Working at Home
By Vic on Jul 14, 2008 in Motivational
You hear people say that the main reason that they want to work at home is because they can work only when they want to work. It IS true that you can set your own work hours when you work at home but it does NOT mean that you don’t have to have set work hours.
A ‘hit or miss’ work schedule…or rather, the lack of any work schedule at all, simply will not work. Time is of the Essence! YOUR time!
Working at home can be a very, very good thing. You can be at home to see the kids off to school and be at home when they get home. You can put a load of laundry in and it can run through the cycles while you are working.
You can have dinner cooked before a hungry family descends like a flock of hungry buzzards. All of those things are real perks that you automatically get when you work at home.
Working at home can also be a very, very bad thing if you do not plan your time well and if you do not set up a work schedule that you and your family can live with. When you work at home, time really is of the essence.
You must make very good use of the time that you spend working. If you are not efficient in accomplishing the tasks that must be done, you will either spend too much time working or you will fail miserably at your work at home job or business.
You must set up a work schedule for yourself when you work at home and then you must enforce that work schedule for yourself and insist that you family and friends also adhere to your work schedule.
A job out in the brick and mortar world does two things; (1) It provides a structure for your day and (2) it tells your family and friends that your time is spoken for during your working hours. You will notice that both of these things that a regular job provides both relate to your TIME.
First let’s discuss the structure that a regular job provides and how you can apply that structure to your work at home job or business. When you have a job that you go to outside your home, you are required to be at that job at a specified time on specified days of the week.
When you have a work at home job or business, you need that same kind of structure. You need to set regular working hours. The freedom that a work at home job provides is that you can choose the hours…but you do have to choose!
Now let’s talk about your family and friends and how they are going to view your work at home job. It is a strange but very true fact that your dear mother would not DREAM of calling you at your ‘real’ job and asking you to drive Aunt Rosie to the beauty shop and wait for her….after all….you are WORKING and can’t be expected to leave your job to run errands. Right?
That very same considerate mother WILL call you and ask you to take Aunt Rosie to the beauty shop and wait for her when you are working at home. Why? Because you are at home and available, that’s why.
Your dear, sweet mother will not see your work at home job as a ‘real’ job. Your spouse will also see you as being free to run errands. Your friends will see you as being available for long telephone conversations, lunch or for a coffee klatch.
You can see the problem. If YOU do not schedule your time and abide by your schedule yourself, others will not. Unless you see your work at home job as a REAL job with REAL working hours, your time will be eaten up. You will not accomplish the tasks that you need to accomplish.
You will fail and find yourself out looking for a REAL job unless you see your work at home job as the REAL THING with regular working hours that make you unavailable for other activities.
The best way to accomplish using your time to your own best advantage with your work at home job or business is to make a schedule and tell your family and friends what that schedule is.
You don’t have to be rude but you do have to be firm. Make it clear to all. “I will be working between 9 AM and 3 PM Monday through Friday. On those days and during those hours, I am NOT available to run errands or take personal phone calls or entertain company.” Then stick to it!
Wise Time Management
Time for work-at-home entrepreneurs is their single most valuable asset. Nothing can replace time…valuable, precious time!
No matter how rich or poor you are, no matter how many things are on your ‘to-do’ list, you still just get the regulation twenty-four hours each day. Sometimes I could use another twenty-four but that isn’t going to happen. I’ll bet that you could use more hours in your work day, as well.
The thing about those twenty-four allotted hours per day is that we can’t spend all of them working. We have to sleep some of them(I am working hard on this). (I am working hard on this) We have to take time to eat and there is the occasional shower, too.
Our families and our friends require some of our time. Relationships must be nurtured. So…we can allow ourselves just so many work hours each day. Since our working time is limited that means that we must make the very most of the hours that we work. We can’t waste time on unimportant details or on tasks that others can do.
When you shave a few minutes here and a few minutes there, you will make more efficient use of your allotted work hours. Here are a few suggestions and in the interest of saving your time (and mine), I’ll keep this brief and to the point.
• Email account efficiency: We all have various email accounts. We use one account for this and another account for that. Checking each and every email account more than once a day can be a time consuming task that you very easily make less time consuming by having all of the email that comes to all of your various email account to come into one gmail account. One email account takes a lot less time than several and you can still maintain all of your various email addresses.
Additionally, you don’t need to spend a lot of time reading and answering emails that are not going to add to your bottom line.
Email comes in several varieties. There are emails that are business related, emails that are important but not business related and emails that are simply frivolous and time wasting. If an email has been forwarded several times, don’t waste your time.
If an email is addressed to a great many people, don’t waste any time on it either. Email can consume a lot of time. You need to filter the important from the irrelevant and only spend time on those emails that are related to your business.
• Set up time tables to help you prioritize your work day: A scheduled work day is an efficient work day. You will get a lot more done in a lot less time if you know in advance and can see at a glance what task is next on your list. I like visual aids. A time table is a visual aid. It can help you allot your time efficiently and productively!
