Working from Home

I’ve had a few jobs come through recently and I’ve been work­ing hard on get­ting good results out the door for my clients. Com­bine this with every day life activ­i­ties — buy­ing fresh veg­gies for my guinea pigs, tak­ing the car in for rou­tine main­te­nance, buy­ing gro­ceries, clean­ing the house, etc. — run­ning one’s own busi­ness can be quite hectic.

I think many peo­ple on the out­side look at you and assume, “he’s liv­ing a good life work­ing from home.” What I think they don’t real­ize is that I prob­a­bly work twice the amount I used to when I had an office — eas­ily a good 16 hours a day. The first thing I do when I wake up is put on a cup of cof­fee, turn on the com­puter, shake out the cob­webs, and check my emails to see if there’s any fires that need to be put out. And if it looks like it’s going to be a slow day I’ll decide if I have time to shower and shave and maybe take care of some paper­work. But most of the time, I get up and it’s “run, run, run” — often just mak­ing some­thing to eat quickly for lunch and eat­ing in front of the com­puter, and often the same for din­ner and way into the late night hours. This also includes weekends.

Quite often, I have to squeeze in other daily activ­i­ties in the interim peri­ods. Some­times I’ll actu­ally let a ren­der­ing “cook” sim­ply so I can have the time to go run some errands, and other times it’s just to let my thoughts decom­press. Some­times it’s just mak­ing a blog post — tak­ing a much needed break before get­ting back to work. Other times it’s just quickly skim­ming news head­lines and scrolling down Face­book to see what my friends have been up to. Then it’s back to work.

I’ve seen oth­ers who work from home — and I don’t mean this to sound con­de­scend­ing, but many don’t seem to keep or want to keep a rou­tine. They let their projects fall behind, lose moti­va­tion, etc. That’s why I’m very skep­ti­cal of most peo­ple work­ing from their own office. It works well for a few that are highly deter­mined and moti­vated, but is com­pletely lost on the major­ity of oth­ers that lack the drive or a well-formed struc­ture. One pat­tern that I’ve noticed is that most of the “suc­cess­ful” peo­ple (mostly artists that I know) that man­age to keep work­ing from home over the years work just as hard as me if not harder at times — putting in those long hours and work­ing week­ends in order to keep their clients happy and to keep some sem­blance of normalcy.