The perils of the shiny

I do actually exist, and I am part of this blog. My problem at the moment involves motivation -- how to get motivated when you are the only one supervising your work. Like many writers, I am plagued by the sort of inherent ADD that makes me especially susceptible to distraction. I'll get to that pitch... as soon as I check out this one web site to check a fact, or pull that other fact fromthis reference book, and oooh, look at that, that's interesting, let's follow that up, and hey! I didn't know that, and I wonder if this will be interesting, and .... hey, what have I been doing for hte past three hours? Curses! I have once again been seduced by shiny distractions, and I've managed to get nothing done. I'm in the lucky position that I have enough regular work to pay the mortgage and the bills. These are expected weekly deadlines, and I know I have to complete these tasks or disaster will occur. Plus, this regular work comes from people I went to school with or encountered during my office-job career -- friends, basically -- and I would hate to let them down or get them in trouble because their source turned out to be unreliable. So these regular gigs get done like clockwork, no problem. The problem comes from generating work people aren't expecting -- pitches, articles on spec, things like that. I'm the only one expecting these things to appear, and I am a master of allowing the shiny to distract me from my self-appointed tasks. Part of why I love the idea of nouns verbing is it provides me an outside layer of both encouragement and accountability. This is a place where we can share ideas, and hopefully by doing so, make them bloom. And by putting those ideas somewhere other people can see them, the theory is, I'll be forced to follow up on them. A question for the masses: How many other home-based or freelance workers have the same sort of problems with motivation? How do you overcome those problems? I'm guessing this is something that confronts many of us, and I hope this site can help us deal with our own impulse towards distraction.