The following is a guest post by Olivia Coleman. If you would like to guest post for this blog, please check out the guidelines.

If you are currently considering working from home, or you are just starting out, you’re probably very excited about the prospect of doing so. While your friends and family may slave away at soulless cubicles, spending hours commuting, you have the option of waking up whenever you feel like it, having a long, leisurely breakfast, and starting your day ready to take on your work.

It sounds great in theory, but as someone who has worked from home, take it from me it’s not all fun and games. Here are some work-from-home habits to avoid if you want to make the experience the best that it can possibly be.

1. Losing the Rhythm of a Routine

One of the best parts of working from home is that you have a much more flexible work schedule. If you need to go to a doctor’s appointment, you don’t need to ask for a boss’s permission to take a few hours off. You can theoretically wake up earlier or later than you normally would, and you can also work at different locations basically wherever there’s an Internet connection.

While allowing time to switch up the banality of a routine is great and can be a breath of fresh air from the rigidity, it can also be taken to extremes, resulting in loss of productivity. What I did to undo the habit of working sporadically while still mixing it up a bit was have one routine three days a week, and a different routine the other three days. In other words, I’d wake up at a certain time on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I’d wake up later on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. I also worked in my home office every other day. The key is to vary your routine without completely chucking the routine itself.

2. Spending Too Much Time at Home

Cabin fever is a very real phenomenon when it comes to working at home. When you’re in an office, your co-workers will all go out to lunch, so you’ll be encouraged to do the same. When you don’t have someone to tell you to take some time off from where you’re sitting in your home office, it’s easy to spend all your time at home. Make lunch plans with friends, and take a little walk outside twice during your work day.

3. Letting Your Work Interfere with Your Downtime

This bad habit can very easily develop if you have a tendency to work too hard. When you work in an office, you have set work hours, so when you get home you can forget about your job for the rest of the evening before going back the next morning. When you work from home, you may take a long break during the middle of the day, leaving you to catch up in the evening. If you do this too often, then you can say goodbye to your evenings spent with friends, family, or simply doing things you enjoy. The way to avoid this is by simply telling yourself that you will not work past six or seven in the evening at the very latest. If you have to catch up, wake up earlier and get it done the next day.

4. Giving in to Web Distractions

In an office, you aren’t as tempted to give in to those distracting websites, whether its Facebook, online newspapers, or YouTube, simply because you have others around you who are working, encouraging you indirectly to keep trucking. Some offices even block popular sites or monitor Internet activity. But at home, you have to monitor your own activity. Good news, though, there are several web-based tools out there to help you avoid these Internet time-drainers. My personal favorite is Google Chrome’s StayFocusd. This plug-in let’s you set the amount of time you can spend on the websites that tend to distract you. When your time’s up, then you can’t access the site till the next day. This gives you more leeway in case you do want to take a break, but limits your time that it doesn’t completely take over your work day.

These are just a few things I learned from my own experiences working from home. It can be the best experience ever, but it can also quickly spiral out of control if you don’t exercise a bit of self-control. Establishing good work habits and avoiding the bad ones before they take root is the most effective way of making working from home work for you.

About the Author: Olivia Coleman writes on the topics of online colleges and universities.  She welcomes your comments at her email Id: olivia.coleman33 @gmail.com.

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