Working from Home Can Be a Rewarding Experience.

But, one of the major downsides to working from home are the many distractions you’ll face. You need to know how to deal with those.

Social Media

Social media is a huge waste of time if you’re not engaging in work tasks. That’s because you think you’re going to just pop in for a second and you end up staying for a lot longer than you thought you would.

What happens when you end up spending too much time on social media is it causes you to develop an attitude of procrastination acceptance. You blow off work because you tell yourself you’ll get to it later.

But what you’ll face is the excitement of something always being new and interesting on social media and work usually isn’t. So it’s easy to give in to the temptation to stick around on social media a while longer.

Then the next thing you know, not only have you lost time, but you’ve lost the productivity spirit. You end up feeling apathetic toward whatever you’d planned to do.

With Facebook, not only is there your own profile or page to post on, but there are plenty of others that will sidetrack you.

A friend posts a funny meme, so you take the time to respond. Then you notice a video that you just have to watch, so you do that, too. After that, you see a conversation on there that you’d like to join.

You go back and forth with others talking and having a good time as the minutes and hours whittle away at your day. YouTube is where your attention span goes to die. There are so many videos that appeal to a wide range of interests.

It’s easy to fall down the black hole of this social media site because one video leads to the next and even auto plays for you! On Pinterest, there are so many pretty images and so much information.

There are recipes and things to buy. There are beautiful landscapes and romantic ideas and information about saving money or losing weight. These things all grab and hold your attention.

With Twitter, it’s easy to think you can hop on, catch up on the Tweets, then hop back off. But this site sucks you in — not just with the good stuff going around, but also because it makes you get caught up in whatever drama is going on.

Whatever good intentions you have when you’re going to be on social media for a “quick second” always go out the window. These sites are designed to hook you in and keep you there.

When that happens, you end up blowing off work projects. That doesn’t mean you have to stay off social media. But if you know that it’s a problem for you, use them wisely. You can do that by deciding why you’re on the site.

If it’s for networking, research or work purposes, then do go on there, but only during your scheduled social media time. If you find it difficult to leave, use a countdown timer app that will kick you off the site once it’s outside of your scheduled time.

Save the scrolling and browsing for no specific reason for when you complete your work and use it as a reward. That way, you won’t get behind on work. The posts and videos and comments will always be there later in the day.

Friends and Family

Your friends and family love you and as soon as you start working from home, they get excited at the thought of you being more accessible when they want to spend time with you.

This can be a big issue because it’s hard to say no to the people that you care about. But it can cause you to get behind on work projects, and it can make you feel pressured and stressed.

The reason that family and friends behave this way is because their lives don’t necessarily look like yours. They may have more free time. When they’re home, they’re not working, so they don’t get that when you’re at home, you’re not just relaxing on the sofa watching whatever is on television.

You might experience the friend who needs help with something like an errand or she wants you to babysit her kids so she can run errands on her own. Or, you have the friend who drops by just to chat or have a cup of coffee.

Relatives might show up unannounced. They might want you to go out to eat with them or go do an activity together. Though your friends and family may be well meaning, you have to understand that your priorities aren’t the same.

So they’re not going to act like they’re on board with your priorities when you’re working.

Usually though, it’s just because they don’t understand. They don’t know what’s required of you with working from home.

It’s up to you to make sure that they understand. This is where it can get a little tricky because you want to be careful not to let any frustration or stress you feel spill over onto the relationship.

But you do have to speak up. Doing this is crucial to your ability to work at home as well as keeping the peace with family and friends. It’s always best to set boundaries for family and friends right from the start.

You can simply give them your schedule and tell them that those are the hours you’re not available for phone calls, drop-ins or anything that’s not an emergency. Maybe you didn’t do that in the beginning, so now you’re having to deal with distractions from people used to you being available.

The best way to nip this in the bud is to be honest. Tell them that when you get distracted from work, it’s more difficult for you to get back in the flow. Let them know that when you take an unscheduled break from work, it can throw you behind in your projects and you have to end up working late.

Make it a policy that you don’t answer your phone during working hours from family or friends. But if you do choose to answer, and discover that it’s not something urgent, you can tell the person that you’ll need to call them back later.