My creativity has a headache

Oh yeah - working from home can be awesome. Lets face it I have very few travel expenses, no commute, freedom to organise my diary, no office politics and only an imaginary boss looking over my shoulder. On the other side of the coin is that it can be lonely, there can be a lack of motivation and of course the old fiend procrastination. It is so easy to just put that wash on, check your emails or Facebook and drift off into non work events.

I like structure. Monday I remove the chaos that the weekend made, clean the house and do the garden. Which leaves me with a four day week plus two evenings. I'm great at making lists and love the reward of a great big tick. I give my self strict work hours and even schedule breaks.

So ideal day means I drop daughter off at school at 8:30 and then I walk the dog for forty five minutes and ideally go to the gym for thirty minutes. Bacon butty and strawberry milk shake in hand - sometimes with seven cherry tomatoes because it is supposed to stop cancer I'm ready for action at 10:45. I work until 12:30 then it's lunch and I sometimes walk the dog up and down the hill (don't be impressed it is a six minute walk but it helps the old brain.) Then I start work again until 2:45 grab a drink and drive to school to pick up daughter. I then check emails - a bit of Facebook on the iPad in the car. Once the girls are fed and watered I usually work again after I've washed up at 5:30 until 7pm. I can get a lot achieved.

Unfortunately, I do not cope with any change in my routine. Yesterday my great aunt phoned up and asked how far along I was with planning and booking her 90th birthday party which isn't until 4th of January 2014. Can it wait? I asked hopefully - of course the answer was no. That and a few consent forms to fill out, the postman brought a parcel which set the dog off and a guy to fix the oven.

Today, woke up and some idiot had pulled the leads of the battery. My dog who will bark if a leaf dropped in another county had crawled into my bed at 12:10am doing his best Scooby Doo impersonation and I did hear the gravel crunch but I put it down to nature. See previous rants about badgers and pheasants. It's a horrible feeling and of course your first thought is whether or not you are being targeted. Who 'has it in for you?' My youngest daughter was very unsettled. The police were great. Unfortunately, there is a certain proportion of the population who are idiots. The RAC were busy, lots of let down tires and missing cables this morning no doubt. But thanks to an iPad and e-how I fixed it myself. Daughter late to school, meeting with the head, phone call from the publisher about a bad peer review. It's now 11:45 and this is how the procrastination creeps in for me. I've now lost the urge. My creativity has a headache.