Working from Home:Prioritize your home office activities

I mentioned previously how important it is to consider the days of the week and hours your work at home schedule includes, but it is just as important to properly prioritize your home office activities and other daily tasks.

I'm not referring to meeting potential clients for freelance work or telecommuting since those situations depend on external forces.  You have to determine a time that works both for you and the potential client whereas telecommuting depends on what your boss tells you.

For the rest of us, people who are paid by task, affiliates, web-publishers, bloggers, visual artists and designers (when not working on a commissioned project), etc., It is essential to prioritize your business's tasks in order of productivity.

Other than perhaps showering, eating so you aren't hungry, and preparing your coffee, those who are most productive in the morning or early morning should go right into their most productive task.  If you are a blogger, start writing posts or brainstorm a new post.  An artist might start by processing another photo for upload. The focus should be on adding new content and submitting it to where ever it should go for publishing or sale.
Make your goal having something of quality to show for your work before the distractions start and your energy level drops.

Put less productive activities lower on your list and spend less time on them.  Checking e-mail message, viewing web statistics to see how many visitors you get, etc. can be fun, but it isn't very productive.  You'll get those messages and those visits whether or not you check your Analytics account!   Sure there are things to check for statistics like keywords and popular content on your site, but your efforts to create new content and keep everything up-to-date should be your priority.



If you aren't sure where to start, make a list of what you do as you do them for a couple days. Then review the list check the ones that are productive and think of them as a to do list to keep by your desk.

Prioritizing your home office activities also saves you time. You could easily accomplish in 4-6 hours what would take 8-10 hours just working as the mood moves you wasting time on unproductive activities.