Personal and Business Development Consulting

Choosing home-based work is a great step towards achieving self-reliance and financial independence. But often times when people start working from home their level of productivity drops. Why is this and what can be done to change it?

Most people’s productivity at work is a direct reflection of their pier group there. At work you had many people on which to compare your level of productivity against. Now that you are home-based work you often have no measure of how productive you are, so most people’s activity levels drop.

Also, while at home there are many distractions during the day, which can lead you astray. Television, newspapers, internet, phone calls, and laundry all lead you astray from your good intentions to get work done.

On key thing you can do to increase your productivity is to plan your day out, and write what you want to achieve for that day and stick to your plan. Some activities require a certain amount of time to be put into it, while for other activities you need to achieve a specific outcome. Often times it is better to set daily goals as specific outcomes, otherwise if you just set time limits, the level of importance for that activity swells to fit the time you gave it when instead you might have been finished earlier with better results if you had focused on the outcome rather than the time put in.

Another tip to feel more productive working from home is to dress like you are going to the office. Every morning, get up, shower, and put on office clothes. Wearing your work clothes will put you into a different state of mind and will make you more productive. This will be a clue to your mind that now it is time to work.

Having a designated office area is another important thing. If you can have a room that doesn’t have a bed in it that would be great. Also, make sure your office is clean neat and try to work with the door closed.

Also, many people who work from home feel shut in. It is important to get out of the house a couple of times during the day and go for a walk or drive. Going to the mall is great for a quick walk and seeing people.

If you decide you really can’t work from home; look into renting cheap office space somewhere. In many office buildings you can find a room to rent somewhere, which is much cheaper than renting a whole office.

Working from home is great if you have the discipline to keep at it. It takes consistency and drive just like any other job, but it can be a great experience. Start by making your to do list for tomorrow today.

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To become more productive in your business, you must first take note of how you are currently spending the majority of your time.

It doesn’t matter how many hours a day you work. What matters is how productive you are. PRODUCTIVE means doing things that actually make you more money. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend working on your business, if you’re not doing the things that really matter, you’re just wasting your time.

You can spend hours of time visiting various sites, spying on your competitors, reading different articles or blog posts, and researching the forums to see what people have to say about specific topics related to your market, but this type of activity, in and of itself, isn’t productive.

The trick is to take the information that you have learned during this type of research and actually use it to create more income for your business. It doesn’t matter where you spend the majority of time, write down every little thing you do with your time. Include the amount of time spent on those activities, so you can begin the process of cutting unnecessary activities from your life.

Do you get caught in the “OCD Loop?”

The OCD Loop involves a phenomenon among many Internet marketers where they exhibit a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in the way that they are obsessive about following a specific sequence of actions repeatedly throughout the day, in many cases.

What a lot of marketers will do before they take action on anything truly productive for their businesses is to start off by checking their email, where they take the time to read various emails, reply to emails, and even decide to write new emails because of something that reminded them to do so in another email.

Then, once they finish checking their email, maybe they decide to jump over to check out Google Analytics or another web stats program to see what type of traffic their sites have received, or maybe they login to their shopping cart to check out the details of any orders that may have been placed.

Once they’ve reviewed their latest conversion rates, opt-in percentages, and so on, they may surf over to their favorite discussion forums or blogs that they read on a regular basis to do some research on their target market, or even to other sites like CNN or ESPN to check out the latest news or sports scores.

Then, the amazing thing that happens after they’ve checked out all of the sites that they are accustomed to visiting, is they decide to check out their email, again, to see if they’ve received anything new that might interest them.

Maybe they reply to some of the newer emails, decide to email someone whose name they saw in their inbox, or even click on links that take them to web sites that totally cause them to lose focus from what they’re really supposed to be doing that day. When they’re finally done checking their email a second time and visiting all of the sites they found promoted within those emails, they jump back over to their stats program, again, to see how things are going with their websites.

Then, they end up back on their favorite sites, again, looking for things to capture their attention, or maybe they login to the many membership programs they belong to so they can see if anything new has been added,
and before you know it, they’re in this endless loop of jumping back and forth from all these nonproductive activities.

Although this may sound funny when you first hear this described, the truth is that you’ve probably experienced the same feeling of having spent hours in front of your computer thinking that you’re getting stuff accomplished, when in fact, you haven’t accomplished anything that’s taking you closer to reaching your goals.

If you’re really honest with yourself, you need to ask yourself how often you actually allow to fall into this OCD Loop, and fail to stay focused on doing the things that bring money into your business. Pinpoint your tendency for falling into this trap, and start thinking of ways to snap out of it when you feel yourself getting sucked into this loop, because it can waste a lot of your time.

Discover how to grow a business, Make Money Blogging with Johncow.com. Check out his latest article on understanding how to select Best Keywords

To become more productive in your business, you must first take note of how you are currently spending the majority of your time.

What matters is how productive you are. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend working on your business, if you’re not doing the things that really matter, you’re just wasting your time.

You can spend hours of time visiting various sites, spying on your competitors, reading different articles or blog posts, and researching the forums to see what people have to say about specific topics related to your market, but this type of activity, in and of itself, isn’t productive.

It doesn’t matter where you spend the majority of time, write down every little thing you do with your time. Include the amount of time spent on those activities, so you can begin the process of cutting unnecessary activities from your life.

Do you get caught in the “OCD Loop?”

The OCD Loop involves a phenomenon among many Internet marketers where they exhibit a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in the way that they are obsessive about following a specific sequence of actions repeatedly throughout the day, in many cases.

What a lot of marketers will do before they take action on anything truly productive for their businesses is to start off by checking their email, where they take the time to read various emails, reply to emails, and even decide to write new emails because of something that reminded them to do so in another email.

Then, once they finish checking their email, maybe they decide to jump over to check out Google Analytics or another web stats program to see what type of traffic their sites have received, or maybe they login to their shopping cart to check out the details of any orders that may have been placed.

Once they’ve reviewed their latest conversion rates, opt-in percentages, and so on, they may surf over to their favorite discussion forums or blogs that they read on a regular basis to do some research on their target market, or even to other sites like CNN or ESPN to check out the latest news or sports scores.

Then, the amazing thing that happens after they’ve checked out all of the sites that they are accustomed to visiting, is they decide to check out their email, again, to see if they’ve received anything new that might interest them.

When they’re finally done checking their email a second time and visiting all of the sites they found promoted within those emails, they jump back over to their stats program, again, to see how things are going with their websites.

If you’re really honest with yourself, you need to ask yourself how often you actually allow yourself to fall into this OCD Loop, and fail to stay focused on doing the things that bring money into your business.

Discover how to grow a business, Making Money Blogging with Johncow.com. Check out his latest article on understanding how to select Best Keywords