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.