Developing The Motivation To Avoid Distractions

From the outside looking in, freelancing and running your own business looks like the perfect career. You work when you want, how you want and for whom you want. We all know that the formula to success is not quite as cut and dried as this…

Whether you are a freelance blog writer, or even own a web design company, you’ll have to deal with distractions.

A distraction steals you time in two ways:

• You lose time, the time that you are doing whatever you have been distracted by.
• You lose even more time; it may take 20-30 minutes to really get back into the swing of things and refocus your thoughts.

For that reason, one simple distraction could lose you an hour or more every single day!

Understand what distracts you!

First of all, you need to figure out what the things are that are distracting you. The chances are that the distractions for a freelance blog writer, as extremely similar to those of a .NET developer, ecommerce store owners and even search engine optimisation specialists.

Here is a list that might help:

• Lack  of breaks
• Mobile phones
• Instant messaging systems
• Email
• Social networking sites
• Friends or family visiting/interrupting
• Not having a routine

The problem usually boils down to distractions; the next stage is to find a problem to the solution.

Breaks

Breaks are important. No matter how hard you want to work, your brain will slowly get lost in several trains of thought.

If you have regular breaks, then you’ll feel refreshed and be more productive as a result. As a rule of thumb, try and have 5 minutes for every hour of work and 45 minutes for lunch.

Mobile phones, instant messaging systems, email and social networking sites

This is pretty simple. Switch them off/log out until your lunch break, or after you have finished work. The only exception to the rule would be when one of the above helps with work. For instance, if you have clients that need a quick response via email, log on every hour rather than shutting the email off completely.

Friends or family visiting/interrupting

This is a difficult one, especially when your friends or family live with you. It is hard for a lot of people to see what you do as a real job. For that reason, they might arrange a trip or ask you to help them for an hour here and there.

Be stern, but polite; they need to understand that if you don’t work, you don’t get paid.

Think of it like this…

How would their boss feel if they went and walked their dog for an hour during working hours?

Explain that you need to keep focused, just like their boss wants them to stay focused when they are working.

IMPORTANT – Having a routine

By far the most important part of keeping motivated and focused is having a routine. If you have a plan, then you brain can absorb what you need to do. As you hit milestones, you will feel like you are progressing, which helps to keep motivation high.

1. Don’t assume that a plan has to be unrealistic or set in stone; it can be adapted. Work out what you can do within a proposed time frame and put that in an Excel style diary. The diary can consist of basic notes and no times, or it could be more detailed. As long as you understand your diary, that is all that matters.

2. Don’t be tempted to wake up late, simply because you can work later. Working too late is unhealthy. This also messes with your routine, it will make it hard for you to stay motivated, but make it easy for you to get distracted.

3. Don’t include things such as answering emails in your plan, if you do that every hour anyway.

4. Always take into account your regular good/bad days; don’t be unrealistic when you make a plan. Maybe Mondays are the days where you don’t actually get much work done? Maybe tend to have lots of emails to answer, clients asking for quotes and so on; admin type work? Adjust your diary to suit.

Your plan might look as simplistic as this:

Monday

Start: 9am

Finish: 4pm-5pm

Break: 5 minutes per hour worked

Lunch: 12.30pm-1.15pm

Jobs: Quote (client name), guest post (site name), weekly admin, 5 x 500 word blog posts (client name), 1 x post on “Name Of My Business Blog”

Within 10 seconds of scanning your daily diary, you’ll know what to do. When you get emails from clients, it makes scheduling incredibly simple. If you’re not a fan of complex diaries; this is a great way to organise, keep motivated and keep focused.