Productivity

“You work from home? Wow! I wish I could do the same.”

If I had a quarter for every time I heard someone tell that to me, I wouldn’t be rich but I would definitely have enough rolled up quarter to buy me a stay at a Hilton hotel, maybe for a week.

Working from home is often romanticized as the best job ever.

You rarely have a boss. And if you do, you never have to face him in person.

Then you can set your own hours, work whenever you feel like it, and NOT work whenever you feel like it.

With a laptop, you can work anywhere — lying on your bed comfortable (which I do regularly), in your home office, on your kitchen table, outside on the patio, and best of all, while traveling to exotic places.

You don’t have to stay in one place! You can work anywhere. It’s complete freedom.

Or so they say…

I won’t deny that working from home, overall, is pretty awesome. I would not switch what I do for any job in a corporate office.

But one thing that is rarely talked about are the challenges of working from home. The dream of working from home is what they sell you in books and self-improvement seminars. But there’s a few things they never told you about it, that only people who experienced it will be able to nod and say “oh yeah, I know exactly what he’s talking about.”

Let’s talk about the “dark” side of working from home and how smart entrepreneurs deal with it.

The Trap of the Open Schedule

In theory, everybody loves the idea of an open schedule. You set up your own hours, work whenever you feel like, and if you want to take a day off in the middle of the week, that’s okay too.

In practice, this approach never works!

It’s just human nature. Without structure, we’re lazy and disorganized.

Start working from home and pretty soon you’ll start chasing your own tail, wasting your time in unproductive activities and have the constant feeling of not getting anything concrete done, yet never allowing yourself the freedom to take any real time off, out of guilt.

Anyone who’s worked from home long enough knows that you have to set yourself a schedule and stick to it.

Once in a while, you can change your schedule or skip it completely, but there must be a basic setup in place.

For example, my typical work day starts around 10 a.m. (I know, poor me…). In the morning before 10, I exercise and get ready for the day. Then, starting at 10, I work for a couple of hours, and then have lunch. Then I try to have a productive afternoon. In the evening, I’ll often work for two hours from 7 until 9.

I try to take at least one complete day off per week, and some days I only work 2-3 hours.

You need a schedule and a plan, otherwise you’ll start wasting your time and never get anything done.

The Cabin Fever Syndrome

One of the problems of working from home is that you’re home all the time!

After a while, cabin fever sets in.

First of all, your house is a mess, because you use it more than most people. You will stay in the house 8 to 10 hours more a day more than someone working in an office, meaning that you’ll end up needing to vacuum the floors and clean your place more often, leading you to spend even more time in the house.

When you have a job, you spend most of your day outside of your home. Then your home becomes a restful place that you associate with relaxation.

When you work from home, you start associating your house with work. It seems that there’s no place to escape. When you’re done with the day, it’s difficult to “call it a day” and relax, because work is always waiting for you under your laptop.

Sleep experts tell us that our bedrooms should only be used for sleeping and sex, but not for watching TV, and certainly not to work.

In your home, you should ideally have a dedicated office space where you work. When you close the door to that office, you leave your work behind. Don’t bring that laptop to the kitchen table or the bedroom bed, if you can.

To avoid cabin fever, you’ll need to plan more activities outside the house. Go out for a jog. Run errands yourself instead of ordering everything you need on the Internet.

That’s why I don’t start work until 10 in the morning. I need those few morning hours for myself, to read, go for a walk or a run, and enjoy the house without the thought of work.

As people who work from home grow their business, many of them end up renting a separate office space outside the house. Why? To avoid that cabin fever syndrome.

I personally rent an office in my city with the Regus.com group, through a subscription that allows me to use a private office 5 times a month. That way, at least once a week I get to spend an entire work day outside the home and alone, which keeps me productive.

Another strategy that many entrepreneurs have used, especially those with families and children, is to rent a hotel room once a month or so to conduct a “lock-in.”

