When You Start to Work at Home
MAKING THE TRANSITION - Different Kinds of Time
by Christine Torres
It's true, working at home gives you a kind of freedom. Your time becomes your own. But that lack of structure can also be a problem for some people, especially when you first make the transition from "employee" to "self-employed".
COPING WITH LACK OF STRUCTURE
It's been said that the educational system actually handicaps the average person by not teaching them to learn. Instead, it teaches them how to take tests, how to evaluate what the teacher expects and how to deliver just what is expected.
The same problem applies to the system of "work". Most of us are not taught to manage our own time. We have the experience of going to a job, during which our time is carefully allotted and mandated and structured for us. And then we have "non-work" time, our weekends and evenings, which is often spent playing catchup on chores and errands. And then we have that precious "free" time, during which there is no planned activity, no Honey-Do list, and no pressure (unless you're one of those people who can't relax even in your "free" time).
But when you're self-employed the lines between different kinds of time are blurred. And most of us don't know how to manage our time without falling back into the same old rigid structures of the work-a-day world. But managing your time doesn't necessarily mean setting a timer, being in your home-office by 9 a.m., staying there until 5 p.m.. Of course, if you're tele-working, your employer may expect you to keep regular business hours, even though you're at home. But the self-employed person - in order to take advantage of the freedom of self-employment and still be successful at their business - needs to learn to think about their time in a different way.
DIFFERENT KINDS OF TIME
Creative Time - Being self-employed means you have control over your own creative time. But when transitioning to working at home, you may have to learn how to tap in to this valuable resource. Most employees are required to sit at their desks even though their creative juices aren't flowing. This is a terrible waste of time and resources, but for many employers it's more important to know where their employees are and what they're doing than to make maximum use of their creativity. What this means is that we never learn to listen to our inner creative voice. By trying to force it to comply with rigid time-frames, we end up not hearing it at all, we become severed from our own creativity.
If your job/business requires any kind of creativity, it's important that you spend some time getting acquainted with your creative voice. Mostly this will just involve listening. Pay attention. Keep a note pad with you at all times, and write down, not just ideas when they come whispering in, but the time when they arrived. That will give you an idea of your best Creative Time. And don't require yourself to hammer at the stone wall of a project, if it's getting you nowhere. I get some of my most creative ideas at 4 a.m. Sometimes ideas literally wake me up, and I get up and spend an hour or two at the computer or drawing board. This kind of creativity cannot be dictated, restricted or mandated to happen within a certain time frame.
Alert Time - There are times during the day when my brain and body just shut down. I suppose a bio-rhythm reading would help me understand what's going on there, but I don't need to see it charted to know that there are times during the day when I'm more alert and awake, and times when I'm just a waste of space.
Find your Alert Time and make good use of it. If you're not a "morning person", don't make yourself work in the mornings. Or work in small chunks, completing tasks in small manageable bites. Save the hard stuff for times when you ARE alert. If you're falling asleep at your work, go away from the task for a while, give yourself some "free" time, or change tasks. Take a nap! Experiment with working at different times of the day. Eventually you will find your best "alert time", and that's the time you allot for serious work.
Interacting Time - My work requires long periods of uninterrupted concentration, so I try to do that work during my Alert Time. I try to set aside phone calls and interacting with clients for some other time. Of course, that's not always possible, and some jobs require constant interaction with others. But if you can, you should set aside time just for phone calls, etc, and when you need quiet uninterrupted time, give yourself permission to turn the phone ringer off.
Free Time - The two problems that come up most often when transitioning to self-employment is spending too much time in Free Time, and not spending enough Free Time. Going back to the idea that we've never learned to really manage our own time, many people, suddenly free of the structure of a regular job, find it hard to do anything but play. The necessary controls to keep nose to grindstone have never been developed. There was always the "boss" who dictated when one worked and when one played. Now, you'll have to build some structures for yourself.
This is where standard time management can be helpful. You may need to allot specific times during the day when you will work. But it doesn't have to be 9-5. And Free Time doesn't have to be either planned activity or huge blocks of time. You may develop a natural work rhythm, where you work for a few hours, and then reward yourself with an hour of free time puttering in the garden or watching TV. The important thing is to figure out for yourself when it feels good to work, and still allow yourself time to play.
