Do you work from your home? If you do – good for you. It’s great to have the freedom and the latitude to go get a beer from your own fridge while you take a break from staring at the computer screen, isn’t it?

Yeah, working from your own home office is an awesome privilege that not everyone has. So consider yourself lucky.

But the home office carries with it a curse. It is not unlike a two-edged sword. On one hand, it offers freedom. On the other hand, it can bring pitfalls and distractions.

To help you avoid the pitfalls, I’ve made a nice list of things to do and not to do. If you follow my suggestions, you’ll get more done working from home.

1. Don’t work in your underwear. You’ve heard people talk about this before. They say that if you work at home you can stay in your pajamas or underwear. I say: don’t. Get dressed, and put on shoes. Act like you’re going to work – because you are. Not only will it put you in the right frame of mind and allow you to get more work done, but staying in your underwear all day in kind of disgusting.
2. Have a regular routine. Don’t allow yourself to sleep late some days and get up early other days. Just decide on a schedule and work according to that schedule. Remember – working at home allows you to pretty much set your own schedule, so you don’t have to give up any of your freedom. Just stick to a schedule of some kind to give yourself a rhythm and a routine for the sake of productivity.
3. Write lists. You don’t have a boss when you’re at home, so make sure you have something to tell you what to do. I suggest two things: a notebook that you write lists on, and cross out items on the list.
4. Take breaks. Yeah, the extreme of not getting ANYTHING done is overworking yourself to the point that you can’t get anything worthwhile done. So remember to take breaks. You need reminders? Here’s a nice program to help you do that.
5. Eat meals. It might seem like an obvious piece of advice to most of you, but some people don’t eat breakfast. Well, you should. Your brain will work better. Same thing for lunch – you probably need to eat something even if you don’t feel hungry.
6. Have a comfortable chair. It makes a ton of difference! I worked for about five days on a terrible kitchen chair. It’s a great chair for sitting down and eating my Cheerios, but an awful chair for doing 8-10 hours of computer work. Now I have a pretty nice office chair. No more aching back.
7. Have a nice desk. My desk is awesome; it has two slide-out flat things so I can work on those if I need to, it has a drawer in the center and three drawers on each side, and it’s huge and flat. I set my monitor on top and it’s perfect. I don’t know what I’d do without this exact desk – I love it because it allows me to work better. That’s my point: have a desk that actually assists you in working. Make sure you have enough room and it functions well for you.
8. Don’t allow others to disturb you. How you implement this may be hard if you don’t have a separate office with a door, but you have simply got to enforce the rule of “STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM ME” if you expect to get things done. Do not allow wives, husbands, or children in the room during work hours or you may find your time being taken up with everyday stuff. Remember – you are at work.

How’s that for a list of essentials? I think those eight items take care of almost anything you can think of as far as working at home is concerned, but if you think of anything else please add it in the comments!

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