There are a lot of things, which may distract you from work. Especially freelancers (bloggers, online marketers, SEO specialists) who spend most of their work in front of the monitor, are in danger.
- Email(s)
How many times a day do you check your email? Or maybe you have automatic notification, about new message is in your inbox? Is it similar to you? It’s one of the most common time consumers. How you can fight with it? The simplest way is closing your email client. I’m trying to check my inbox only twice a day – in the morning and after the whole day. If you are waiting for specific email(s), you can check it for example in the middle of your working day
- Cellular phone
If you are in contact with your clients via cellphone, it may be very hard to limit this distraction. But if you get phone calls mostly from your friends or family – you have to shut down your mobile in working hours
- Social media
Social media, like Facebook or Twitter, are really very dangerous time suckers. There is so many various social media networks (including Google +, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, etc.), that it’s impossible to work on your business, using at the same time all of them. I’ll give you 2 advices, about Twitter and Facebook
If you want to be followed by a lot of people, you need to tweet. But do it in the smart way – 1-2 tweets at the beginning of your day work and 2-3 tweets at the end of your work should be enough. Of course you can tweet more in your free time 🙂
You know, that these days everything is on the Facebook. But you must calculate, if being everyday on Facebook is good enough for you or for your business. I visit FB 2-3 times a week
- Your Family
Working at home give you the freedom. Except this, you don’t waste your time and money for getting to the office. But there are some disadvantages. Your children are crying. Your wife (or husband) wants to go shopping. Your neighbor wants to borrow a drill from you. If you don’t establish proper rules, especially with your family, your work may become a horror. So please communicate your family, that even if you are at home, between 9 am to 5 pm you are unavailable.
- Your coworkers
Working in the office has also pros and cons. If you want to concentrate on your online activities, you must separate from others, at least for 2 hours. If someone calls you in this time – please gently ask, if it can’t wait for some time… If it’s your boss – of course he can’t wait. But you can plan your online work in another time – for example between 6 and 8 am…
- Interesting articles
This is very time consuming and dangerous distraction (for me, personally, it’s on the first place of distractions 🙁 ). There are so many interesting articles, studies and news on the web that I want to read them all – (un)fortunately it’s impossible. I started to fight with it by copying their addresses to the notepad, and only when I finish my work, I read them. But believe me – sometimes it’s very difficult.
- Noisy environment
It doesn’t matter, if you are working at home or in the office. If you can’t concentrate on your activities because of noise – you must take steps to eliminate, or at least limit this noise. For this reason I bought headphones. For me it works very well 🙂
- Mess on your desk
How do you feel in restaurant with unclean floor and dirty dishes on the tables? I feel very bad… The same is with your place to work – it should be cleaned and ordered. Do you need more hints about this point?
- Games
Some bloggers are keen players. They want to relax, or play only for “some minutes”. Of course gaming isn’t bad, but only when you don’t play at your working hours. For offline games there is one good way for eliminating this habit – don’t install games on your workstation (it’s workstation!)
- Laziness
The last, but surely not least thing on the list is laziness. If you work at home, you have great excuses for sleeping one more hour, extend your lunch time or finish your work one hour earlier. Why – because of your laziness. And if you really want to make money online (or something else) – forget about two hours per day of work.
And what are your tips for fighting with distractions? Or maybe you know others, time consuming activities? Please share them with us.
Emails take up a large portion of my day, time that I could be using to work on my site. I get 100+ emails every day, some business related, some SPAM, so I have to make sure I go through them and answer all the important ones.
Social media is also a bit of a distraction, but it’s also an important part of blogging. I guess it’s about finding the right balance.
Hi Matt,
thanks for your comment. Right balance is, as you said, very important, but sometimes it’s almost impossible to find it 🙂
I use a timer to limit the amount of time I spend on social networking websites. It keeps me from frittering away my day on one small component of my online presence. I try to be particularly diligent on Pinterest. I could pin for hours.
Timer is very good idea, I must try it! Thanks for your comment Shawanda.
And I’m working and playing MS Flight Simulator at the same time whilst reading this! But the plane’s on autopilot.
Yeah, a bit distraction for me is family and games.
🙂
Thanks for the comment, Niall