Success in Sweatpants

Working from home gives us a lot of control over our environments. The phone can be ignored, as can the doorbell. Doors can be closed, televisons turned off, and Internet disconnected if necessary. No one walks into your office uninvited (as long as you’ve established ground rules with your family), and there’s no water cooler or coffee maker to hang around wasting time.

Still, it can be a challenge to stay focused as a vpreneur. Here are a few morsels for thought:

• I screen my phone calls, but actually don’t have that many, having "trained" my clients that if they need to talk by phone, no problem, but that we need to set an appointment to do so. And I figure that anyone who really needs to speak to me will leave a voice mail.
• I do not read, watch, or listen to the news (except NPR on the rare occasions I’m in the car)–sensationalism, bad news, and provocative spin are the nature of the beast, and I don’t need that kind of negative stimulation.
• I have the TV on as I work–always have, even in school (honor roll student). Not so much that I watch it, more for the visual and auditory stimulation…so whatever’s on the screen needs to be something I’m not raptly interested in (that stuff gets tapes for after work watching).
• Information overload got me quite a while ago. I’m not a big blog reader, though I will visit one when pointed that direction by someone else. I don’t have any RSS feeds coming in now. I use iTunes to download podcasts of interest to me and listen to them when I’m working in my favorite WiFi coffee shop (I go there for a change of scene!).
• My email is my link to the world, and without phone calls, and working from home where I can control my interruptions (I don’t answer the door when I am working), it is not a big problem. I set up rules to send recurring emails (newsletters, etc) to folders immediately, and I read them when I have time.

Some people are so inundated with emails that they have to find ways to manage the distraction it creates. Many will read their messages at scheduled times in the workday, and some send out autoresponders informing senders of this policy.

I do understand the strategy of only reading email at certain times of day, but I am NOT a fan of the autoresponder. Nothing says "I have more important things to do with my time than read your messages" better than an automatic response giving me the person’s schedule for reading email. It sounds pretentious and distancing to me….not sure that silence works better….so don’t have a suggestion (yet) as to what would be a good approach.