A child screaming in the other room; the pots burning; your partner constantly distracting you with memes. “Mommy, can I have chips?” Debt collectors and telemarketers that never stop phoning. The colleague that promised to send something in 15-minutes, 2-hours ago. Loneliness.
At other times, you feel bored and cannot seem to kick off that cosy blanket called procrastination, especially when there’s Netflix, Instagram, WhatsApp and every other distraction barely a click away. And the fridge – every five minutes you are in the kitchen burgling the fridge and snacking on sweets and other junk.
This idea of working in the comfort of your home sounded terrific at some point. It was a modern lifestyle; no getting stuck in traffic; no running into your crazy boss or that bitch at the office. And better yet, you might have even imagined yourself working from the beach and shooting off a few emails to people who are still stuck in the rat race. But it’s not like that. Instead, it’s turning out to be confusing and overwhelming. It’s driving you up the wall.
As a software engineer and business consultant, I spent more than a decade working from home and connecting with people from all over the world. In this article, I will share my experience, hoping that it will make your transition from office to home more comfortable.
There are five considerations we will explore:
1. Your Space
This one will differ from person to person. Some people have big houses, and setting up a dedicated space to work from is easy. For most people, however, we have no option but to work in our bedrooms with that soft, cosy bed that’s constantly serenading us to take a nap; or we have to work in the lounge, with that large T.V that has an endless stream of our favourite shows. Getting into work mode can be challenging.
We are creatures of habit. The difficulty about transitioning and working from home is that the patterns that we have at home are not related to working. We are used to leaving our workplaces, a very structured environment, and go home to relax, in other words, become unstructured.
Therefore the first step towards working from home is creating a workspace and then developing a work posture.
Choosing and Creating a Workspace
Your workspace does not have to be an entire room. It can merely be a part of the couch, a specific chair on the dinner table or a desk in your bedroom – it will be even better if your spot is near a window.
The trick is to avoid sitting there (or using that space) unless you are working. In time, maybe three to four weeks, your brain will learn to associate that space with work. More importantly, your family members (or people you live with) will also learn that when you are sitting there, you are working.
Contrary to popular belief, your space is less about it being panache and more about the behaviour that you associate with it. In time, you can always add a flower pot, a better desk and chair to improve it. But that’s just 20% – 80% is associated with behaviour.
Developing a Work Posture
In conjunction with a workspace, you should develop a work posture. For example, I put on my headphones (even if nothing is playing) and sit up straight and intently when I am in work mode. When I am not working (on my workspace) it becomes apparent as well – I slouch a lot and rock on my chair.
For you, this could a dress code or a special tea that you make to get into the zone. The idea is to do something that signals to the brain that it’s time to work. Developing a work posture also signals to others whether they can approach or whether they should stay away.
2. Your Physical Health
Keeping fit and healthy is no longer an option, but it should not be a chore either. There are two parts to staying fit and healthy: food and exercise.
The Secret of Light Exercise
Let’s start with exercise. We all know that exercising is essential for us; it’s probably the best medicine there is out there. But most of us do not exercise because we focus more on the results, which seem daunting, rather than the process.
Another mistake is we overdo it, especially when we are still enthusiastic in the first few weeks. There is no benefit in running five kilometres if you will not do it again because it felt like death. That is why we must exercise to feel good, even if it is a quick 10-minutes of walking or stretching in the morning. Here’s an excellent 16min video that will wake your body up.
Remember, if you feel good after a quick jog, walk or stretch, then you will do it again the next day and the next day until we are fit and able to run marathons, lose weight, wear sexier clothes and all the other goals we might have. Feel good first.
Eating Healthy is Expensive. Or is it?
Food, just like exercise, affects the quality of our day. Unfortunately, healthy food is far more expensive than most of the junk we eat. Or is it? Our bad diets are, by-and-large, the result of the “conveniences” we have from supermarkets and fast-food restaurants. An easy way of breaking this cycle is simply cutting out bad food, as in, not having it at home at all, and replacing it with tea, fresh fruits, nuts and vegetables.
Disclaimer: I am vegetarian, not for any particular reason except that my body feels much better without meat. I sleep like a corpse, and my energy levels are consistent during the day. This could be a tricky proposition, but you should try going without meat for a week and see how you feel. You could even call a friend and do it together – make it fun and discover new foods.
