The ‘net is flooded with articles about the many pitfalls of working online and how we can be sucked into various time-wasters while we’re supposed to be working. The average person checks email every three minutes! Regular Twitter users lose over an hour out of each work day! Reading blogs is a huge time waster! And so on. (Hey, as a professional blogger, I feel no guilt over classifying blog reading as a necessary business activity, so I gave up worrying about that one ages ago.) (Also, um, you‘re here, and that works for me, so let’s not get into that….)

Everyone is all hyped up about the ways in which your workstation can actually drive you to distraction with all of the decidedly non-work activities it offers. It’s social media gone amok, and everyone’s work is suffering because of it, right?

Hey, dude, not me. I keep forgetting I even have Twitter. I check email more than I should, I suppose, but I haven’t found it to be a detriment most days. For me, the true distraction in working from home doesn’t reside in my computer (though, trust me, I’m plenty able to get lost in something trivial online, occasionally), but here in my house.

Here is but a small sampling of the things I absolutely never did when I should’ve been working, when I still worked in an office outside of the home:

Made pesto. Yeah. Um. I never had an office before now where my herb garden was just twenty feet away. And it only takes a few minutes and there’s just so much basil so maybe I could just whip some up and freeze it for later during a lull.

Got into an argument with my tween about whether or not two minutes constitutes viable piano practice. Her case: Moooooooooom, I played my song twice! My case: You could be lazier, but I’m not sure how, and so let me play right into your hand here and slip into lecturing you when you should be practicing and I should be writing. Oops.

Scrubbed toilets. Look, sometimes when I dash into the bathroom after a large cup of tea I am reminded that small boys and aim don’t always go hand in hand. It’ll only take a minute, anyway, and I can’t stand to just leave it all gross in there.

Organized my desk. While it’s true that I probably did this periodically even back in cubicle-land, it is not true that when I had an office elsewhere that I would often find it littered with my children’s books, toys, and scraps of paper. The mess in here is only partly mine, and that means I succumb to the “this is my desk, not your holding tank” lecture entirely too often.

Cleaned out the refrigerator. There’s a hole in the bucket, you know. Because i just thought I’d take something out to defrost for dinner. And as long as I’m doing that, maybe I’ll just whip up a marinade. That needs some garlic, so into the crisper drawer I go, and how long has this been in here?? Next thing I know, “taking out something for dinner later” has turned into a major excavation of the fridge.

Gotten into a to-do discussion with my husband. My husband is a professor, which means that he’s off work for the summer. He’s doing a lot of work around the house, and invariably as I watch him putter around I feel guilty (you know, because I’m sitting here doing nothing… wait…) and start painting trim or telling him how I’ll get over to the hardware store for such-and-such if he needs me to. These discussions usually end with him cocking an eyebrow at me and saying, “Don’t you have some writing to do?” Oh, yeah. That.

Played with my iPhone. Yes, if I’m sitting at the computer it makes no sense that I’m fooling around with my phone… unless you consider making “White and Nerdy” by Weird Al your ringtone a matter of utmost importance. Hey, I have priorities.

All of the above? Well, that was pretty much yesterday. No problem, I told myself, each and every time I got up from my desk. I’m a freelancer! I can get work done whenever! Yeah, well, it didn’t feel quite so carefree when I was still working at midnight last night.

No need to tell me what a moron I am. I’m aware. Believe me.