If you have your own business and you work from home, it can be challenging to form the right habits that you need to be productive.

Working from home provides its own unique challenges, and it is very easy to get distracted by many things around you in the house.

You might start tidying your desk and then decide you should also do the laundry and end up several hours later with a perfectly clean house but no work done.

You can also lose hours of your time surfing the net, responding to emails, and reading clever and funny blogs before you realize how late it has become. When you work from home, you are also susceptible to being distracted by the dog, kids, your partner, and much more.

So how can you improve your productivity and learn to focus on your work when you are working from home? Here are some helpful tips:

• Create a good working environment which makes it easy to focus. It should be far away from the television and other distractions, and in a quiet area of the house. If you have a room to yourself where you can close the door and tell everyone else not to disturb you, this is even better.
• Don’t get too comfortable. One mistake you might be making when working from home is working while curled up in a comfortable chair with your pajamas and fuzzy slippers on. While you can wear whatever you like when you work from home, it’s easy to get slow and sleepy in this environment and you will be more efficient when you get dressed, and sit up on a chair at a desk in a well lit environment.
• Keep a piece of paper next to you, and if you think of something that you should be doing such as putting the dishwasher on you can write it down so that you can push it out of your mind while you focus. When you finish your work, check your list and complete the tasks on it.
• Give yourself short and frequent breaks. When we work for too many hours on the same thing, our brains can become burnt out. Concentrate on a small task and set yourself a goal of when you will complete it.
• Reward yourself. When you finish each small goal, allow yourself to get a snack, a cup of coffee, or do something else for five or ten minutes. Set a timer for your break to remind yourself to get back to work.

These are just a few ways that you can fine tune your working habits to become the most productive you can be!