Thursday, November 15, 2007

Minimizing Distractions in Your Home Office

Working from home is an ideal situation for some folks. From stay-at-home moms to those wanting to save on the high prices of gasoline these days, working out of a home office can be the right choice for many. There are, however, some pitfalls to working out of your own home. One of the biggest is the problem of distractions.

In a corporate environment, distractions, to a certain extent, are controlled by the employing company. The company might employ the use of cubicles, rules governing conversation or music, even desktop do's and don'ts to cut down on distractions.

In the home office, there's no such overseeing body to minimize the distractions that can potentially keep you from your work. In fact, when you work at home, distractions multiply. The phone rings with non-work-related calls. Salespeople and family knock on your door. The neighbors play music too loudly.

For some people, these distractions are a non-issue. They're able to focus regardless of where they work or what distractions present themselves. For others, however, these small distractions can mean trouble. There are, however, things you can do to minimize the distractions in your home office.

- Maintain a structured work area. Keep your desk and work area free of anything that might draw your attention: catalogs, magazines, household bills, or non-work-related mail, among other things.

- Set off-limits hours and ask friends and family to respect your working time (emergencies excepted, of course). Ask that they understand that you aren't home for leisure during these hours and that you'll be more than eager to speak with them either before or after your working hours.

- Set rules for yourself. These might such things as include: no television, no radio, no answering the phone, or no sneaking into the kitchen to find the sleeve of chocolate chip cookies you know is tucked at the back of the cupboard. More importantly, once you set the rules, stick to them. If you break a rule once, it's all that much easier to break it a second and a third and a fourth time.

- If you don't have a separate phone line for work, invest in Caller ID to save yourself answering those non-work-related calls.

- Buy yourself a set of noise-canceling headphones. For those who are easily distracted by noise, these can be a perfect solution. Put them on with soft, instrumental (i.e. non-distracting) music playing, and the world's noise disappears.

- Set structured break and lunch times and take those away from your workstation so that you can clearly separate work from home.

Most importantly, determine your own level of distractibility. For some people, some of these suggestions are entirely extreme while for others, they might be entirely necessary. Some people are all focus, no matter what. Others are susceptible to even small distractions such as the bird in the trees outside. Knowing yourself is the best way to start when considering distractions. For some, a TV playing in the background is simply background noise, something to make the environment more comfortable. For others it is a death knell for their workday. If you know yourself, you know what distractions you can tolerate and what you can't, and you can set yourself up to work accordingly.

Distractions don't have to be the bane of a home office. With a little work, your home office can be as comfortable and as distraction-free as possible.

This article has been submitted in affiliation with http://www.Facsimile.Com/ which is a site for Fax Machines


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