Working at home can be both a blessing at curse. Obviously, working at home allows you to be with your family more; and to finally say goodbye to supervisors, quotas, commutes, and other annoyances you could certainly do without. On the other hand, working at home can be quite a challenge. Without that irritating supervisor over your shoulder, it might be easy to drift off, surf the net, watch some movies, talk to some friends, or take multiple naps, rather than actually getting work done. In fact, it may be hard to even figure out what it is you should be doing on a regular basis. In this article, I’m going to give you a couple rules you can live by to make your “work at home” more productive. After all, if you can get the work done in 3 hours, rather than 6, why waste 3 sitting at your computer?

So here’s my list. Heed it and you will notice considerable improvements in your productivity:

1. Clean your work space regularly. If you work out of an office, the whole office needs to be clean. Now, you might say “I don’t care if it’s clean,” but that’s irrelevant. Countless studies demonstrate that a clean and organized work space leads to greater productivity. If you want to be effective, you need to make sure everything is sorted carefully. You need to know where things are; and you need to be able to walk around without tripping over cords.

2. Ignore conventional schedules. Figure out when you are most productive; and work around that. Many people are most productive at the crack of dawn. For this reason, they’ll wake up at 5 AM and work whilst looking at the sunrise out of the window. Others are night owls. If they have to work before midnight, they’re going to do a sloppy job and be distracted the entire time. Figure out what your peak hours are and work around them. Additionally, figure out whether you should take multiple small breaks (say, 5-10 minutes every hour) or whether you should take several long breaks (say, several hours per break).

3. Set objectives and actually meet them. I’m not suggesting massive goals in short time frames. Rather, I’m suggesting reasonable-sized goals on a daily basis. Think about your work like this: everything you need to do can be broken down into smaller steps. So break it all down into smaller steps and then plan to do a few of them each day. Save a notepad document on your desktop that includes everything you must do for the day. Delete each line as you complete it.

4. Divide “work” and “non-work” stuff. One of the benefits of working at home is that you can see your family more; however, this can turn into a serious liability if you do not control it carefully. You need to make it very clear that certain hours are “work hours” (and, with the exception of emergencies, breaks, etc. are totally off limits). If you can cleanly divide how you spend your time between “work” and everything else,  you’ll be far ahead of other work-at-homers who never are able.

So take these four tips and put them to work today. Start organizing and cleaning your workspace. Ignore conventional schedules; and replace them with what works. Set realistic, daily objectives. And divide work and non-work stuff into two groups. If you can do this successfully, you’ll reap the rewards by working less and earning more.