When you first start a stay at home job, no task seems too large or too boring. Your enthusiasm for your stay at home has you on your own little stay at home work cloud and you feel you can tackle anything. You have enough motivation for 5 stay at home jobs!

Then it happens. You wake up one morning and getting to your stay at home office just down the hall seems like a chore equal to climbing Mt. Everest. And once you are actually at your stay at home office desk, you find yourself writing long emails to your former co-workers or looking through yesterday's mail"again. You just can't seem to get started on your stay at home work. Your motivation has deserted you.

If you stop and think about it, you'll find you're procrastinating getting started on your stay at home job duties for one, or even several, reasons. These reasons for putting off a stay at home task is usually because:

-The task seems big and overwhelming

-It's boring

-It's a complex task and hard to know just where to begin

-The task isn't a routine part of your skill set

-It's something that's a necessary evil

When you start feeling these things, you know your stay at home job honeymoon is over. And you don't have to feel like there's something wrong with you or that deciding to opt for a stay at home job is the biggest mistake you ever made. All that's really happened is that your stay at home job has become just that: a job.

And really, it's good when you start thinking of your stay at home work as a job. This makes it more real and gives it more substance. After all, before you started your stay at home job, you had a conventional job that had some aspects you really enjoyed, while there were others you didn't, right? No matter how much you love your stay at home job, at some point it's going to hit you that it is a job"and that means your stay at home job will require some chores you just don't want to do.

So now that you're truly married to your stay at home job, you need to have some strategies for dealing with those parts of your stay at home work that you don't like or threaten to overwhelm you. The more prepared you are for dealing with those aspects of your stay at home job that you don't like, the better and faster you'll be able to accomplish them"and get them off the desk of your stay at home office to make room for the tasks you do enjoy.

Some ways you can make those dreaded stay at home chores easier, and less daunting, to manage are:

-Break a large work at home task into increments and spread them out over several days

-Prevent small work at home tasks from piling up into a mountainous chore by doing a few of them every day

-Reward yourself for finishing a large or particularly boring stay at home task

-Delegate"even if you work alone, you can outsource things like accounting and tax chores

-If the work at home job you're dreading is not something you're an expert out, find someone who is and ask for help

When it comes to work at home tasks that are just boring, get creative and find a way to make it fun"enlist family members to help, turn on some cool, upbeat music, race the clock, whatever you can think of to make it less boring for you

Consider just not doing the stay at home task"often we're our worst enemies and make up extra work for ourselves, so ask yourself if it's something that absolutely has to be done, which can often be the case

Give yourself frequent breaks from boring or complicated stay at home work tasks

And then there's always just do it. For some reason when you put off something, whether it's a stay at home task or emailing your mother, it gets a lot bigger in your mind. Think about it for a second. How many times have you found yourself dreading doing something only to find out after you'd finished that it wasn't nearly as bad as you thought it would be? So don't waste your time and energy dreading that boring or difficult stay at home task, do it, and then treat yourself to a chocolate chip cookie"or two! That should keep you motivated.

Charles Fuchs
http://www.charlesfuchs.com

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