Whichever way we look at it, our physical health plays a massive role in our clarity of thought and state of mind. It’s even more critical when we work from home because we tend to sit in one place for long periods. Therefore, take some time out and think about diet and exercise as part of your work-from-home plan.
3. Mental Health
Mental health is a broad topic. Therefore we will limit our discussion to managing our state of mind and willingness to work when we are at home. My view is subjective, but for me, there are two types of moods: fleeting and persistent.
Dealing with Mood Changes During the Day
Throughout the day, our mood changes depending on what is on our minds and what is happening around us. The advantage of working from home is that we can respond to our mood changes more effectively than when we are in an office.
For instance, if you are feeling tired, frustrated or angry, you can (and in fact, you should) take a nap or walk to reset your system. On the other end of the spectrum, if you are feeling excited and bouncing off the walls (as with a sugar high), you should also blow off that energy somewhere else – have sex or something.
The best state of mind for working is when we are calm, focused and clear-minded. A simple but effective way of developing and sustaining this state is developing self-awareness. It’s really simple, just take a few seconds every now and then to notice how you are feeling. At first, write it down and observe your recurring patterns over time. You might find it insightful.
Persistent Feelings That Won’t Go Away
As we develop a sense of self-awareness, we often find that some feelings or thoughts keep coming back. By-and-large, this is the source of most of our anxiety, which can lead to depression if we ignore them.
In this case, it is essential to figure out whether we have control of what is bothering us not. For instance, if you worry that your job might become redundant as a result of things changing (like COVID-19), then you can be proactive and start developing new skills or find another job – this is something that is in your control. On the other hand, worrying about whether the company you work for will survive the lockdown is probably not in your control. Notice that both examples are an assessment of the same situation, albeit from different perspectives. This is one way of figuring out what we can and cannot control.
These persistent feelings can sometimes be signals that are beyond our intellect. Gut-feeling. Quite often, our gut makes no sense but listening to it can save us a lot of grief.
Our mental health is vital, especially when working from home because if things go wrong, there is nowhere to run. Therefore, as we go through our day, we should scan for mood changes and be more vigilant of persistent feelings and moods. An excellent place to start for developing self-awareness is this app, headspace.
Disclosure: I am not paid anything to promote headspace. It’s just an APP that I used a few years ago and recommended to many friends who also enjoyed using it.
4. Being Productivity at Home
There are mountains of books on productivity. One of the famous ones that I also found useful is 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. It goes a bit over-the-top, but many of the underlying principles are timeless.
For the sake of this article, once again, we will limit our discussion to three essential ideas, namely: low-intensity working, high-intensity work, and other people’s work.
Low-intensity Work
Low-intensity work includes signing off documents, responding to emails and sending invoices. This is work that can be done in 5-10 minutes and does not require undivided attention.
The trouble with this type of work is that it is easy to put off, but when it piles up, it becomes an uncomfortable constipation. Some people prefer to set aside time to do low-intensity work, but I prefer to just get it out of the way as it comes.
High-intensity Work
High-intensity work, such as research, writing or creating something, can take days, weeks or months to complete. This is the work that becomes part of our personal brand. Therefore, it is not only vital that we get it done, but we must do it properly.
Some people are more apt to working at night and others in the morning. Whichever one you are, listen to your body and figure out when you are most alert, calm and focused for a one or two-hour stint. Use that time to do your best work.
Also, remember that productivity comes from rest. Therefore taking short breaks during your hour or two hours of doing high-intensity work will actually improve your overall productivity.
Working Remotely and Collaborating with Others
We have to work with other people to create more hours in a day and to augment our strengths. However, the challenge of working with others is that our levels of motivation and ability to communicate can differ quite a bit.
The solution is to plan for the week and schedule a 15-minute video call every day (called a scrum) to collaborate. I cannot stress you how important this is! During scrums, you will not only clarify tasks and get things done, but you will also create a rhythm and espirit de corps – this is important.
Ultimately, productivity is measured in what you said you would do and what you actually did. Personally, breaking up work into these three categories has helped stay organised and focused on priorities.
