Stop Wasting Your Time on Your Online Business

For most of us, our computer is not only an amazing business tool, it is also a means of entertainment. Unfortunately, the entertainment has a way of intruding on our online business causing us to waste valuable hours that should be spend productively. Distraction is the number one complaint of people who work from home.

The two biggest time wasters are email and social networking. We all need to use email for our business, but we also stay in touch with family and friends through email. The same goes for social networking. Twitter and Facebook have become a necessity for business marketing and also a big part of our social lives. How often do you go to your Facebook account with the intent to update the status by sharing your latest blog update, but then get caught up in watching a video sent to you by a friend or looking at your friend’s newest baby pictures? The key is to keep your business and personal life separate.

2 Important Tips To Avoid Distraction When You Work From Home

1. Never mix business and personal social accounts. Set up two separate accounts and do not invite friends to join you on your business accounts. During the time you have set aside for work, never login to your personal accounts. This will save you hours of time and remove the temptation to socialize. Not only will it make you more efficient, it will make you look more professional too. Your business clients and associates do not need to know what you did on the weekend, and sometimes you would not want them to know!

2. Separate your business email accounts from your personal accounts by setting up “Identities” or “Profiles” within your email client software. For Outlook Express you can create different identities. Move your business email to your business Identity and only have that one open during your business hours. For Outlook you do the same but with Profiles. You will not only prevent yourself from being tempted to answer your sister’s email and reading silly jokes during business hours, you will also find you have to deal with less spam during your business hours which means there is less chance of deleting an important email by accident.

If you follow these two rules you will find you get twice as much done in a day. Do not allow yourself to be distracted when you work from home. Focusing on the tasks that will grow your online business during your work hours will leave you more time to spend with family and friends without having the feeling that you have been working for 10 hours online.

These are just two tips for making your online business more profitable. There are many more ways to become more productive when you work from home and I go into them in much more detail on my website.