Allowing yourself Free Time during your work day actually helps regenerate your energy and free up brain cells for tackling big problems. I also call this Self Time. It's interesting that so many people feel guilty about Free Time. I have known people who couldn't sit and watch a movie without feeling like they should be doing something productive. For them, taking Free Time must seem like a self-indulgence they don't deserve. I wonder, do they look down their noses at people like me, who are content to spend several hours, even days, doing nothing at all?
THE SLEEP ISSUE
Another issue that comes up when you work at home is when you sleep. One of the BIG advantages to working for myself was that I could let my body revert to its natural rhythms. For me, this turned out to be important for my health. However, this can also be a problem. Trust me, many people won't understand if you let your inner clock slip out of sync with the business world. People who have to get up in the morning to go to their 9-hour daily grind will be resentful that you get to sleep in. Never mind that you spent the entire night working on their project. Never mind that you actually sleep less hours in every 24 than they do. The fact that you're still asleep at 10 a.m. will bring down silent (and sometimes not silent) judgments of lazy, slacker, etc. It's sad that the world judges us this way, but it's true. My husband is a programmer, a notorious night-owl, who does his best work in the wee hours of the night. But his clients still expect him to be up in the morning to take business calls or meetings. Clients don't cut much slack for the late sleeper.
You'll have to make some decisions about whether or not you want to try to stay within regular "business" hours. If your business requires a lot of interaction with people who ARE working regular business hours, it may be best in the long run to try to stay in sync. But in my mind, that's a loss of one of the greatest benefits of working for yourself.
BEING UN-AVAILABLE
There's a funny assumption some people make -- if you're home, you're available. You're "interrupt-able". Kids holler at you. Family members call you. Friends drop by, assuming you'll be available to them because ... well, because you're home.
Jeff Zbar, in Working With Kids Around, recommends setting boundaries, things like putting a "Do Not Enter" door hanger on your office door. Good advice for dealing with spouses and kids, but that won't work with friends who come to the front door, we've tried it. At some point you're going to have to tell the callers you have to get back to work, and ask the drop-ins to stop dropping in.
WHEN YOU WORK TOO MUCH
Working at home does make your time your own. But on the downside, the stress of trying to make your business succeed often means you spend more hours at "work" when you're at home, than you would if you went to an office to work.
For me, this was a fear issue more than a time management problem, and I've found that dealing directly with the emotion is better than band-aiding it with standard time management strategies. I do set some boundaries now about when I work, and when I take client calls. But the first year of self-employment was hell. I made every mistake in the book and nearly had a nervous breakdown, working constantly and never taking a break. Stopping to deal directly with my fears helped immensely.
QUALITY TIME WITH THE SPOUSE
If your significant other works at home also, you're about 10 steps ahead of the curve. Frankly, I don't know if I would have tried self-employment if my husband wasn't already working at home. He gave me the value of his experience, and encouraged me to become the entrepreneur he saw in me. And he understands my long and quirky hours.
I was lucky. Most spouses will have difficulty with the work-at-home schedules and lack of availability. Again, there's the assumption that if you're there, you're "interrupt-able". And for some relationships, this becomes a serious issue. If you talk about it before-hand, and make it a point of setting aside quality time to spend with your spouse, the time you spend at-home-but-unavailable won't be such a thorn.
THE TIME-WASTING CLIENT
In The Politics of Home Business, Rob Spiegel says there will inevitably come a time when you find yourself spending waaay too much time on one time-wasting client. There have been 3 occasions over the years when I have had to "fire" a client. It was a hard decision, because as Rob points out, being self-employed means you hang onto every client for fear that your business will go under. That fear can make you stay in the ring with a client long past the time of productivity. You'll need to develop some internal radar to track these time-wasters.
- Pay attention to how much time you spend with each client and what kinds of issues you deal with.
- Pay attention to how you feel after dealing with each client. Do you feel drained? Washed out? Some people can literally sap you of your energy. Especially if they're constantly nitpicking and complaining.
- Determine your "level". What are you willing to put up with, and for how long? This may come only with time and experience of dealing with client after client and seeing how you feel after each interaction.
- Weigh and balance - how much revenue is this client bringing to you? Is it worth the amount of time you're spending and the energy you're losing?
There will come a time when you just have to get rid of the time-wasters. Give yourself permission, and remember that the time you've just freed up can be better spent on some other clients.
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