Working at home can be very difficult. You already know that. One of the most difficult things you face is how to balance work time from family time.

You want to get enough work done before you call it a day. But you don’t want to have to work all day and no time to spend with your family. What I have discovered is the perfect way to deal with this very difficult aspect of working at home. A way that you can get plenty of work done, yet also feel good knowing that you did enough work for the day.

It’s called the point system.

It’s very easy to implement and it’s absolutely perfect for working at home. Here’s how it works…

You assign a work task as being worth a specified amount of points. For example, you could say that writing a new article for your website is worth 100 points. Getting a link to your site as being worth 50 points. Posting something in a forum as worth 10 points.

Whatever tasks you do on a daily basis, give them a specified amount of points. The better it helps your business, the more points it should be worth.

After that, give yourself a total number of points that you must get before you can quit for the day.

So if your daily total is 500 points, then you can’t quit until you have reached that mark. In the example above, you would have to write five articles. Or three articles and get four links. Etc. Etc.

The Good And The Bad

This point system is great for two reasons:

1. Each day, you are doing the right amount of work. You won’t have days where you get nothing done and you feel bad about it all night. It will motivate you to work harder so you can call it a day!
2. You won’t feel bad when you do decide to quit for the day. You will be confident and happy with yourself because you earned the number of points that you were trying to accomplish to start the day.

One of the best things about the point system is that it forces you to do the work. If you slack off, you are going to have to work all day just to reach your point total.

On the other hand, if you work really hard in the morning and get a lot done, you can take the afternoon off to celebrate. Provided that you have earned the total number of points for that day.

An important thing to note here, this system only works if you are loyal to your plan. You can not quit until you have earned the total number of points for that day! If your goal is 500 points and you only do 300, don’t say, “Hey, tomorrow I will do 800 points to make up for it.” Also, the same applies for the other way around. Don’t do 800 points today and say, “Hey, tomorrow I only have to do 300 points.”

I’ve tried doing both of these things and let me tell you, it doesn’t work out!

When you quit early and say you will get them back tomorrow, you never do! It just leads to the bad habit of quitting early too frequently. Until eventually, you are quitting early every day and you are never getting anything done!

The same thing happens when you work hard today and allow yourself to slack off tomorrow. This only makes you want to slack off the next day and also the day after that. Once again, it leads to bad habits and eventually you will reach the point of not getting anything done.

Doing either one of these two things does not work out for you in the long run!

Remaining Flexible With The Point System

Set a target amount of points you want to earn, and accomplish that goal every single day! And don’t be afraid to be flexible with your goal points…

If it’s too easy for you to reach your desired amount of points, increase the total. Or if it’s too hard, try lowering it a bit.

Please note, if it’s too hard, seriously consider all of the things you might be doing wrong before you lower your total number of points. How many minutes of your time do you waste surfing the internet? If your answer is more then 0, don’t lower your points goal until you get that taken care of.

Another thing to consider changing is the number of points you assign for each task. This is very important!

If you are assigning too many points for a task that isn’t very helpful to you, your business is going to suffer. Plain and simple. Make sure each task is given the right amount of points. For my website, I once assigned too many points for posting in forums. I figured out that instead of doing quality work like writing articles, I could just post in the forums for an hour and have enough points to call it a day.

Needless to say, my website suffered. I badly needed to tweak the amount of points I was awarded for forums posts. Eventually, I decided to not give myself any points for forum posts.

The point system is meant to be experimental. It may be the greatest system you will ever use to boost your productivity. Or, it may be completely worthless and you will only use it for a couple of days.

If you are struggling to get work done, or you want to be able to feel good at the end of the day knowing you did enough work, then give the point system a try.

It’s a love it or hate it kind of system. But you won’t know until you’ve tried it.

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