The Netpreneur Blog

I work from home.  Most people I speak to say that they would find it impossible to work from home because there would be ‘too many disctractions’.  For example, the television, refrigerator, the dog, wife, life…

It certainly takes discipline to work effectively from home.  I am certainly no paragon of discipline (I get distracted with the best of them), but I have employed a couple of strategies to ensure that I get things done.  Hope you find them helpful:

1. Set aside your work area.  Set up an office – preferably detached from your home - and use it only for work.  Your office is your place of work and it should be treated as such.  Adorn the walls with your degrees, qualifications and business registration certificates.  Set up photos of your loved ones – because they should not be able to interrupt your work sanctuary during work hours and you will miss them!  This is your place of work – do work here, do life elsewhere.  Avoid the temptation to take the laptop down into the living room to work in front of the cricket during the day or to catch up on work ‘after normal business hours’.

2. Dress like you are attending a regular workplace.  I have a confession to make.  I regularly start work without having had a shower.  Yep, I walk the dog and I head straight to the computer, without having had breakfast.  Bad karma.  It’s better if you prepare yourself each day as if you were ‘going to work’.  That is, get up at a reasonable hour, take dog for walk, shower, put make up on (?), do hair (?), eat breakfast, kiss the wife/husband, and head to the office.  It’s all about establishing a routine and sticking to it.  If you have a good routine, you will find that your productivity will increase substantially.  Of course, I wouldn’t advocate dressing in a suit and tie – jeans will suffice!

3. When in your work area, work!  Now that you have set up your office, make sure that every minute spent there is channelled towards your work objectives, not personal stuff.  Produce a daily to do list and make sure that you achieve it in the allocated time.  Don’t leave the work area until everything is done.  You need to walk out of that room at the end of the day having achieved something.

4. Make sure others respect your work area.  This is a hard one.  Tell your family and friends that your work area is your ‘office’ and it is to be treated as such.  They wouldn’t come barging in to your office if you were working for another employer – it should be the same deal in your home office.  Visitors to the house also need to understand that you are working and that you shouldn’t be interrupted.  A little bit of R-E-S-P-E-C-T is needed from others to work effectively in a home environment.  By the same token, you need to respect the fact that your home is a home too.  Don’t let your work impact unduly upon the lives of your partner and children.

5. Take breaks.  When working at home, there is a temptation to just work straight through without breaks – no morning tea, no lunch break.  This is a mistake.  It’s important to take time out during the day to clear the mind – sit down and eat some lunch, go for a walk, read the paper, play with the dog, take your mind off your work for a while.  In short, do what you would do if you were working for another employer (except, of course, play with the dog).

6. Separate your home and office utilities.  If possible, get yourself a separate business phone line.  Don’t answer your home phone during work hours and don’t answer your business phone outside of work hours.  Consider also getting a separate computer and broadband connection for home and office use.  It might be expensive to have two computers, but it will allow you to separate your two online lives – personal email, web favourites, files etc on the home computer; business stuff on the business computer.  This will also ensure that you never have to fight for the computer when trying to work – ‘honey, can I use the internet for a minute…’

7. Network and socialise with real people.  Working from home can be very isolating.  To maintain your contacts, and retain your sanity, it’s important to keep interacting with people – and not just via online forums.  Attend events, conferences, breakfasts, networking sessions, business lunches, drink functions, etc.  If you don’t get out and network with others, then you could ‘lose your touch’ with people and even become a recluse!   Many people who shun working from home do so because of the lack of daily interaction with other people.  It’s important that you fill this void by seeking out other opportunities to interact.

8. Network with others online.  It’s also important to network with those in your industry via the web.  Twitter is a great tool for this because it provides a mix of work and social messaging.  I have read elsewhere that Twitter is like ‘hanging around the water cooler’ at work and is an excellent tool for shooting the breeze.  Beware though – Twitter is addictive and time consuming!  Half your day can suddenly disappear as a result of tweeting and responding to followers.  Other tools that you should use include web-based online forums, Facebook (mainly for social interaction), LinkedIn (professional interaction), Ning, email, voice over IP and instant messaging (I use Skype for the last two).

9. Join the local business enterprise centre or industry group.  Most areas of Australia have federally-funded business enterprise centres, chambers of commerce or business councils.  These groups are often pretty cheap to join and they offer some great benefits and networking opportunities for small businesses.  At the very least, most of these groups have a website and they will list your website URL as part of the membership package – this is good for your SEO.

10. Schedule holidays.  One good thing about working for yourself is the ability to schedule holidays.  We schedule our family holidays at the start of the year.  Not only is it great for securing excellent travel deals well in advance, but it’s also good for your morale and self-motivation, giving you a milestone to work towards.  When you finally do go on leave, try and resist the temptation to take the laptop.  If it’s simply not feasible to leave the laptop behind, then be disciplined on your holiday and only work during designated periods to ensure that you spend the majority of the time in recreational pursuits.  I am sure that your wife/husband will remind you of this requirement anyway…

11. Take time off when you need to.  You wouldn’t work for yourself if it didn’t provide some perks, would you?  One of the perks is the ability to be  flexible with your schedule.  If you need to take time off, then do it.  If you need to work at 2am on Sunday morning, then do it.  Again, it’s important that you are disciplined and catch up on work in your ‘own time’ if necessary.  And you also need to be disciplined to ensure that you don’t work 24 hours a day – some netpreneurs are so caught up in their little enterprises that their work becomes all-pervasive and this can be very dangerous for home life.  Of course, some netpreneurs only need to work a couple of hours a day…I’m still striving to achieve that.

12.  Claim your home office expenses.  Make sure that you speak to your accountant about claiming your home office expenses in your tax return(s).  If you run a business from home, then there are a host of expenses that are deductible: electricity, gas, water, heating, cleaning bills, telephone, fax, ISP, office furniture, computer costs, electrical equipment used in the office, etc.