Being an online business owner comes with certain advantages. Unless you’re moonlighting (and thus working a day job and coming home and night to run your business) you can enjoy the perks of working at home:

• Set your own hours
• Be your own boss
• Wear what you want
• Avoid the traffic

… just to name a few of the benefits!

But I know someone who looks at these benefits and admits that those are exactly the reasons he is NOT going to be an online entrepreneur any time soon. Like most people, he doesn’t love his job at a car dealership, but he’s impressively realistic in admitting that if he were allowed to set his own hours and be his own boss he would flounder and his business would fail in the first month… as he would spend more time in front of the television than his computer.

If you own a business and work out of your home, here are a few things you should do to help ensure that you spend more time with your online customers than with Judge Judy or the good folks at Days of Our Lives.

• Schedule your start time. That advantage to being your own boss is that you can set your own hours. But how many of us really do that? Most of us have a start time of “whenever.” The workaholics start as soon as they’re out of bed… the procrastinators start after their third coffee of the day.

• Schedule your finish time. Again, we may have the advantage of setting our own hours, but do we actually SET them? Many don’t.

• Schedule your lunch hour. This is a great time to get away from your virtual office for a while and go for a real walk and eat some real food with real people. Don’t think of it as a waste of time, think of it as an investment into your sanity.

• Schedule breaks. There’s a reason that breaks are coveted by employees everywhere: they’re vital to our survival! Take a few minutes of break every couple hours to enjoy the most out of your day.