Working from home is certainly a great experience, and simply put not for everyone. I tend to feel cruddy when I get distracted and am not giving a full day of effort. Last week I got stuck in a rut where I was more distracted than I demand of myself. I started a massive open online course (MOOC) a few weeks back and started getting distracted by this and letting it leak into my desired professional time (roughly 8am to 5pm). Lucky for me, I am able to see this in my daily reports and jumped on attempting to do something about it before it became a major issue.
Tending to wake up and start working between 8am and 9am, and wanting to start a little earlier like 7am, I took measures to push me into making the first hour or two the most productive I can make it. Setting up a few alerts on my RescueTime account has helped drastically. The first alert is triggered once I’ve spent approximately 1 to 2 minutes on the computer, it greets me with a “Good Morning” and encourages me to get something awesome done today. It also automatically starts a 15 minute FocusTime session to get the gears spinning in the right direction.
The next two alerts I set up as a goal to monitor how well I am doing over time. They run on a filter from Monday to Friday between 7am and 10am. They will trigger once I spend 1 hour of time on productive activities and a challenging 2 hours of time on productive activities. So far since starting this I have been able to reach the 1 hour productive goal, but since I am still waking between 8am and 9am, I haven’t yet been able to hit the 2 hour productive goal but am looking forward to continuing to try.
What I have found, is that spending the first hour or two in a really productive state, it actually carries you throughout the rest of the day. It acts like momentum, helping you plow through distractions like the stone above.
That’s pretty great. I use a variation of the “good morning, now get focused” alert as well and it really helps me start the day off on a good note.