• Focus on result producing activities: When you make your work day schedule, you need to be certain that the tasks that you schedule are the ones that will in fact make your business grow and thrive. Don’t waste your time, effort and energy on tasks that can be done by others.
Take time to investigate outsourcing. You can add hours to your day each and every day when you outsource the mundane business tasks to others.
You can outsource such tasks as bookkeeping and accounting, article/E-book writing and submission, travel and event planning and ad writing. Others can do these tasks better and more efficiently than you can and your time is better spent on growing your business, making those contacts and closing those deals!
• Shave time off of counter-productive activities: Like I said, your friends and families do required some of your time but you can also waste a whole ton of time on such unproductive activities as watching TV.
You will be really surprised at how much of your day that you waste if you keep a record of your time expenditures over the course of several days’ time.
Now don’t misunderstand me. We all need down time. We all must relax our minds as well as our bodies. We can’t be all business all the time but we can limit our unproductive or counterproductive activities.
Time is precious and time is limited. We need to make the very best use of every minute of every day that we possibly can.
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Vic - it’s great to be hearing from you again. Keep guarding your health, and we’ll look forward to hearing from you again via video.
I’ve worked at home on & off for about half of the last dozen years. You’ve hit all the main pros and cons I’ve found in working at home, but there is one other that’s always been an issue for me.
We try and eat dinner together with our kids each night, and I find it very hard to transition from “working Andy” to “Dad” without a commute. I come downstairs from my office with a head full of work-related issues, and I’m not quite ready for a recap of my 2nd grader’s day at school, or mu high-schooler’s request to hang out with his friends on a school-night, or, or, or … you get the picture.
As Durant said below, the biggest mis concept of beign your boss is the bullshit of having all the time in the world. This started in the 70s from the Amway days and now it has become huge in selling the dream in ebooks. But man it is way hard sometimes staying focused when you have tons of non work related things happening around and we sure as fuck can not call in sick
The greatest lie ever foisted on the working man (or woman) is that working from home gives you more freedom.
Bull-f’n-shit!
It never ends. Clients and bosses call 24/7. At least in an office or factory or whatever you have a designated work space and time and if you aren’t there people don’t just assume you’re available to work. I often find myself having to disconnect all of my phones (both work and personal) in order to even get some sleep.
And what you say about others not respecting your time, dead on. I’ve got a mother who calls constantly and then gets mad when I can’t/won’t talk for 20 minutes on the phone in the middle of the work day.
On the other hand you can’t beat being able to roll out of bed 5 minutes before it’s time to start.
Amen!!! Shit look at me my 20 hours day put me in my ass cold if not for my wife finding me god knows what could had happened. Even when you outsource you still got to do 100s of things. Like I said above the Amway sell the dream shit and the current mmo ebooks have kept selling this bulsshit. No doubt one day will come where I can sit at the beach with the laptop but fuck the road sure as hell is not the popster dream in the ebook LMAO!!!
This is a lot of what’s been on my mind lately. I’ve really been trying to focus. And I think a set schedule is the way to do it. Also when working online it helps to schedule breaks and meals, kind of like at a non at home job. If you spend 12 hours straight online it takes a day to recover. At least for me. Once again, it’s great to hear from you.
The eating part has been really hard for me because I forget to eat then I binge and at 40 for a guy who does no exercise not really good idea.
Yeah I guess if we forced ourselves to take healthy breaks, like 20 minutes on the elliptical, and healthy snacks, it would be ideal. But easier said than done.
Hi Vic - thanks for telling it like it is. Every now and then I run into a blogpost or article listing all the great advantages of working at home. And it’s always pretty obvious that the author either hasn’t worked from home for long, or they’ve never done it at all.
I used to let people interrupt me while I was working but it really annoyed me. Now, if someone knocks on the door and they don’t have an appointment, I don’t answer it. Even if they look through the window and can see that I am there working - I still ignore them. It may seem rude but so are they for interrupting me to begin with.
Tell you what. When you get sick and you have not reached a point in internet marketing where you have enough sites ranking shit you learn what being your own boss is real quick. A year ago there would had been no way I could had just taken time off to rest and chill. I would had to tough it out and kept working. No work no money of course you say this shit in a sales page for the next magic bullet ebook know body would buy it.
Vic, great post. 2 things I have learned about working at home-
1-Working from home is not considered work to those around you… so lock the door so they can’t see you!! This way they cant bother you.
2-If you roll into “work” in your pajamas, people will not look at your job as work. Dress like it is work (actually wear clothes) and people will understand this job brings in income.
I stick to my way. Just fucking disconnect. I do not answer phone do not login to skype do not look at email and just get the work done.
Hi Vic,
I got here from Griz’s site. I’m new in this circle, but have been reading your blog, Griz’s, and Court’s for about a month now. I don’t like phony people so I probably fit in here somewhere. Keep up the good work, your posts are very helpful and I need all the help I can get.
Sonni
Welcome,
As you may have noticed I have not been posting much as I am semi-retire from his blog but trust me thee is more then enough content in all there of our sites to make it in your online business.
