When I decided to go full-time freelance a couple years ago, I had a lot of self-doubts and fears to work through, but there was one thing I was consistently psyched about: working from home. Finally after years of praying for snow days and office-wide Internet outages, I no longer had to leave the borders of my apartment to get work done. Gone were the days of cranky commuting and overpriced salads from the cootie-ridden deli. Now I could work from the half-bedroom turned home office, have my dog on my lap and take power naps whenever I felt like it. I would be so much more productive!
Insert present day work from home reality: I'm currently sitting on the sofa in the living room. I still have a home office, but it's occupied at the moment by heaps of laundry, an elliptical machine, and a collapsed shoe rack. There are so many papers on my desk that I can't even deal, so I’m just avoiding it all for now. It has taken me 45 minutes to write what you have read thus far; not because I have writer's block, but because I keep getting distracted. First it was to go get milk, then to make a late breakfast. While I ate, I watched some really cute video of a baby fruit bat eating grapes, which got me wondering about fruit bats: Where do they live? Can they be pets? I did some totally useless research on fruit bats. By the time I came back to the browser of this story, I wondered if it wasn't too soon to take my daily 20-minute power nap.