Working in a home office requires the ability to overpower procrastination. No one is looking over your shoulder to make sure you get the work done. No one is watching what's on your monitor to be sure it's work-related.
Setting daily routines helps you form a new habit. According to Dr. Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living out of Life, it takes 21 days of practice to turn something into a habit.
Based on this, try to come up with a basic plan for your daily activities and put it to work every day of the work week. Obviously, the work depends on what you do. If you're a project manager, you probably do administrative tasks, writing, and project management activities such as updating the project plan, checking on others. A plan could be like this:
8:00am: Start work and check email and voice messages.
8:30am - 10:00am: Complete writing work.
10:00am - lunch: Complete project management activities.
Lunch: Exercise, lunch dates, household chorse, etc.
After lunch - 2:00pm: Conference calls.
2:00pm - 5:00pm: Administrative, follow ups, and other remaining activities.
Household chores is in there because some people feel guilty knowing things need doing around the house. Making it a lunchtime or breaktime activity will allay the guilt so you can get on with your day.
In creating a schedule, you don't have to outline every 30 minutes or hour. The point is to identify the projects and tasks you do daily, then assign them a time of day so it turns into a habit.
Daily Routines provides quotes from successful people and how they organize their days. It contains plenty of quotes, articles by occupation, and article by habits such as drinking and working late into the night. Look at Charles Darwin. He created a tight schedule for himself and stuck with it no matter if he had visitors.
Author John Grisham, who still worked as a lawyer at the time, woke up at 5:00am every morning and started writing by 5:30am. His goal was to write at least one page per day. One page doesn't sound like much, but he had the "day job" to go to after doing his early morning writing.
You'll notice that story after story references routines and schedules. That's because creating routines helps people form habits and stick with them. The same works for successful home office workers.
