If you’ve ever worked from home, you know just how difficult it can be to do so successfully. Many people find themselves asking, “how can I keep my family from disturbing me when I work at home?” Lifehacker answers this question with advice from individuals who have successfully worked from home for decades.

Tips for minimizing distraction include:

• • Schedule your time carefully
• • Keep your family occupied and/or make them self-sufficient
• • Embrace your family interruptions
• • Set some boundaries.

To set some boundaries, one expert suggests that the first thing you should do to avoid interruptions is to have a discussion with your family:

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Sometimes family members should interrupt you, but the key is to get them to know which interruptions are okay and when. Give them examples of things that are both urgent and important that you can be interrupted for immediately (disasters and emergencies), as well as important but not urgent things that can wait until you take a break.

Urgent and important: someone broke a leg.

Important but not urgent: someone needs new shoes.

Neither important nor urgent: someone found the remote that went missing two minutes ago.

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One suggestion given for communicating when and what types of interruptions are okay is to use your home office door as a signal system.

For more information about this system, and for plenty of other useful tips, click here to read the full post.