3 Essential Work From Home Tips You Should Know

You finally did it—broke away from the nine to five to follow your passion.

As a writer, someone who needs plenty of time and space to come up with interesting ideas, standard office jobs are difficult to work in. You’re always being watched, and your productivity monitored. You might even be scolded for staring out of the window as you’re gathering your thoughts on your article.

Work From Home Tips

With that said, here are three ways to make the most out of working from home:

1. Use Security Measures To Protect Your Work

Since most of your work as a content creator is online, you need to use security measures. If you’re working independently using an Internet-connected computer, you can install anti-virus software on your local hard-drive. However, if you’re working as a telecommuter and accessing corporate resources to do your work, you need to ask if the network administrator is taking enterprise security measures to protect your information. With this type of system, intelligence can be shared across many secured layers.

2. Choose A Designated Place To Work

Yes, you can work from anywhere. You can set up your office in a coffee shop or on a beach chair. After all, you just need a laptop with Wi-Fi connectivity. However, the thrill of being able to work anywhere eventually wears off.

An office offers certain advantages that the nomadic lifestyle of a free-ranging human does not provide. For instance, it’s nice to be able to have your reference books close at hand; it’s easy to access your paper files to look up archived information; and it’s convenient to use your notebook and pen to sketch out mind maps as you work. In other words, you can populate your space with all the things you need to be creative, productive, and fulfilled.

There is also something magical about having a sacred space, the one place where you can focus on your most important ritual. In your case, it might be coming up with brilliant ideas that shake up the world from its dogmatic complacency.

While a home office is similar to a traditional office, it often has much less space. So when setting up your home office, take a look at catalogs and websites that show examples of contemporary home office furniture. You will get a lot of great ideas on the best type of desk, chair, and shelving that you need for the amount of space you’re working in.

3. Create A Productive Daily Work Schedule

It’s amazing how much more work you can get done in a standard office than you do at home. This is a discomforting truth that many home office workers quickly discover.

Why does this happen? Although you are sitting at a desk with plenty of work in front of you in both scenarios, and you are in a much more comfortable setting in a home office, you find you can get much more writing done in a traditional office.

Here’s the irony of the situation, freedom rarely syncs well with productivity.

In a standard office, you have a little freedom. You are expected to be in the office over a designated period of time. You have limited break times. And your family and friends, knowing you are at work, don’t call you. In addition, people are always passing by and you feel obligated to look busy—after all, you’re being paid for every hour you spend there.

In a home office, you can work when you please. You can take extended breaks. And family and friends can’t distinguish between when you are working and when you are free to talk. In addition, nobody is keeping an eye on you—and if a five-minute break visiting Facebook turns into a one-hour session with your friends, nobody is the wiser for it. Then, of course, there is the refrigerator, the television, and a to-do list of errands and chores you didn’t get done earlier.

It takes a tremendous amount of self-discipline to impose the same rigorous work ethic that you showed in the office. It’s only too easy to dismiss link surfing as research when you are not working under the clock, and it’s difficult to just sit there plodding away on your keyboard when you could be doing something much more interesting.

Alternatively, you could also overdo it, and refuse to get up from your desk, working endless hours. The result is the same. You will eventually need to take an extended break to recover from your exhaustion. Because you did not pace yourself, sliding from overwork to a prolonged rest period to recuperate, you end up not being as productive as you had hoped.

The best way to become a productive home office worker is to impose a working schedule that has many of the elements of your former job. For instance, find ways to work the same number of hours.

Best of All Possible Worlds

As someone who works from home as a writer, you have the best of all possible worlds. You’re free of the tyranny of the rat race, the daily commute, and the lack of creative freedom to express yourself. You can also earn a decent living by telecommuting for a company, working as a freelancer, or developing your own projects. By taking these three steps to protect your work, design the right environment, and create a productive routine, you can take full advantage of your new lifestyle.