My Productivity Killers--And How to Deal

Working for yourself, you're directly accountable to yourself for how much you produce and how much you make. The more I can work in a day, the more successful I'll be. if I don't get everything done in a day and leave time for marketing and other business tasks, I don't give myself enough opportunity for success during the day.

Sometimes my day goes smoothly--and I get everything done that I want done. Other times, I get stuck on a single project I thought would take an hour--and it winds up taking all day. Sometimes this has more to do with my focus than the difficulty of the work. Here are a few things that never fail to distract me--and how I deal with them.

The Internet. The Internet is a necessary evil. I need it to communicate with clients and market, but I also can get drawn into a great time-wasting vortex. Between blogging, my forays into social networking, checking email incessantly, and playing around on Facebook stalking people I haven't seen since high school (come on, you know you do that too) when I should be working, sometimes I can lose hours to the Internet without realizing I'm doing it. Sometimes I need Internet access for certain projects, but with projects that don't need online research, I sometimes head out to a cafe that doesn't have free Internet--just so I can stay focused.

The phone. My friends and family know I work from home--and they know they can reach me in the afternoons. I love spending time catching up with the people I care about--but not when I'm in the middle of a project. Of course, the diplomacy is tricky--they know I make my own schedule, so I always worry they assume I could talk if I wanted--so I tend to stay on longer than I should, just to be nice. Being nice isn't always the best for your business, though....

The work! Sometimes there's just so much to do that I can't focus on a single thing. I start one project and then worry that I'll never get time to finish the next one. So I start switching from project to project, never really focusing or finishing. To combat this, I make a lot of lists--and get a kind of perverse joy from crossing things off them.

A late start. The worst productivity-killer for me is getting up late. Nobody's demanding I show up to work by a certain time in the morning. Still, most of the time I try to get up early enough so that I have a whole day to get things done. Sometimes life doesn't work out that way, though--and just going to bed an hour later than usual can cause me to wake up later and lose considerable work time.

As freelancers, we're responsible for our own success--and part of that, for me, is making sure I have enough time to do everything that needs doing. And there are still more things I want to do than I have time for.

What are your productivity killers--and how do you deal with them?