Working From Home Vs. Working at Home
by mathe | Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 11:22 pm | Life as I See it |
Let me share this article which I wrote for Helium. I hope you guys find it relevant. It’s self-explanatory, but I’d just like to say that I wrote it with moms who want to balance working at home and working from home, in mind.
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Working from home is a most convenient option for mothers who want to spend as much hours as they want with their children. With the modern gadgets and equipment technology has to offer today, working at home is a very good and convenient prospect, indeed.
To be a successful home-based career woman, you only need to strike a balance between your life as a stay-at-home mom and a work-from-home career woman. It sure is tougher than it sounds but it is not impossible either. Here are a few tips you can use if you want to make a go and be a work-from-home success!
Define your work space:
First, define your spaces at home. Designate a separate work area like a mini office. It need not be a grand place, it can just be a small cubicle, or a little corner conveniently tucked into a quiet and private area of the house.
Dress up your work space to look like a real office, complete with all the important equipment you need to work or run your business. For example, if you only have one phone line and it is located in the living room, have an extension in your own work area. This gives you a great psychological boost about you meaning business even when you are just at home.
Not only that, you will also save time running around the entire house going from your desktop computer to answer the phone or fax something. Having a defined work space also helps your family to visualize your role as a working mom, apart from what they know of you as wife or mom. This will make them more cooperative and supportive of your home-based career.
Determine your objectives:
Set deadlines for your outputs or deliverables in your work or business so your clients know that you mean business with them. You can even carry it a little further by coming up with a vision for your business or home-based career and setting strategic or annual and even quarterly objectives or targets.
To balance this, designate also vacations or breaks from your work, much like what you get when you are regularly employed. This will give you days to rest, relax and just be with your family.
Develop time management skills:
Having settled that, develop impeccable time management skills. Time management is the best kept secret of successful work-at-home moms. Keep to a structured schedule with the number of hours for work and household chores fairly divided according to your priorities.
If you have smaller children, then you can schedule your working hours during their nap time or when they are already asleep at night or when there is another adult to look after them even just for the few hours that you are working. If your children are in school during the day, it is easier to set you work-chore balance.
Go for a straightforward division of your time between house chores and work. Think of yourself as having a regular job outside the house, which means you have the early mornings and the evenings for family and house chores, though you can be flexible as to how much time in the morning you want to do the things a wife and mom would do before working, or how early you take off your hat as an office worker, entrepreneur, writer or whatever and don your domestic hat again.
There is also a definite advantage for people who are at their peak performance at nights. If you are one of them, you can even work through the night and sleep during the day, when everybody has gone out and the whole house is quiet.
Do the “list”:
Keeping a list of household chores and work outputs that you need to do in a day or a week, is also another good idea because if you do not have a list, it’s either you go on doing chores the whole day and not a single output for work, or you miss to do the more important chores as you get stuck in your office space.
List the things you need to do in columns under the headings “chores” and “work.” Tick each item off as you go along, making sure that you do not miss anything important. Once you have settled into a routine, you will find that you will rely less and less on such techniques.
Discipline:
Try to discipline yourself to keep to the above techniques in order to achieve that work-chore balance you are after. Having a definite space for you to work and be creative, knowing where you want to go as far as your home-based work or business is concerned, and observing excellent time management will only become effective if you are disciplined to make these happen.
Even doing things as simple as dressing up for work even when you are at home requires discipline. Of course, you need to go through the trouble of bathing, choosing an attire and all that, but it’s all part of disciplining yourself. Your mind will really shift to “working mode” when you do this. It will also stop you from being diverted to do house chores when you are supposed to be working and vice versa.
Your children and family need to be disciplined as well, to support you become a successful home-based career woman/mom. When the children are at home and you need to work, train them to keep away from your work area unless it is extremely necessary. Prepare snacks and activities for them to do while you are working. Assign older children to be responsible for the little ones and arrange for a sharing scheme between you and your partner to tackle child care and household chores.
Definition:
Also, internalize the difference between “working at home” and “working from home”. When you are working at home, it means that you just happened to be working there much like working in an office and so your home life and work life are easily muddled. The phrase simply describes which place you are working in. Working at home can also mean working on anything – from house chores to working in your computer.
Working from home, on the other hand, means that you have a more structured home life vs. work life. It means that you are actually doing formal work in a home office or work area, and this is the term that you should be aspiring to.
Balancing housework with working at home is the key to achieving success in both your career and family life. It can be done and you can do it.
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