One of the difficult things of working for yourself from home can be motivating yourself to get enough work done. Having customers, subscribers and outsource workers are definitely good ways of producing accountability, or you’d look stupid if you don’t do what you say you are going to do.
But Dan Brock talks about tricking yourself into getting started, by just having the initial goal of doing 30 minutes of productive work as soon as you get out of bed. I have been doing this since January, except for an hour, and for me, it’s not without first making a coffee.
Dan is so right about the day turning out to be full of whatever you work on first thing in the morning. He says on his blog that if he watches TV in the morning, he’ll end up watching it all day, but if he works on his business as soon as he gets up, he will be working all day. The reason this is true is that most people, is that they become lazy. And getting started is the hardest part. Once you start, it is a lot easier to just keep going with what you’re doing, then it is to stop and start something else.
But I’m a songwriter too, and before I devised a time management system, I used to be pretty much screwed if I got a new tune in my head that I thought was worth pursuing. Not much internet marketing got done on those days. I often ended up adding more and more voice files to my PC, and then when I thought I’d got a complete song, either record the whole song onto audacity or play it onto my MIDI keyboard, then the editing took all day.
Now though, I just sing a few lines into a voice recorder and leave it at that, until I have time to finish writing the song. I set aside two days a month to work solely on songs. But I am constantly creating them every day, usually while walking the dog (I couldn’t stop doing that if my life depended on it – they just come to me all the time automatically). It can be a challenge in a busy park trying to sing down my phone’s voice recorder without anyone hearing!
