I work from my home office. Procrastination is my all-time worst enemy. I loathe it. Yet, women like me will agree - if you're trying to establish and grow a new company from the comforts of home and the kids are out of the house a few days a week, there's often nothing you can do to prevent procrastination from luring you from your work. Some days there's just no excaping its evil clutches.

All my life I've been a procrastinator - book reports and science fair projects in grammar school, exams in high school, my senior thesis in college, etc. On occasion, I've even been known to pull all-nighters to complete client projects because I put them off for too long. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I've gotten away with it.

It's odd. I pay all my bills on time, deliver the kids to school and retrieve them at the same time every day, and try never to be late to appointments. It's really only the cerebral stuff I tend to place on the back-burner until the last possible moment. My brain just operates better under pressure (sharper still when I am multitasking within severe time constraints). So, when a deadline isn't naturally tight, you can count on me to tighten it through my own actions. In fact, I consider it a finely honed skill, a professional strength if you will (although you won't find it listed in my resume or on my web site).

Sometimes, though, a procrastinator's moment of weakness can spiral so far out of control that an entire afternoon of workable hours becomes a massive blur of regret and repeated vows to never, never again set aside the task at hand for a seemingly inconsequential household chore. Even I, a very well-practiced procrastinator, was recently reminded of the pitfalls of procrastination.

One of the perks of working at home is when the clean dishes in the dishwasher holler to be returned to their cupboards, you can typically spare a few minutes to properly tuck them away. So, before immersing myself in what I knew was going to be an intense and extensive research project for a new client, I decided to quickly tackle the chore. I figured it would be much easier to focus on my work without those screaming dishes competing for my attention anyway.

As I pushed back the chair from the dining room table, I took a deep, cleansing breath and I prepared to finish digesting the scope of my new client's project while I mindlessly relocated plates, bowls, glasses, and mugs from the dishwasher to the cupboard. It's the

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