There comes a time when you find yourself less productive. You get a sense that you are not doing all you can. This is especially true when you work from home. At the office it happens too, but for other reasons and not so often. Your boss makes sure about that. But working from home it comes gradually, sneaking, without warning - your work demons. Work Demons let you wish to have more time in a day or week for you to accomplish things, time has an unusual way of slipping by. Actually work demons are time bandits. Did you ever read Momo by Michael Ende? The story is about men in grey who take time away from people without them knowing it. Momo is a little girl who's gift is to help people take back their time. Before you can take back your time, you have to know what your work demons are. Raj Dash has done an excellent job in naming 9 demons, or men in grey if you like and they are:

1. IM Satisfying friends’ “need it now” social voting requests via AIM.
2. Twitter Getting distracted by incoming Twitter tweets (via the Twhirl client) and an even more addictive Twitter-like service, Plurk. (My addiction used to be Google’s MyMaps, or any kind of mapping mashup.)
3. Email Being signed into GMail all day (tsk tsk), and obsessively checking for new messages, only to waste time mostly filtering spam.
4. Comments Visiting sites where I write, to see if I need to respond to any comments. (I don’t always get an email alert, despite “subscribing” to the comments of a post.)
5. TV Turning on the TV capture card on my computer, and telling myself I “need” to watch something in particular, to get ideas for blog posts.
6. Being indecisive Fooling myself into believing I can start several projects for one client and not deciding which to finish for the week. This is anti-productivity (but is not the same as multi-tasking). It doesn’t work, and nothing done means no dinero.
7. Over-booking work Taking on too much work because I don’t like to tell people “no.” As my online brand grew, the number of offers grew — though not being selective results in damaging to my reputation.
8. Attempting too much Trying to cover way too much in a project. For example, trying to do a “31 and a half reasons” list instead of five, seven or maybe eleven good, well-thought out reasons that you can elaborate on. This over-reaching comes from an abject need to give that cliched “110%” on a project. The net result is performance anxiety and incomplete projects.
9. Working at home This environment has its benefits, though there are many home-related distractions.

From his list I can say that Attempting to much is my No 1 and right after it is Facebook for me. I just spend to much time doing some facebook apps pretending to do research work of some kind, but actually not. Can you share some of your work demons where ever you work - home, in a cafe, office or library? How do you free yourself or how do you take back your time and get thinks done? Looking forward to your comments.

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