The 5 Rules of Working From Home

Minimize “Time Sucks”

Monitor how much time you spend not working in a day and how you spend those hours. Edward Hallowell, author of CrazyBusy ($15, Ballantine, amazon.com), has found that people working alone in offices waste enormous amounts of time on the phone and the Internet.

To wit: According to a study done by the Nielsen Company in June, an average visitor on Facebook actively spent―get this―a total of four hours and 33 minutes on the site each day. To counter this tendency, never check personal e-mail at the start of the day (it can sidetrack you), and respond to calls and work-related e-mails only during scheduled times. Otherwise, send calls to voice mail and consider quitting your browser for at least a few hours daily.

Also be wary of scheduling household duties and even lunch dates, which always take longer than you think and can leach hours from your day. Keep out-of–home-office socializing to a minimum, and try to relegate chores to one morning or afternoon a week.