One of the biggest reasons people don’t do well with a home business is that it’s so easy to procrastinate. I know I procrastinate far more than I should, even when I’m looking at where I’d like my business to be. It’s just easier to do other things too much of the time.

The challenge is figuring out how to not procrastinate so much. That part takes some work.

Why Do You Procrastinate?

There are all kinds of reasons people procrastinate. Maybe you’re avoiding working on a part of your home business you don’t particularly enjoy working on. Maybe there’s something you’d rather do with the family. Maybe there’s a show you’d like to watch on television. Maybe you’re tired because it has already been a long, difficult day and you’d just like to head to bed a bit early tonight.

Whatever your reason, you need to recognize when you’re using it too much. There are times when it’s appropriate to do something other than work on your home business. Most of us like to have a life as well as a business, after all. It’s when you give in to excuses too often that you need to look at why you’re doing that to yourself, your business and your hopes for success.

How Do You Stop Procrastinating?

It’s hard to stop procrastinating. So often you feel as though you have a good reason to put off doing the work you know you should be doing. You may not feel bad about it until later, such as when you check your stats and realize you aren’t earning what you’d hoped to earn this month, and realize that you really didn’t work that hard.

You have to figure out what motivates you to keep working, even when it means you won’t get to do something else you’d like to work on. What is it you love about your home business? What attracted you to it in the first place?

If you were attracted by the idea that you can work entirely on your own schedule with a home business, for example, you’re probably quickly realizing that it takes more than taking a break whenever you feel like it to make a successful home business. It takes a lot of hard work, often more than you would be doing for a job. The short work week of the home business owner usually doesn’t come right away. It comes after serious hard work to build the base of the business. It may never come at all, depending on the kind of business you’re running and the success you have at it.

Compare what attracted you to your home business with what you now know you need to do in order to succeed with it. There are often many differences from what you expected at first. You need to put those parts together to work on the bad work habits you’ve built. Find something in there that will motivate you to keep working.

It may be as simple as making a chart of your goals and posting it near your work area, somewhere it can be seen clearly. Update your progress regularly.

A picture of something you’d like to buy when you earn enough may be a help as well. Get those dreams out where you can see them.

What I don’t recommend is focusing too much on what procrastination has cost you. That’s looking back and is too negative. It’s not a bad thing to be aware of it, but don’t focus on what might have been. Focus on what could be if you just work hard enough.

Don’t focus entirely on the wild dreams either. Just as with setting goals, your motivation to keep working should be something you can get within a reasonable time frame.

Figure Out Ways to Make Up Lost Time

Sometimes you can’t help but be interrupted as you work. That’s life. It happens.

That doesn’t mean you can’t plan for losing work time. You just have to figure out what to do about it so you don’t get too far behind.

It may mean planning to stay up late or get up early to get some more work time in. Do whichever is better for you.

It may mean working on the weekend when you were hoping for a break. It may mean skipping your favorite television shows because you’ve realized building your business is more important. That’s what DVRs are for anyhow, right? You may be able to take time later for them.

If you have kids, it may even mean paying someone to watch your kids for a time, or asking a family member to help you out for a bit. You can get a lot more work done in a short amount of time if the kids aren’t underfoot, as a general rule.

Never give up on yourself just because you tend to procrastinate. Find a way to motivate yourself to limit that habit and get things done any way you can. Your hard work should pay off eventually.

With the new year approaching, many people like to review how things have been going and make resolutions or set goals for how their business will go in the new year. It’s as good a time as any to do this; in fact, reviewing your progress and setting new goals is best done a few times a year in my opinion. You need to be aware of how things are going to make sure you’re on the right path.

I’ve been doing a lot of this lately. This past year did not go as well as I wanted it to, but some things I’ve been working on are showing signs of life. I’ve had plenty of incredibly frustrating times where my income hasn’t been remotely where I want it to be, and times when getting enough work done has been next to impossible. All I can do is keep plugging along.

There have been changes in how I run things. I won a laptop earlier in the year, and that has been a big help in getting time to work. On the other hand, I’ve been homeschooling my oldest daughter since August, and that takes a lot of work time away. Things get pretty hectic at times.

These changes effect my productivity goals. The laptop gives me flexibility, the homeschooling limits my time available during the week.

You have to adjust your goals when things like this happen. It may not be only your business goals that change, however. I also changed my expectations around the house, and learned to ask for more help in keeping the house clean. I ask for more quiet work time on the weekends, while trying to not neglect family time. It’s a doozy of a balance much of the time.

Keep Goals Realistic

Your work goals must be realistic. Goals that you’ll never reach are only so motivating. Lesser goals that take you in the direction of your greater goals are necessary so you know you’re making progress. You may have a goal of becoming a millionaire, for example, but what are the intermediate steps. If you don’t have realistic goals that take you in that direction, eventually you will get tired of that goal and give up.

Let’s start with something simple, say, earning $5000 a month from your home business. It’s not an excessive goal, but it’s one many of us would love to reach.

Depending on where you’re at, that may be too distant a goal or it may be a perfectly reasonable one. For this example, I’ll treat it as a distant goal, something for someone new to running a home business might be dealing with. Most of us aren’t going to hit that goal quickly – in fact, most home businesses earn much less. You need goals you can achieve so you can really feel your progress.

There are many goals you can set that will help you to know that you’re making progress toward that $5000 a month goal. They aren’t all financial, although having a goal of even $100 a month to start isn’t a bad beginning if you’re still at $0 a month. Here are some goals to consider:

• Website traffic goals: How much traffic would you like to generate? Keep it simple at first, then increase. You may also want to measure this goal by increases, such as increasing your website traffic by 10%, 25%, etc.
• Talking to people: If you’re more oriented toward talking to people, set a goal for how many people you will talk to about your business. Just don’t get obnoxious about it with your family, friends or people you meet on the street. It’s a great way to become unpopular. You want to pay attention to signals that a person is or is not interested in your opportunity.
• Writing goals: If you do a lot of writing for your business, set a daily writing goal. Don’t go for pure quantity, make sure there’s some quality in there too. Quality takes longer, but it should benefit your business for a longer time than mass produced dreck will.
• Lead generation: Set a goal for the number of leads you’re generating. As you meet each goal with this one, plan an increase for the next goal. If you’re starting out, even your first lead may be something to celebrate.
• Research goals: What do you need to learn to run your business better? Set a goal to learn and apply that new skill. Learning about a new skill is nothing if you never apply it. Don’t set a new goal in this area until you’re actually using the information or have consciously decided that the new information or skill is not something you want to apply to your home business.
• Social media goals: Don’t make this be just about how many friends or followers you have. Consider your interaction with them as well. You may do well to set goals on how often you reply to other people on social media sites, so long as you keep it real. Social media is great for marketing, but it works best if you’re a real person to the other people on there. Using social media well for business can be a combination of marketing and being a real person, at least if you’re a small or one person business.

As you can see, none of these on their own is about earning $5000. However, they may help you get on the right path toward that more difficult goal.

Analyze Your Efforts

Whether you reach your goals or not, you should be analyzing what went right and what went wrong. This will help you keep from making the same mistakes over and over again.

You may find, for example that in doing your research you tend to skip the step of applying the new things you’ve learned. That’s a lot of time and very possibly money wasted. It’s a very common issue for people running any sort of online business.

You need to figure out why you aren’t applying things you’ve learned to your business. Are you too quickly attracted to bright and shiny product launches? Do you always think they’re too hard to do? Are you really trying to learn the right skill sets for what you’re willing to work on?

Once you know your mistakes you have a better chance of not making that same mistake in the future. That improves your chance of success.

Sometimes things will be beyond your immediate control. You may fail to generate the traffic you hoped to gain because your site fell in the search engine rankings for your best keyword. You can work on that problem once it’s noticed, but it may take time to fix. Knowing where the fall happened will help you figure out what to do about it.

Even when you aren’t reaching your goals as quickly as you’d hoped, it’s vital that you set some sort of reachable goal. It’s one of the things that can motivate you to keep working on what is probably a very challenging business.

One of the advantages of working at home is sometimes said to be that you can work at your kitchen table. It’s meant to emphasize the flexibility you have when you work at home. But is working at your kitchen table  or other convenient but not quite comfortable spots really a good idea?

If you have an option, I’d recommend working elsewhere in your home. Sometimes the kitchen table really is the best choice for your situation. If you have a better spot to work, however, I’d suggest using it. There are a couple of reasons.

1. Too much in the middle of things.

The first problem with working at the kitchen table is that you’re right in the middle of things. This makes it too easy to let work get in the way of enjoying your family life. It’s too accessible, and too easy to stop and just do “one more thing” when you should be paying attention to other things.

It’s also too accessible to any kids in the house. This is particularly true if you have little kids who don’t always understand the limits you set. Kids can be accidentally destructive. We nearly lost my daughter’s gingerbread house project, for example, because my son spilled water all over the kitchen table while the parts were sitting there. It’s too easy to have things like that happen to your work things as well.

The other problem is when you’re trying to work. You’re easily interrupted. You may be able to see what the rest of the family is doing and be distracted by the goings on. The kitchen table or other common areas of the home just aren’t separate enough to give that “at work feeling” that helps many work at home parents focus on what they need to be getting done.

2. A kitchen table setup is rarely good ergonomically speaking.

Most of us don’t pay a lot of attention to ergonomics while working. Many don’t know that much about ergonomics. But if you want to keep working and cut down on the odds of repetitive stress injuries, you’ll want to consider ergonomics, even if you feel comfortable working just about anywhere now. It takes time to get a repetitive stress injury, and they’re no fun to recover from.

If you’re having to bend your wrists much up or down in order to type, you’re not in a healthy position. You’re putting strain on your wrists.

You also shouldn’t have to look up at your computer monitor. The top of the screen should be about level with your eyes. Looking up for long periods puts a strain on your neck.

While it’s not easy to build the habit of paying attention to ergonomics, it’s a really good idea to do so. You can save yourself a lot of pain in the long run. There’s a lot more to it than these basics, but the general idea is to avoid putting strain on any parts of your body while you work. It wouldn’t hurt to read up on ergonomics on your own.

No Home Office Space? What Options Do You Have?

Of course, most people don’t choose the kitchen table or other awkward spots to work out of a preference. Most people who work at the kitchen table do so because there’s a lack of space anywhere else in the home. Is there anything you can do about it when that’s really the only place you can work?

Look for places where you can work effectively and more comfortably. Just where this is depends on the equipment you need to use and the furniture you have available. You have more flexibility with a laptop and wireless internet connection than you do with a desktop computer and a wired connection to the internet. Either way, look for a way to work with your wrists nearly flat, not particularly bent up or down.

You may also want to consider a program such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, or the voice recognition software included with Windows 7. You’ll type less once the program is trained, and you can give your hands and wrists a rest. Very much worth the money and the trouble of training the program if it saves you money on medical bills dealing with repetitive stress injuries, not to mention work time lost.

An ergonomic keyboard may be another good investment. I love my Microsoft Natural keyboard, but there are a number of different styles for different preferences. My wrists feel better using that one than after using a regular keyboard for a long time.

We can’t all have that perfect home office with the door you can close – I don’t have one. But we can think about where we work and think about the long term impact on our bodies so we cut down our chances of dealing with painful injuries from poor work habits.

We finished quite a project here recently. Just barely made the deadline, in fact, and there’s still some extras that need doing.

It was a truly exhausting project to deal with, more than I had expected it to be, but oh, so fun!

We entered California Virtual Academy’s Winterland of Gingerbread event. As I expected, my daughter was pretty ambitious with her ideas for her gingerbread house. Can’t say I discouraged it that much, other than to make sure it wasn’t more than I thought we could handle.

It was closer to too much than I like to think, though. I’d never baked gingerbread before. Made “gingerbread” houses with the kids before, but I always cheated and used graham crackers. Much, much easier!

Still, I think the trouble was worth the results. She was one of four kids in her category to win a prize.

I’m still dealing with the aftermath, in the form of helping my son finish his significantly smaller gingerbread house. Didn’t seem fair to let one kid make a gingerbread house and not the other. At least he isn’t trying to win something – he just wants to have fun and sneak bits of candy as he builds.

Most of us working online will at one point or another decide to buy an information product to help us build our online business. It’s the fastest way to get information on a particular topic, and a well written information product will teach you how to improve your business. They can be very much worth the money.

As with anything else having to do with working at home, they can also be scams.

Many products make outrageous claims and back them up with fake testimonials from “delighted” customers. The challenge to you is figuring out when the testimonial is real.

1. Check the photos.

Many product testimonials use photographs of the person they claim to be written by. It makes them look more legitimate.

However, there are many free and paid stock photo sites out there. Unscrupulous website owners can take a stock image and write a testimonial to go with the photo and false name. It looks great on the page.

Photos are easy to check out once you know how. Right click on the photo and find “View Image” in the menu that pops up. This will let you see where the image is.

Copy and paste this location into a reverse image finder such as TinEye. It will pull up any matching images it can find.

If the image is from a stock photo site, there may be plenty of places it is found.

Look at the places the image is found. See if the person’s name changes from site to site. If it does, you know the testimonial is not legitimate.

2. Read the testimonials.

Sometimes a photo will legitimately be used on a number of product testimonials. Many marketing “gurus” review a lot of products because they’re given a free review copy. You may see their face on many reviews for that reason.

If that’s the case, take a look at all their testimonials. Are they all rave reviews? Do they mention receiving a free review copy? When did they review the product?

The FTC has been working on policing online marketing, and testimonials is one of the areas they’ve looked at. A good testimonial should mention if a free product or other incentive was given. A date is a good idea as well.

Of course, only the good testimonials will be posted on a site anyhow, so rave reviews are to be expected. But sometimes they won’t quite ring true. It’s nothing you can necessarily define, but if it feels like a false review to you, don’t trust it.

3. Can the testimonial be verified?

Many testimonials don’t give you enough information to confirm that they’re legitimate. Who is J. Doe or John D. anyhow? You have no way of knowing.

Better testimonials have a way to contact the person who wrote it. If you’re talking online marketing stuff, there may be a link to that person’s site, or at least the name of their website. It gives their testimonial more authority if they’re someone big in their industry.

4. Search part of the testimonial text.

An easy way for a lazy writer to create a fake testimonial is to take parts of other testimonials. Much easier to take someone else’s testimonial and apply it to your own.

Obviously, you need to skip any parts with the product name in it, as that’s too specific. Pick a section of the testimonial and plug it into Google, and see what you find. The closer the match to testimonials on other sites, the more likely it’s fake.

Even with all of these tips, you can’t be certain you won’t be fooled by a faked testimonial. All you can do is cut down the odds. Make sure you don’t get rushed by sites claiming their special deal will end soon or sell out or whatever excuse they give for you to hurry up and buy.

There will always be another product you can buy to help your business. You probably don’t have the money to waste on junk. Take your time and only buy when you’re confident the product will help you take your business in the direction you want it to go.