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If you have finally waved goodbye to your full-time job to pursue a more fulfilling career going it alone and starting your own business, the chances are you might be working from home. This is the perfect way to achieve a better home and work-life balance, and you can spend more time with your little brood. However, working from home isn’t all puppy dogs and candyfloss. To make a success of working from home, you need to put in the hours and be prepared for a whole different working dynamic. You are reliant on yourself to bring home a wage rather than putting in your eight hours a day in return for a steady wage. Take a look at these pitfalls to avoid when working from home.
When you work in a busy office, the camaraderie and banter of your colleagues can get you through a particularly stressful day. Working on your own in your home office is very different. There’s no one to bounce ideas off, you can’t chat with a pal over coffee, and you can’t share funny emails with work colleagues. Working from home can be isolating and lonely. To combat this, consider your channels of communication. Link with other home workers and set up a network. Consider employing a service like eFax to help you send faxes over the Internet and to mobile devices. Set up a WhatsApp group with other local businesses, and generate an online office environment to help see you through your home office blues.
It’s all too easy to slip into a routine where every day becomes a pyjama day. Instead of getting up at seven, enjoying a coffee and muffin, and getting dressed before venturing to your home office to start your day, you are spending the first couple of hours of every day scrolling through your Facebook feed. You might spend over an hour preparing an elaborate lunch, or you might stalk Twitter for too long. While working from home is a luxury, you still need to treat it as your job. Make a to-do list of everything you want completing each day and set to work achieving this. Otherwise, you may run the risk of procrastination ruining your new startup.
You may be ambitious with your new eBay empire, your craft enterprise, or your self employed accountancy firm. However, don’t be tempted to run before you can walk. You need to ensure that you have a buoyant cash flow around every corner. Don’t accept a thousand orders for a product if you cannot deliver it. Instead, begin small and build up slowly. Expand when ready and always work within your capabilities as an individual. When you need to take on extra staff, you need to be in a position to pay them and provide an excellent environment in which they can work.
Being a newbie entrepreneur and working from home sounds joyous and exciting, but there are many pitfalls that you need to avoid.
This is a collaborative post.
Welcome to Birds and Lilies! I'm Lou: mother, blogger and freelance writer. This is my lifestyle blog, where I talk about motherhood, infertility and IVF, beauty, my love for food and wine, as well as my thoughts about stuff, and our real-life and travel adventures.
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