Working at home is a near-impossible task. The desire to clean my room — that evergreen procrastination standby — is omnipresent. My room also contains distracting things: my books, my movies, the Internet. In addition, my wife also shares the tiny room. If I’m not distracting myself, The Wife will be watching Star Trek. ‘Just one episode…’ I tell myself, ‘then I’ll get back to work.’
The small room my wife and I share is used for everything: sleeping, eating, watching DVDs, talking, arguing, and, err, thinking of England. It’s difficult to focus on one kind of task in a room with so many functions.
If I’m serious about getting things done, I need to get out of the flat. Luckily for me, living in a big city there are an abundance of places to go and work. Libraries, museums and cafes abound.
One of the benefits of working somewhere other than your home is that you can build, single, focused, positive associations with that place. If you always associate a location with getting things done — and nothing else — you will be more encouraged to work when you arrive.
Another source of motivation comes from is not wanting to waste the travel time to get to your work spot. If it takes twenty minutes to ‘commute’ to the library, don’t just sit there daydreaming. If you do then you’re doubly wasting time: once for the actual time and once for the commute time. Similarly, if Starbucks is a place of work, it would be a waste of the coffee money to just stare out the window. Increased guilt about not getting things done will increase the pressure to actually cross off some to-do items.
Through experiment, I’ve found that my optimal efficiency is to switch locations every sixty to ninety minutes. This way I get in two or three solid units of work but leave before I get bored or weary of what I’m working on. Then I’ll spend ten to thirty minutes walking to the next location. This downtime allows my brain to reboot and start whatever I’m working on anew when I get to the next spot.
Go outside, get away from distractions, and get things done!
--
Photograph by artandscience
Uncategorized 
Well said…
I read an article a couple months ago about “offices” designed for self-employed people and whose who would otherwise work from home.
For a relatively inexpensive rent ($150-300/month), a self-employed person has somewhere to go each day. These offices supply a cubicle or desk, phone service, Internet connections, fax machines, coffee makers, and perhaps a small meeting space.
Better yet, it gives the sensation of “going to work”, gaining the benefit of a new location and the associated mental shift, for the self-employed.
I recall there was an online directory of these “offices” somewhere — if I find it I’ll post a link here.
Even more efficient is to change locations about every 10 minutes. In fact, you could also make money by strapping one of the U.S. military’s MX missiles on your back while you’re at it.
[...] The most vital part of my mobile office setup is my MacBook Air. While the machine’s underpoweredness is sometimes frustrating, its featherweight light more than compensates. It’s so light that I can’t tell if it’s in my bag or not — a particular advantage if you like to switch work locations frequently. [...]
[...] my passport, financial information and birth certificate – and I never worry about what happens if I forget my laptop in Starbucks one day. How do I do this? I keep my documents in a digital [...]