Nowadays, it is a lot easier to figure out a work and home life balance so you can enjoy yourself more, or you can spend more time with your family, and as companies are offering many people the option to start working from home, it means an easier life for everyone now, doesn’t it? Well, yes and no.
While so many people dream of the good life, getting out of bed at 8.58 in the morning and settling down to your computer with a nice cup of coffee, looking outside at the horrible weather and silently gloating to yourself, there are some downsides too! Let’s take a look.
Working from home in any capacity has a lot of wonderful things going for it, but it depends on the home environment you are in. If you run a business and cannot afford an office in the meantime, you are working extra hard to keep everyone focused on their work while doing it remotely, which means a heck of a lot more typing and communication that can easily be done with a sentence or two in person.
If you are running a blog, and have many writers to oversee, or you are a social media manager, the home environment can be a little distracting.
The prospect of learning at home can be a difficult one too. Managing people like bloggers on a one-to-one basis can be very time consuming so you need to find tools to make sure that you are not working 12-hour days, which is something you can easily do when you work from home because that divide isn’t there.
Instead, provide a source of information for them to learn from. It makes life easier for you, and it will cut down your workload. The cliché is that a lot of parents go to work to have a break from the kids, which is something you can’t escape from when you work at home!
The other thing that is a challenge for home-workers is the discipline you need to have. For many, the notion of working at home is one where you can be lazy. For those that have never worked at home, this is far from the truth.
Sure, you can take breaks whenever you want, but if you are under a tight deadline, you need to treat the environment like it is your workplace. So get an office set up, or find a place where you cannot be distracted for a certain period of time.
While it is nice to have home comforts, you need to ask yourself if they make you work any better. Some people prefer the option of putting on work clothes because it gives them the distinction between work and home. So it may help you to set up an office at home that looks nothing like the rest of your home so you can make that distinction, and as soon as you step out of your office, you aren’t in “work mode” anymore.
Your work and home life collide when you operate from where you live, so be sure to make that distinction. After all, you wouldn’t sleep in your office, would you?
