Many people would love to work from home. You can wake up whenever you want. You can spend the day in your PJs. You can work from the couch. And your schedule can be as wide open as you like.

While it’s true that working from home has its advantages — flexibility being a big one — it’s not the paradise you might think it is.

Distractions abound, especially when family members are home — or others call or come over, thinking that you’re simply not that busy. (Unfortunately, many people don’t take working from home very seriously.) There’s always a household chore that needs to be done. And you don’t get paid for resting, so you’re often working longer hours.

Here are seven tips that take these concerns into account and truly work.

The unemployment rate today has skyrocketed to approximately 10% and is forecast to stay above 9.5 percent for the rest of 2011. For the first time in American history, more women are working than men because close to 80 percent of the people laid off in the recent recession were men.

According to a recent study published in the “International Journal of Epidemiology,” unemployment is a major risk factor for depression, even in people without previous vulnerability. Because my husband is an architect — the housing market is dead, remember — whose work has slowed down substantially, I have an invested interest in this topic and wanted to know what I could do to help him stay physically and emotionally healthy, since, theoretically, one of us should be.

Here, then, are 12 steps to bust your depression when you’re unemployed.

I’m reading Cross and Perker’s The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations, and I was riveted by their discussion of energy.

This caught my eye, because my father is always emphasizing the importance of energy, whether at work or at play — especially at work.

Cross and Parker argue that energy is a key factor in understanding who is effective at work, and why. When they analyzed networks of co-workers, knowing whether someone was considered an “energizer” and a “de-energizer” shed a great deal of light on how networks worked, and how productive various people managed to be.

Their discussion is complex, but here are some highlights.

How many times each day do you try to work yourself up to tackle some undesirable task?

If you’re like me — several. Nothing is more exhausting than the task that is never started, so I’ve come up with some tricks to use on myself, to prod myself to get started.

1. Put yourself in Procrastination Jail.

If I feel pressure to jump in and finish something in a rush, and therefore can’t bear to start, sometimes I put myself in jail. If you’re in jail, you have all the time in the world. You have no reason to hurry, no reason to cut corners or to try to do too many things at once. You can slow down, concentrate. You can take the time to get every single detail right.

Creativity is essential for any profession (whether you’re working for yourself or someone else) or even pastime (perhaps with the exception of TV-watching). It’s a major contributor to one’s success. But sometimes people simply get stumped. The ideas stop flowing, and the well becomes empty. For most of us, a creative drought isn’t just frustrating, it’s demoralizing.

In her book, 12 Secrets of Highly Successful Women: A Portable Life Coach for Creative Women, author Gail McMeekin writes: “We know we are creative beings. Yet we are also very aware that sometimes our creativity stalls, plays tricks on us, or appears to have vanished completely.”

In her book, McMeekin provides readers with a variety of activities to help boost their creativity. Here are some ideas from her book to get you started, inspired and on your way to never experiencing a dry spell again.

With the economy going nowhere fast in the U.S., more and more unemployed workers are looking toward endless unemployment with little hope for their future.

Two recent articles I read highlight this problem and the associated devastating impact being unemployed can have on one’s emotional health — especially their self-esteem and sense of worth. While not all of us value ourselves based upon our job, it can’t help to make up a part of our self-worth no matter where we are in life.

Some people believe age starts playing more and more of a discriminatory role in the hiring process. Older people feel like they are often not hired because of their age, or perhaps because their greater experience requires a higher starting salary.

In any case, it’s no fun being unemployed for months, or even years. In fact, it can make a person downright suicidal.

Eleanor Concepcion “Connie” Mariano has quite an impressive resume — even for a doctor. Not only was Dr. Mariano — or, Dr. Connie, as she’s more intimately known by a few — the first Filipino-American to become a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy, but she was also the first American woman to be appointed the Director of the White House Medical Unit.

In June 2010, Dr. Mariano released The White House Doctor: My Patients Were Presidents: A Memoir (Thomas Dune Books, 2010).

I was able to speak with her recently about the psychology behind spending nine years caring for three Presidents of the United States through everything from surprisingly panic-inducing blisters to that sex scandal heard ’round the world.

Thank goodness the Wall Street Journal isn’t known for its outstanding health reporting.

In a story written by Rachel Emma Silverman, she reports on some preliminary research recently presented at a management conference. Like a lot of research that gives us “surprising” results, it was done on a single group of 96 undergraduate students at a single college campus.

And the task designed for the college laboratory setting by the researchers would be difficult to characterize as analogous to most people’s work environment or jobs — it was highlighting every single letter “e” or, in the second part, “a,” while reading.

The question the researchers asked — Can surfing the Internet help you to become a more productive employee?

Idiots.

The world is full of them. How hard it is for us, non-idiots, to put up with them. But to get our jobs done, our kids fed, and our pets groomed, we must deal with them.

Idiots come in many shapes, forms, and types, but the ones that frustrate me the most are those who don’t believe in any form of mental illness. These creatures maintain that all mood disorders are cute, creative stories crafted by persons who enjoy obsessing, ruminating, and crying their eyes out… a wealthy bunch who can’t think of anything better to do than come up with a make-believe tale about a few neurons wandering around the limbic system afraid to ask for directions, just like Moses.

We must tune out the idiots to achieve any kind of sanity or serenity. But how? Here are four ways that have worked for me.

I recently read (sort of) Frederick Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month. As I understand it, this book is a cult classic, and I was very curious to read it. It’s about software project management, and even though that’s a subject about which I know nothing, I found the book very interesting — that is, the parts I could understand.

My favorite section was a discussion of “The Joys of Craft,” in which Brooks answers the question, “Why is programming fun?” This question interests me because it’s such a good reminder of my Secret of Adulthood: Just because something is fun for someone else doesn’t mean it’s fun for me — and vice versa.

If you find yourself in a toxic relationship, you always have the option of ditching the friend and moving on. However, when the environment in which you make your bread and butter damages your self-esteem and robs you of self-confidence, you can’t exactly walk out… if you want to eat that night.

What to do?

More than a few friends have complained to me recently about toxic workplaces and their dilemma of how to live sanely within insane walls. So I thought about this more, consulted some experts, and offer a few suggestions.

Mental health care in Massachusetts is sometimes a hit or miss proposition. Especially if you’re poor or indigent, or may present a danger to yourself or others.

For the 14-bed locked hospital unit at Carney — now owned by Steward Health Care — it apparently was such a “miss” proposition that they ended up sacking the entire staff. Yes, you heard me — all 29 psychiatric nurses and mental health counselors were let go about a month ago.

Is it possible that 29 different professionals really were responsible for the four complaints? Or is this a perfect example of incompetent management and senior hospital executives covering their asses, and trying to put the best foot forward to keep their beds licensed by the state?

Gee, I wonder.