This hotel room will not be used for illicit romantic encounters, but rather to work like crazy! For some reason, having a desk in a hotel room is very productive place, away from all distractions of home. I personally have used that technique successfully many time to finish projects.

The Schizophrenic Social Life

I recently met a lawyer who told me he could never work from home because he needs the stimulation of meeting people every day.

Work-at-home entrepreneurs tend to be a bit more introverted than most people. I personally am like that and that’s why I love to work at home.

But at some point, any normal person will start to go a little bit crazy from the lack of social interactions from working from home.

That’s why you need to plan more social events and get out of the house to meet people.

While it’s tempting to automate everything and never leave the house, conducting all of our business online, I find it liberating to be able to run some errands myself, go to the post office and do “normal” stuff, even though I could do many of those things on the Internet without having to leave the house.

Final Words of Advice for Work-at-Home Wannabes

The advantages of working from home outweigh the disadvantages.

You’ll never been invited to a boring christmas party.

You’ll never be molested by your boss! Or accused of sexual harassment for making a politically incorrect joke.

And you’ll never have to breathe the strong perfume of your co-workers, or the underarm smell of those who forgot to shower that morning.

And best of all, if you sleep in one day, no one will ever find out. Except you… and that may be the challenge of the work-at-home entrepreneur. You still work for someone: yourself! And you need some accountability.

Some tips:

• Don’t think that working from home means you don’t need any discipline anymore. You need MORE discipline working from home because you have no one to keep you accountable, except yourself.
• Try to separate “work” from “home” as much as possible. Don’t bring your work anywhere and everywhere.
• If you start to feel cabin fever, change environment. Go work at the public library, or at your favorite coffee shop.
• Resist the temptation to buy everything online, and sometimes actually get out of the house to run some errands
• Plan some “play days” in your schedule. Ideally, in those days you should not touch your laptop at all.
• Don’t forget that you need a social life. Schedule social meetings in your calendar, otherwise they will never happen!

Remember that the best thing about working from home — the total flexibility and freedom — can also turn into your worst enemy. Avoid that from happening by putting some structure into things, and you’ll only be more productive and happier.

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Last week, I bought a jump rope.

I realized that I was spending too much time sitting down at the computer, and not enough time exercising.

Because I’ve been traveling a lot, I lost my sense of routine, and ended up working whenever I felt like it, instead of following a schedule.

Through experience, I know how disastrous that can be.

So now I’m following some kind of routine. Here’s how it works:

I work for about 50 minutes, then I take a 10 minute break. That’s why I jump some rope and pump up my heart rate! It’s fun, it’s motivating, and it keeps you in shape. I might eat something, have a glass of water, and then I sit down for another 50 minute streak.

During those periods of work, I try to focus on only one thing at a time. No facebook, no checking email, no browsing the web.

Then after, I take a forty minute break.

That’s one cycle! And it corresponds approximately to the circadian rhythms our bodies follow during the day.

Then, I repeat as necessary.

The most important thing is to plan in advance. I might not work the same hours every day, but in the morning I decide what my schedule is going to look like. For example:

9:00-9:50 Work
10:00-10:50 Work
10:50-11:30: BREAK- LUNCH
11:30-12:20 Work

Got it? Plan in advance!

And do something during your breaks so you don’t become a blob!

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Check out the video below on how I wrote my 435-page book Raw Food Controversies while traveling around the world!

Dan Kennedy, the famous copywriter, used to say: “If you haven’t offended someone by 3 p.m., you’re not working.”

By that, he meant that offending people is part of being an entrepreneur. Inevitably, some people are not going to like what you have to say.

Ever since my online business started gaining some popularity, I’ve received some kind of negative comment almost on a daily basis.

A common complaint comes from the anti-capitalist, anti-globalization, young “know-it-all” primitivist, brainwashed by his Marxist university teachers who gets angry because he doesn’t like your “aggressive marketing.”

