can get at least a few things accomplished before I start working my regular job is I get up early – usually as early as 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning.  This gives me time to do a little work on my eBook, maybe do a little transcription if it’s available, check my email, and work on my work newsletter if I need to.
2. Make a to-do list – this is an absolute must for me. I make a list of the things I want to get accomplished. I place the top-priority items at the top, and the lower priority ones at the bottom. There are several different ways you can keep track of your to-do lists. I’ve used Goodtodo and Todoist in the past, but now my favorite tool for keeping track of my to-do lists is the tickler file notebook I created in Evernote.
3. Create reminders for yourself – I use Google Calendar to create reminders for things I need to do on a regular basis, such as writing my weekly update blog post for My Ebook Journey, sending out emails for my regular job, or for my focus group meetings.
4. Use a timer.  You can use a kitchen timer, the timer on your watch or cell phone – whatever works for you.  There are also several online timers. You may also want to look into using the Pomodoro technique – I talk about it a little bit in this post I wrote on Work at Home Adventures. 
5. Exercise.  I love my morning workout routine – it gets my energy level up so I can be productive throughout the day.