Imagine sitting in the same room for hours, day after day. Now imagine that you’re all alone. Can you handle self employment? Get mentally ready for work at home.
The sentence “I work from home,” actually sounds a lot better than it realistically is. The truth is, work at home usually means sitting in the same room for several hours at time, with nothing but the sound of your own typing to keep you company. The job gets even harder when family members, daily responsibilities, and difficult work at home projects conspire against your best working efforts. Self employment isn’t sunshine and roses…can you handle the reality of working at home?
Not everyone has the discipline needed for self employment, and not everyone can handle being alone day in and day out. It isn’t easy to stay on schedule, often without a sounding board or inter-office distraction to break up the monotony of the day. Can you handle self employment?
Get mentally ready for work at home by finding out how well you handle work alone. Self employment, for the most part, is a very lonely occupation. There’s no one else to rely on, nothing to fall back on, and when you look around all the work pressure is on your shoulders alone. It can be lonely, frightening, and sometimes terribly boring – but in its way, self employment can be extremely rewarding, too. Where in your home do you do your best work? When you know the answer, go into that room and shut the door. Shut out the world, and simply sit there and work. Time yourself, and see how long you can stand it before you need a break, social interaction, a snack of some sort, even a hard drink. If you find yourself constantly getting up and roaming around, calling friends on the phone, looking for ways to connect, and discover that you’ve hardly got any work done at all, then you’re going to have trouble adjusting to a work at home schedule and lifestyle. But, it can be done. Ease yourself into self employment by practicing loneliness, working completely on your own, and finding out how to create helpful background noise (some listen to music, some play DVDs, others like to leave the TV on) that helps you stay tuned into the job at hand.
