How To Take the Shirking out of Homeworking...

Yesterday, I sat down to write a blog post.

I made some coffee, turned on my computer and then I did the following: checked my emails, did some PTA admin, cleaned out the cutlery drawer, completely rearranged the children’s doll’s house (to the level of ‘where should the teeny-tiny lamp go, on the teeny-tiny bedside table or the teeny-tiny occasional table in the hall?’), photographed some clothes to sell on ebay, glued various things including ear on clay rabbit/flap on Dear Zoo/cover of school reading book, covered 5 school books in sticky back plastic, BLEACHED a load of shells from the summer holidays and I think I was in danger of colour-coding the kids’ felt tip pens and sorting the Ladybird books into ‘vintage’ and ‘modern’ sections (I’m not even a tidy person!) when I realised it was school pick-up time.

So off to school dashed I, a ton of jobs achieved but the main goal of the day (remember the blog post?) not even begun. Hello procrastination, my old friend. We meet again.

The thing is, 3 kids within 4 years of each other means that in recent years, I haven’t been able to procrastinate. You just can’t. Kids need to eat breakfast NOW! They need to poo. NOW. They fall over, you run. They scream, you jump. They hit, you hit back. Ahem… I mean you calmly reason. The whole concept of ‘maybe we’ll fix the Lego tower your brother kicked over tomorrow’ or ‘don’t worry about the ‘lumpy feeling’ in your shoe, you’ll forget about it soon’ just doesn’t work.

At the end of the school holidays I’m so excited about getting back down to it I forget that when I’m writing, I don’t just bash away consistently at my salt mine, I work in stops and starts. I can hit the ground running but I can also take ages to knuckle down — and then I’ll have super-charged blasts and periods of utterly crap focus.

One of my big achievements over the last year has been to train myself to work at home. No mean feat when the to-do list includes fairly essential stuff like: make kids dinner, clear half-way-up-stairs bit so people can go up and down without breaking necks and wash sheets before they walk off the beds.

But I guess I’ve come to accept that, sure as night turns to day, this stuff will always be there. The jobs will never be done. And once I accepted that, the writing has come more easily. Still, I can’t do it without my top 10 rules for homeworking. Because when you’re not surrounded by a bunch of office workers, it can be hard to sit down and focus.

1. Make sure house is at basic level of tidiness before leaving for school run so you don’t come back to table full of dirty dishes or you’ll spend the first 20 mins back home cleaning it all up, after which all momentum goes out of the window.

2. Don’t get sucked into going for coffee with school gate mates on regular basis as it’s so much harder to get into work after an hour of chit chat in a cafe.

3. Define goals for the day and prioritise them, ideally the night before. Write these down and keep reminding yourself of them throughout the day.

4. Having work rituals helps, whether it’s using a particular notebook, sitting in a particular place, even using a favourite pen. Mine is a big mug of coffee, sharp pencils — and firing up my brand new beloved MacBook Air definitely fires me up too. Somehow these rituals manage to focus your mind and get you in the zone, a bit like how putting on lycra and stretching might psyche you up to do exercise.

5. Don’t email friends in the day, ditto go on Facebook or you’ll end up writing amazingly witty, wordy emails and posting updates, then before you know it you’ve been sucked into the rabbit warren and find yourself watching a YouTube video of some bloke proposing to his girlfriend underwater on BuzzFeed and not know how you got there.

6. Don’t check emails or anything online. Close web pages. Better still, don’t be online at all when you’re working, unless you specifically need the internet. Do you know why I’m writing this right now? A chap from Southern Electric is installing a gas meter and he’s turned off the electricity. I think I might offer to pay him to come every day and turn it off for 2 hours, so I can’t make coffee, can’t surf the net, can’t research (shorthand for read Guardian online and HuffPost…).

7. Turn off phone notifications. Just hearing that beep beep can distract your brain and set you back 5 minutes research has found and it can be up to 5 minutes before you’re back to your pre beep beep level of concentration — and all to find that someone you never heard of liked your Instagram post https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150709133044.htm Turn. Notifications. Off. And don’t take calls from family, friends etc though I guess blocking calls from the school office to say one of the kids was sick would be taking it a bit far.

8. Have a set time for doing household admin (school stuff, bills, kids clubs, bag packing, making doc appointments etc) ideally after you’ve done some work, rather than making calls sporadically throughout the day as they pop into your head. I now scribble these ‘must-dos’ onto a clip board on my desk and try to make all my non-work calls/emails when I break for lunch.

9. Work to a deadline. Ideally this is imposed by someone else, which is great, as my conscience, pride, and fear of not getting paid means I’ll get the work done, whatever. I couldn’t have done my http://digitalmums.com/ course without all those weekly deadlines which struck fear into me. If there’s no senior authority doling out deadlines (so childish, I know) I need to give myself one. I can’t have another coffee until I’ve finished editing this page. I need to have scheduled 20 pieces of content before I check my emails. I must file this blog post today or potential clients will walk away.

10. Stop troughing. You go to get a glass of water and end up picking raisins out of the box of Fruit ‘n Fibre. It’s easy to slope into the kitchen for a rummage every 20 mins but fight it. You wouldn’t snack like that in the office (spoonful of peanut butter anyone?). Anyway copious research shows that high-sugar snacks make your brain less alert. Have a coffee, chew some gum if you need to, but power through.

And you know what? These work. It’s taken the best part of a year to ease into it but being able to work really effectively from home is a huge achievement for a one-time office worker, latter-day stay-at-homer, present-day freelancer. Now if you'll excuse me while I have a quick scan of Facebook...

Finally, on the days it’s not going so well, I read this quote which is lounging on my desktop: