This is a bit of springboard from my last post, where I explored ways to make your time on the Internet productive.

The key to that, of course, is having willpower, which is something many of us may lack. Or, if we don’t lack willpower, we may just have terrible habits that need to be broken. I may or may not be one of those people, which is why I downloaded two programs the other day that promise to make my productivity soar, if I remember to turn them on. They’re Mac Freedom (or Freedom) and Anti-Social.

The two software programs take all the temptation away from you by simply rendering it in accessible. When you use Anti-Social, you can block  Twitter, Facebook, and whatever other sites you specify, or you can switch on Mac Freedom and shut off the internet all together. It’s the equivalent of putting a padlock on the fridge when you’re on a diet and you’ve got turkey leftovers calling your name. I tried it the other day and it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. In order to shut down the programs and restore your internet connection, you need to reboot your computer, and as the Anti-Social site says, “you’re not going to reboot just so you can check Twitter.”

Of course, with iPhones and BlackBerries you can still cheat. It takes some effort, though. I don’t much care for browsing on my phone, so it’s a good solution for me. And when you need to get down to brass tacks, it may be a good – and cheap! – solution for you.

We’re currently in the middle of a federal election here in Canada. It’s the first one where Twitter is really dominating, so there’s access to a minute-by-minute account of whatever’s going on during the campaign. So while there’s often nothing of significance happening, it’s easy to lose an hour or two – or more – watching updates and opinions trickle in.

It’s really easy to do if you’re sitting at home, guided by self-imposed deadlines. Especially if you love elections, like I do.

But elections end, and the internet and all its delicious distractions stay on. You have aftermath and analysis, then whatever other news is big, celebrity gossip, blogs about mundane things, blogs about useful things, notes from friends, and the time-suck that is social media. If you let them, entire days can slip away in a stream of random URLs.

A cold-turkey break from the Internet can be a good thing, but not always a realistic thing. If you’re a freelancer, breaking away from social media, industry blogs, and discussion forums can take you out of the loop. Some of those things are genuine business builders, things that help put food in the fridge.

The challenge, as always, is to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m willing to bed Bejewelled isn’t a business builder for most of us, unless we’re in the business of creating the next gaming sensation for Facebook (and even then…). Twitter would be fantastically useful to me right now if I were a correspondent covering politics.

So how do you trim down your Internet time without cutting yourself off entirely? Here are a few things that work for me:

Target your use. Decide what’s really important and what isn’t. That means cleaning out your list of “follows” on Twitter or culling the number of blogs and news sites you read every morning. Pare it down.

Make it a reward, not a distraction. Finish the stuff you need to finish before you let yourself go down the rabbit hole. Those blog posts will still be there in the afternoon. And think how much more you can enjoy them if you aren’t worrying about everything you have to get done.

Set a timer. Give yourself a window of time for fun browsing, say, 20 mintues. Stick to it.

Get out of the house. I sometimes find a change of scene makes me more productive, so hitting a coffee shop or the library to work can sometimes help you get out of a surfing rut. Especially if you have to log in to use wi-fi, or even – gasp – pay for it.

Unplug. I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find myself aimlessly surfing when I should just shut the computer off altogether. A lot of life happens away from screen and keyboard. The piles of paper on my desk and the dust-bunnies under it attest to that.

Give yourself an out(age). Sometimes the only way you can work on the computer without distraction is to remove the distraction altogether. Turn off your network connection for a while each day and see how much you can get done.

These have all worked for me in the past, and will probably work again the future. Like later today, when I’ll admit I’m caught in that addiction-recovery cycle and someone on the campaign trail says something ridiculous or galling that lights my Twitter feed on fire. It’s easy to slip, but the secret is knowing how to get back on track.

What works for you?

There are so many fantastic things about working from your home office that it’s easy to forget it isn’t all coffee breaks and sitting around in your jammies. Unless you’re an employee who telecommutes (and actually, even if you are), you need to keep the work coming in. And you need to stay in touch with the real world.

Work Awesome has a great piece on why networking is important for freelancers, but I think it applies to anyone who’s part of a team and works from home. So I’d like to take their five reasons and add my own, a sixth, which is this:

Staying in touch with the team helps you feel like part of the team.

I’ve worked on plenty of long-term projects where most of the team is on-site and I’m not. And the one thing I’ve learned is that the team that works together in the same building every day usually develops a different kind of bond than they might if everyone worked remotely. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s a real thing. So when they invite you to group lunches or after-dinner drinks, go. Even if you have to drive across town through rush-hour traffic, it’s worth it. You can catch up with them in a way that’s harder to do on IM or e-mail, and they won’t forget you exist.

Unpluggd has a great little piece on “The Clutter-Busting Piece Missing From Every Home Office.” What is it?

The trash can!

I like to think mine is used only moderately. Far more often, I use the recycling bin (all that paper!). And most of the time my trash can has a dog toy in it. My dogs are huge fans of the trash can.

So really, the recycling bin is this home-office worker’s clutter-saver of choice. If only the paper made a shorter stop on the top of my desk….

Things have been quiet here at the home office. I’m in that space between projects, where I’ve just wrapped up a big gig that spanned a few months, and am searching out the next opportunity. I’m always surprised what comes up after fallow periods. And fallow periods can be surprisingly busy in other ways – in my case, we’re gearing up for renovations and mortgage renewals and all the running around that goes with that stuff.

I ran across and interesting piece about productivity from workshifting.com, and thought I’d share a link here. There are some great tips to help you stay on track – simple things we all know we need to do but sometimes need a reminder about.

Working From Home or Hardly Working?

A colleague and I were talking a few weeks ago about this fantastic office chair he’s coveted for years. “I’m doing a job this weekend that’s gravy,” he said, “I’m finally going to buy the chair.” The reason he hadn’t bought it before now? It was over $1000. But the thing was, he’d sat on it at a client’s office for 12 hours, and it was the most comfortable thing ever.

So why the hesitation?

That was what we both wondered. If you’re like a lot of denizens of the home office, you spend a lot of time with your butt planted firmly in your office chair. Is it a kitchen chair? Do you have that crazy knot in your upper back, too? Just me? When I first started working from home, I parked myself in front of our office desk, which was too high, in a chair that was less than comfortable but very cheap. I wasn’t ready to cough up for good equipment.

Seven years in, my philosphy’s a bit different. I don’t have a thousand-dollar office chair and I desperately need a new desk, but I see the value in those expenses where I didn’t before. I lease a computer with a pretty fantastic cinema display, because I need to make things big. I consider that stuff worth it. It makes my life better. So does my Janet-Jackson headset, which leaves my hands free to type or hit ‘mute’ during conference calls.

It’s true what they say: it’s the little things. And sometimes it’s the big things, too.

Until last October, I’d never broken a bone. I went 37 years with everything intact, and then I broke two and ruptured a major ligament. Suddenly I was housebound (and chairbound), hopped up on narcotics and unable to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. So October and November were pretty much a disaster, but I learned a lot.

It’s tempting when you work at home to jump right back in to your routine, no matter what. I’m the kind of person who will still work through a sick day, because if I don’t work I don’t get paid, and I tried to do the same in this situation. I have to admit that it didn’t quite pan out. The physiotherapist at the hospital told me it would take a month to get back to normal, and I will admit I laughed at her.

She told me that because it’s true.

I did some terrible work during that time. Hackish, pedestrian, uncreative work. Everything took me about four times as long. There were people (my fabulous parents and wonderful friends) in my house helping me with day-to-day tasks, and while they were welcome company my routine was upside-down and inside-out. On top of it all I had cabin fever and was convinced I was getting fatter by the minute. My head may have been in my home office, but it was not in a good place.

When I was ready to really get back to work, I discovered again how lucky I am to work from home. Unable to drive or hobble very far, it was fabulous to be able to work where I was comfortable, to ice when I needed to, or to take five for some physio.

And of course, I learned a lot during those weeks, including:

• Don’t be afraid to admit it if you aren’t up to something. This is probably a good rule for life in general, but one I found particularly tempting to ignore simply because I could work from home. I could work from home! What’s the big deal? Narcotics, apparently.
• Make sure you have a comfortable place to set up. Obviously you can’t take months off (or maybe you can, but I bet you won’t), so make sure you have a place to work that lets you move the way you need to.
• Ask for help if you need it. That goes for housework, but it goes for work, too. Don’t pretend everything’s normal. It isn’t.
• Get out of the house if you can. Even for a coffee. Someone who loves you will give you a ride.
• You’re probably going to be depressed and short-tempered. That’s normal. Admit it, take the time you need, and move on. Just try not to do it during meetings.
• Try to eat well. It’s easy to let that slide when your mobility’s compromised and you’re trying to catch up on work, but the right food makes you feel much better and heal faster.
• When you start to feel better, still take it easy. Don’t work 24/7 to catch up. It’s not helping anyone.
• Don’t take a Percocet and then accept a big project. This might be my biggest advice of all. Percocet apparently makes me say yes to every last thing, including stuff I have no business saying yes to.

Now that I’m mostly better, I can look back on that crazy time and be glad I didn’t have to schlep to an office every day. It was nice hanging out in my yoga pants and not worrying about how my socks never matched. It was even nicer getting to wear two shoes and drive my car again. And while I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone, I hope someday I can pay forward all the support my friends, family, and coworkers showed me during those months. I’m sure I was hell on crutches to live with.

(Home server) I got an invitation to join Ping the other day, the iTunes Store’s new social media network for music. I signed up right away, because one of the things I do miss about working in an office with other real, live people is all that water-cooler talk – recommendations for good music, what to watch on television, the best movies to see, etc.

So far Facebook and Twitter have been pretty good ways to keep up, but Ping has that little extra something. What’s that? Well, I’m what you might call a loser when it comes to finding new music. I prefer to invest my time in other ways, so without someone sitting across the way from me, sharing their playlist, I have zero idea what’s hot or new or good. (Actually, for the record, it doesn’t even have to be new. Just good.)

Of course, you have to be right in iTunes to see Ping, which isn’t quite as convenient as having it in your browser. Maybe that’s a good thing, though, since other social media sites can become a massive time suck if they’re right there in your bookmark menu. Stay tuned for another post on how to avoid that – right now I’ve got to spend some money in the online store.

You can follow me on Ping at fionawren, by the way.

When I tell people I work from home, they often say one of two things: that they’re extremely jealous, or that they’d never be motivated enough to make it work.

Okay, sometimes they say both things.

The thing about motivation is this: you can be highly motivated if that’s what keeps food in your fridge. Just because my co-workers aren’t sitting right beside me doesn’t mean they don’t still have expectations about which work is going to be done when. I’ve still gotta deliver.

They’re counting on it.

And, ultimately, so is my livelihood.

Pretty easy to reconcile, isn’t it?

Now if only my livelihood depended on having the dishes done every morning, or cleaning behind the couch. Then I’d really be in business.