I'm always sitting at my computer when I'm home. I feel like my office is my own oasis within my house, my own room of fun. My wife calls my computer "her", and says I may spend too much time with "her"; she's probably right. lol

However, I can't say that I'm working every minute of each day, though sometimes it feels like it. I spend some time on email, at least half of it reading and trading jokes, movies, and personal conversations with friends. I spend a lot of time reading other people's blogs, doing research, reading the news, and checking out other sites daily. Nowadays I spend a lot of time on Facebook with a number of people, and I've gotten into the Twitter social communications thing a bit.

However, I also get a lot of things done. In the last week I wrote two newsletters, created a new website, wrote content for that site, worked on two of my other sites as well as worked on an issue one of my web clients was having. I did some marketing, made some phone calls, and went to a couple of seminars and meetings. The one thing I've always been good at was figuring out when to turn it on, get motivated, and start doing something, the next thing that I feel is going to help me progress in some fashion.

Most of my weeks go along like that. As you know from a post a couple of weeks ago, I recently wrote a book on ways people can use their website for marketing purposes. The idea for the book, then writing it, took only four days. I was lucky in that I already had an outline for a course I was scheduled to give at our local community college, so I first took that and redid it. Then I did some research online because I needed some examples of some things I wanted to talk about.

Then I determined the format, and I started writing. Then I started the editing process, and sent a copy of the book to a few other people to ask them to review it. Then I had to write the copy for the webpage I was going to market it from, set it up for how people could pay me, loaded the page, ran my tests, then launched. For four days it was the only thing I focused on, and I got it done.

When I was still a regular working stiff, I remember that each year the chief financial officer would give every director their budget for the year and tell them they had to fill in all the information for their departments. We always got a month to work on it if we needed it. That kind of thing didn't work for me, though. I always turned my budget in within a few days of receiving it, because I knew that if I put it aside for when I actually had time to do it, I'd never have the time to do it, and I'd be scrambling like every other director always did by waiting until the end, then not being sure if they'd done it correctly. And, of course, half of them hadn't done it correctly, and the CFO had to work overtime to pull all the correct information together.

In college, I did the same thing my last two years. At the beginning of each semester, the professors would give out the writing assignments for the semester, and I would turn in all my papers in the first month. This was back in the days before computers, when we actually had to type our papers, and teachers had to find places to store papers students gave them. Most teachers work on schedules, so my giving them the papers early would throw them off somewhat. But I figured that wasn't my issue; I was focused, I did the work, turned in the papers, always had the teachers mark in their books that I'd given them the papers, and at that point I figured it was up to them.

Some of this feels like bragging or just my finding ways to talk about myself, but there's nothing further from the truth. My point is that I hear people every day saying how they don't have time for this or that, and continue doing things they're tired of doing or basically doing a lot of nothing. Life does have a way of messing things up, but it doesn't give most people an excuse for not following through on things they say they want to do, or need to do. Most of these things are for themselves, after all, and if people can't take the time to get things done for themselves, then why do anything at all?

Think about it. How many movies can one sit down and watch when they have things to do that could improve their lives? How many sporting events can one watch when they could be reading a book to learn something, or writing a book? How many things do most people say they want to do, yet don't even start?

So, what do you want to accomplish that you need to find a way to get motivated to do? Whatever it is, just do something; you'll feel better about yourself when you see what you've accomplished.