Home office procastination

[aniinl]

Hi,

can the ones of you who mainly work from home help me with this..

When I left my job earlier this year (to live from the freedom fund for a while and give my ideas the chance to come out and be explored) I decided to work everyday only on what I was inspired to work on. What a luxury! And it worked, the ideas just didn't stop!!

Now, that the business is beginning to take shape, there are of course some things that I *have* to do - no matter if I'm inspired or not... And I notice that I keep snoozing the Outlook reminders for those things - because I'm keeping myself busy with the stuff that I'm inspired to do!

So what I started doing, is to take all the *have to* stuff and leave the house, to sit in a cafe for example and go through paperwork, or revise my website pages, or edit some texts, etc. That works pretty good, actually, and I get most of the stuff done (except for days like today when it's pouring down outside and I'm trapped and can't leave the house...)

So - insping stuff at home, have to stuff outside of home...

Did any of you struggle with similar things? How did you trick yourself into doing the boring stuff (before you could hire someone to do it for you... )?

Anja

[marksherwood]

Hi Anja,

Treat yourself to a delve into Michaels archives (blog) and check out the tip 'what would a business robot do ?'

Cheers,

Mark

[renata]

Hi,

I make a chart for the whole week ahead. On the left - 15 categories, 3 connected with my company, 1 - things to do outside home, others like e.g. cleaning the house, cooking and shopping, gardening, meditation, investments/future plans. On top of the page - days of the week. When I do something in any category, I put a tick on a certain day. Near the end of the week I check what is missing and I do these things twice or more. When I have done some activity 7 times, I write "OK" at the end of the line. This system helps me see my progress and proves my "inner critic" that I don't leave anything out, and also this way I do the things I used to omit in the past (so that the chart looks nice at the end of the week).

[Jay Budzynski]

""How did you trick yourself into doing the boring stuff"" Your brain knows what your up to, so you can't trick yourself, so make them task important and a priority, then look at what your saying, to your brain, not only are your trying to trick yourself, you have assigned it to a "boring" state, what would you need to bring into that part of your task, to make it fun, and easy, or if you ""had it done already"" and you did it from a light hearted place of being, what could you be doing more of, that would make that little effort worth it?

The crude answer to this is sometime we have to get thing's done, so get it done, and then it's not a issue.

Jayx   

[Lennydw67]

Hi Anja

I like Michael's take on the Covey time management matrix.  That is to divide you activities into the following categories.

Bad things will happen if I don't......
E.G> paying bills, doing taxes, making sales call, certain report etc

Good things will happen if I do......
Marketing, forward plaining, blog writing

That'll be nice......
Chatting, surfing the net, going on certain courses

First of all the clarity really helps and then whatever you do make sure you take care of business by at least getting the 'bad things i will happen if I don't' first.  You can even plan ahead with this method by adding time columns 1,3,5 years etc.


Another great thing for getting stuff done are action days, I'm sure there is a tip on this.

Cheers

Lenny