Vic
Ha, ha! I’ve been working from home over the past two years, I’ve been earning money during all this time, and yet my family and friends have the feeling that I’m doing nothing, so I should be available for them any time.
It surely cannot work that way, so I’ve learnt to say no pretty early, when I saw my time passing by while I was doing all kind of stupid errands during mornings, only to realize that in the afternoons I was too tired to be able to work anymore.
With me people already know cuz iI plain outright tell them to fuck off and leave me ale but m wife is not like me and as a solo law practitioner her mom alls her in weekdays to ask her to do the most fucking dumbshit possible but yet her sister who works for a company she never bothers cuz she “works” in the week LMAO!!! Fucking people!!
I thought you were channeling Griz with that long rambling post.
I’ll have to catch the video later when I’m at home.
When I was working at home 2 summers ago, doing short term programming contracts and selling on eBay while I was out of ‘real job’, I went fishing just about every afternoon from 4 until sundown. Getting out of the house and away from the computer for a few hours doing something relaxing for me really helped.
It rally does once in awhile you just have to say fuck it!! These past weeks have been so relxaing and kids o recharges the battery.
I bought Bookmarking Demon on your advice and I’ve been using the Scuttle Search feature but I have yet to successfully register a scuttle site. Any tips you can share about that?
P.S. I was concerned about you when I saw you hadn’t updated your twitter in weeks. I’m glad that you are feeling better.
More then enough info on BMD here at the site.
5 Best things about working at home:
Your Boss will never catch you sleep on the job.
You can play, “how far can my finger go in my nose” without worrying about co-workers seeing you.
You can have a little fun with the opposite sex (while taking a little break) with out worrying about getting caught on company videos.
You can fart all day and not hold it in (my fav).
Last but not least you can watch the Tonight show with Jay -how did I get a neanderthal Jaw-Leno and find 5 more of these…..:)
Seriously tho folks, if you work at home and want to succceed you have to stay focused.
Thanks
I have had to cut back on my hours in front of the computer for the sake of my family’s sense of well being. Once I sit down at the monitor (about 8pm)I unplug the phone and ignore all around me, barring emergencies. Now when I finally get time at the confuser, I have a huge checklist and I just keep hammering away at it. It is nice to have such a variety of boring link building tasks, so when I am tired of submitting articles I can switch to directories or commenting…then maybe over to blinkweb or squidoo. Choose your boredom!
Vic nice to be reading your posts and comments again at BU. My BANS continue to bring in sign-ups and auction winning revenues. So far about 160 dollars since my first earnings of 12 cents on June 5th. For having only 12 BANS sites, in various stages of promotion, and only a part time schedule, I know I am on the right track. I keep reading the blog here and doing what you say. Thanks for the good info.
I see that I need more automation!
This business is all about automation!! The more we automate the more money we make and the easier it gets.
Working from home is the most rewarding work you can do. That said it is also the hardest work you will ever do, especially if you are a blogger, double or triple that amount of work for each blog you are actively working.
Too many people think writing of any kind be it novels, short stories, or blogging is easy. Sure sometimes the you can crank out a dozen posts in a day or slog though 5k 10k or 20k words of prose and dialog. Other days it is a struggle and no amount of good ideas you had the day before will help. When you’re on a deadline it is even worse.
Not only is the work at home blogger a writer, which is one full time job if it is done right, you have to be so many other things. You have to market yourself, but reading and responding on other blogs in and out of your niche(s). Most of the time you have to be your own tech support and IT department. You have to be your own boss that kicks your ass into gear when you aren’t productive. You also have to be your own union rep that sticks up for you against that pushy boss and says stop. if you are home alone and working you also have to be your mother/spouse and perpetually interupt you to ask if you’re going to eating or showering.
The only thing you don’t have to worry about when you are your own boss, is being sexually harassed…
This business is way fucking hard. The problem is people think there is a magic bullet and of course there is not. But with proper training and discipline it is the only business I know that has guaranteed success.
I like your points regarding “Working at home” that you’ve shared in this post like maintaining a working schedule.
You have to plan you work and work your plan!
Hey Vic,
Take care. Sorry you cannot make it to chat tonight. Hope you are feeling better soon. Nisha said to tell you hi.
It is hard to make any type of schedule right now as It is crazy how fast It turns bad for me right now.
Hey Vic..
I just started reading some of the IM/MMO type blogs and found yours.
Man I got too say that you have been by far my most favourite blogger yet to listen too.
The way you present yourself in the videos is down too earth and awesome. I hope you will be continuing the video posts as I could watch those all day.
Um..
One question for you..
When you say you reworded a PLR article what exactly is rewordding lol?
Quicker just to write my own articles, or is the rewordding to make it unique not too bad?
I always been worried about PLR lol so that’s why I’m asking.
Also you use any directory submission software to help make it automated?
I use the SBD and APR, but I need one for directories.
Anyways I will be around too see if their is a follow-up response to this.
Talk with you again bro.
-Scott
just change enough words to pass copyscape and you should be good.