Working from Home: Find your most productive time of day

Do you work from home? I started working from home about 3 years ago. While I will still teach one or two private English courses, I'm only away from home 2 days a week and the rest of the time I work from home, writing posts, doing site maintenance, taking photos, processing them, etc.

Today, I want to share my thoughts on WHEN to work when working at home. We know that a typical work day has very little real productive time for most of us.



When you work in an office you spend much of your time in meetings, checking e-mail, and writing reports. Working from home also has its many time wasters. Some of them, like checking e-mail are the same or worse.  Working from home means putting up with noisy neighbor children screaming a few meters away and neighbors playing loud music. If you share a home with your family or with a roommate to save money, you'll find that they often don't understand the concept of working from home and feel that you are just playing and they'll express that as resentment or say that you need to do more chores since you work at home.

The point is that while working from home, it is often just as challenging to try to get any work done unless you live alone in the country! My first suggestion for working at home is to find the best time of day where you can be productive and with the fewest distractions so you can get the most work done in that time so if you are a writer, when can you get the most writing completed?  If you are painter, when can you get the most progress on a painting without interruption?

I've discovered that as long as my roommate doesn't take the day off work, I get the most done in the morning as soon as I wake up and work until the neighbors start screaming and playing loud music and at that time my day is ruined, but if I can write a few good posts or process a few images in that time at least I was able to get something done. It makes the most sense to check my e-mail, Facebook, forums, and other websites after I do my productive tasks that require concentration.