Of course, the same person will gladly consume your information for free if he can, do nothing with it, and then go to complain about you on various discussion forums where other similar losers hang out.

Let me tell you something. If I listened to every voice of contempt and tried to please everybody, I would be flipping veggie burgers at your local McVeggieLand instead of doing what I love and helping others in the process.

You have a right to make a living and SELL your information. If some people don’t agree with that, let them rant about it all they want.

If you haven’t offended someone by 3 p.m., you’re probably not working. So get to work now and speak your truth! It will change a lot of lives for the better, and make a few people angry. This is 2010 so everybody has a voice on the Internet, including those who have nothing to say.

To get started making a living doing what you love, go immediately to www.dowhatyouloveuniversity.com/new.html

I was recently inspired by an article by Steve Pavlina (www.stevepavlina.com) on a method for productivity, which consists of working like crazy for a week, and then taking a week off to focus on your personal life.

Steve always has interesting articles and this one caught my attention. So this week I’m turning into a workaholic, working 10-12+ hours every day and doing almost nothing else.

Next week, I’ll be doing almost no work (except a few emails) and instead I’ll focus on all those personal projects I’ve put on hold for too long.

Even though I’ve never tried this particular technique before, I’ve experimented with various ways to separate my work and personal life.

For example, for a number of years a favorite method of mine used to be to rent a hotel room for the weekend and “lock myself up” to work on a single project.

Because of the different environment and also the pressure of having paid for that hotel room and needing to make good use of it, and the lack of distractions, I got a lot more done in that one weekend than I normally do in an entire week (or two!).

A friend of mine who also works at home follows a different technique: he works one day and then takes a day off. 

He’s been doing that for over a year and likes being able to focus intensely on his business for a day, and then take a day off.

Another variation of that is my previous method of working three days a week and then taking four days off.

Before that, I had a different method which was to work 3-4 hours a day and then take the rest of the day off.

What all these methods have in common is they allow you to focus more intensely for short periods of time on your projects, and then give you plenty of time to recover.

The method that does NOT work so well is what everybody does, which is to mix work with distractions all day long, and do that day in, and day out.

For example: work 30 minutes on something, then check your emails, then check your Facebook messages, then go back to what you were doing, then check out some blog on the Internet, and so on and so forth.

With that way of working, you’re distracting yourself all the time and are not spending enough focused time on ONE particular project.

If you want results, you’ll need to master the art of focused attention.

You’ll also need to master the art of recovery, so during your “off” time you’re not just watching TV shows and sleeping, but doing something active to advance your personal life.

That may mean read all those novels you’ve been meaning to read, or take a trip somewhere, or pick up a new language, or spend more time with your family.

The best way to understand this philosophy is in the saying:

Work Hard, Play Hard

I have found that your work space (for example, your home office) is a perfect place for executing ideas, but a very poor one for generating ideas. Like most writers, I have found that your best ideas come when you’re not working.

The best ideas come when you remove yourself from your normal work environment. The most effective one I have found is traveling, especially to an interesting and new environment.

If you want to get a fresh new perspective on your life and on your work, go on a trip. Travel somewhere new. Take the train, book a flight somewhere, go visit a relative, or go on a road trip. Do a little “airport”, as author Stuart Wilde would say, but make sure you carry a good notebook with you, because ideas are likely to just start flowing!

Other great ways to get ideas are:

- Take a long walk or hike

- Go jogging

- Go to a seminar filled with like-minded people

- Get a massage

- Play music

- Take some time off

- Exercise

You’ll also need a good way to capture ideas as they come to you. Ideally, this is something you should be able to carry with you everywhere you go.

The best thing that I have found is a digital voice recorder. I recommend the products made by Olympus. There are some at all price points and if you’re wondering which one to get, I would recommend the inexpensive WS-110 model. It works like a charm. You can find out about this on Olympus’ website at http://www.olympusamerica.com

So remove yourself from your normal environment and get fresh new ideas… what are you waiting for?