5. New Ways of Making Money
Traditionally, we are used to working for a salary. However, the beauty of working from home is that we can be more flexible in exploring new ways of making money. A good starting point is to switch from being fixated on one income and start creating multiple sources of revenue. The best way to do this is to think about income in two categories, namely: monthly money, project money and product money.
Monthly Money
The first category, monthly-money, is what most employees are used to. The idea is that someone will pay you a fixed fee for doing a certain amount of work. The advantage of working from home is that you can get more than one person to pay you a fixed fee per month (called a retainer). That way, you can create more sources of income and reduce the impact of things going wrong with one client. The trick is to find a few, maybe two or three, valuable clients that will not harras you and still pay you well enough, rather than finding ten or fifteen clients that will call you non-stop.
I guess the question is, how do you find such clients? Once again, that is a broad question, but it all starts with learning how to write proposals. A good starting point is a book called The Business Proposal Blueprint.
Disclosure: I wrote this book while staying in small-town called Ermelo, in Mpumalanga. As a software developer, I had no way of meeting clients to get new business. I had to learn how to write detailed proposals that sell. This resulted in many months of research and practice, which resulted in winning clients in more than six countries. All the techniques I use are crammed in the Business Proposal Blueprint, and I hope you will find the book as useful as those that have read it already.
Project Money
As a professional, such as an accountant, graphic designer, software developer, H.R expert or lawyer, it is also relatively to become a consultant and start making project money.
The mistake that most consultants make is charging per hour. This is a rooky mistake, and similarly, there is a ton of books that advise against billing per hour. A better billing approach is something called contingency billing. In short, it means if I can achieve x, you will pay me y. For instances, I know many tax consultants use this approach to help companies improve their tax efficiency, then ask to be paid a portion of the savings they realise.
Projects offer an excellent revenue source; even better, they provide an opportunity to hire other people, which means you can make money without doing all the work yourself.
Product Money
The most challenging way of making money from home is to create a product and sell it online. A Google search will lead you to hundreds of “how-to” posts, but the reality is that this approach to making money is incredibly difficult because there are many different skills that you have to master before it pays off. The upside is that if you get it right, you will create an asset that will pay you in your sleep; therefore, it is worth pursuing.
Now we are getting into entrepreneurship, which in itself is a vast topic. However, for the context of this conversation, we will focus on two milestones: marketing and product creation.
Learning Marketing From Home
Learning how to market and sell a product is more important than creating a product. I say this because if you know how to sell and what sells, you are more likely to develop the right product in future.
Therefore, a good starting point on your journey towards creating your own product is selling someone else’s product. A good place to start is looking for a digital product that you love and sell it. The skills you will learn there will become crucial for developing your own product.
People tend to make marketing very complicated. But at the core, it’s a process reaching out to a group of people who care about something and connecting them with it.
Tools to get you started with home-based Marketing
A great tool to use for this is Mailchimp. Start by creating an email list of people that have a common interest, then share something useful with them. You can watch more videos about Mailchimp to learn more about what it can do.
Another way of marketing yourself is to write a blog on a specific topic. Forget about SEO and ranking #1 on Google. Just focus on writing for a small group of people, mostly people in your mailing list, and share useful content with them. There are many tools for creating blogs but WordPress has kept me going for over a decade. It’s simple to get started and it will support you even when you get more advanced. Try it.
Mindset Behind Creating a Product
Once you become more confident in your marketing skills (by selling other people’s products), try to create your own product. By then you will know what your people want and creating something for them is more likely to sell (or even pre-sell).
Unfortunately, the allure of “passive income” is attractive, and many people make it sound easy. If it were really that easy, everybody would be doing it successfully. The truth, of course, is that it’s a bloodbath! A lot of people lose homes, cars, and their livelihoods while hanging on to the idea that their products will sell. Therefore, let this be your long-term goal. Start slowly and build it step by step.
Conclusion
As you can see, working from home is still work – it’s not a holiday. The difference is that being at home presents many other unique opportunities that are not available to people that are stuck in an office all day. Therefore, the trick is to take advantage of these opportunities and slowly build a meaningful lifestyle where you can focus more on doing the work you love, rather than being a slave to the work you have to do.
I hope you found this article useful. Please share it with friends. Thank you.
