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3 Struggles of the Home-Based Entrepreneur

“Livin’ the dream, hey?“

This is always the first thing I’m told when letting someone know what I do for a living: a home-based entrepreneur that sells workout journals for athletes.

And yes. It is. In so many ways. There is nothing else I’d rather be doing, to be honest.

I set my own schedule. I get to blast loud gangster rap when the mood suits me. And I can roll into the office 28 minutes late with a blistering hangover and not get any judgement for doing so.

But, as with everything in life, there are downsides that come along with the autonomy and freedom. In terms of productivity, a lack of constraints also tends to incur a lack of discipline. With nobody to impress–or offend–personal hygiene tends to take a bit of nosedive, for instance.

Here are 3 common struggles of the home-based entrepreneur.

1. Unplugging at the end of the work day.

Four years in and this is still something that I struggle with. Even though the work day is over, and no one will respond to emails, and all your service providers are off-hours, this doesn’t mean your brain isn’t spinning at full velocity like a hamster after drinking a six-pack of Red Bulls.

I should remember to change the text on the CTA button. Maybe update my opt-in page too. I need to remember to email my accountant. I wonder if I could get a sturdier envelope for the orders.

And on, and on, and on.

A ceaseless, never-ending babble of thoughts that imprison us with work matters long after we have powered down our workstation. Where a 9-to-5’er has the benefit of physically and mentally clocking out at the end of the workday, for entrepreneurs this never really happens.

This is especially apparent when your office is ten and a half steps away from where you rest your head at night. More times than I care to remember I’ve found myself back at the computer at 3am because a thought or idea suddenly struck me while in bed.

That lack of separation and the lack of boundaries blurs the lines between your personal life and work life to a point where it becomes extremely difficult to make them unglued, even when you desperately want or need to.

2. Figuring out the best ways to wrangle your time and effectiveness.

Okay, so time management isn’t something that home-based entrepreneurs are solely afflicted by. It’s certainly a universal issue. Whether it’s someone trying to find more time to make it to the gym, or even just go meet your friends at the bar on time, promptness, and grasping how long it takes to really complete a task is something we all grapple with.

But when you are punching in the clock on someone else’s dollar, and your schedule is set by others, and the business isn’t solely reliant on you for revenue, it is easier to disengage. With no one over your shoulder, no one to be accountable to or to give you crap for throwing the ball in the dirt, you can just as easily shrug off those lazy days with a–“Yeah, but I’ll really work hard tomorrow.”

The good news is that working from home and on your own will give you your own baptism-by-fire in learning how to be productive. Without the benefit of someone else to dictate your workload and schedule (and yes, I actually mean benefit–it’s helpful to have someone giving us orders when it comes to doing work we naturally resist) we float from strategy to strategy until we (finally) land on something that works for us and our particular circumstances.

For some it is learning how to manage their to-do list (here’s a hint: keep it short). For others it’s setting blocks of time for task work instead of setting goals for task completion (i.e. “I am going to work on the new website for 4 hours” vs. “I am going to finish the new website”).

Proper time management, and the self-awareness that is so vital for being effective with our time, is something we all come to learn at our own pace, with our own set of tools and strategies.

In my case, working as much as I can before noon makes me productive. By late afternoon and early evening my brain has started to melt, my attention starts to drift, and oh look, a puppy!

Setting time-based goals has been critical as well–I still simply do not possess the ability to truly guesstimate how long specific tasks take (blog post writing, for instance), and as a result, will schedule myself blocks of time for these tasks. Whether or not I complete the task isn’t the point–but filling those hours is.

3. Managing distractions.

Working from home by definition means your home life is part of your work life, and vice versa. Convenient? Hell yeah. But it also presents its own challenges.

Distractions abound: some basic (“I’m hungry”), some out of pure boredom (“I wonder what’s happenin’ on the ‘Gram right now”), to semi-work related, but not really (“I’m going to check the analytics for the twelfth time this hour”).

With the brute, addictive strength of the connectivity that the digital world and those little gratifying notifications give us it’s a wonder that we ever get anything done. But when you have a kitchen with snacks, a living room that could use some tidying, a puppy that needs a quick head scratch, or a roommate with an hilarious story, the detours and wasted time pile up at a staggering rate.

Considering that it takes us a significant amount of time to dial back in on the thing we were working on each time we get distracted, the power of deep focus and concentration becomes an ever more prized commodity, and a critical asset for those who can only depend on themselves for the growth of their business.

In Closing

From the outside looking in, working from home is the dream.

Dress code is optional. Your workplace can be decorated and arranged to your whims. And you are close to family and Netflix.

The challenge is in creating a workplace that is separated enough from home life so that you maximize your work day, manage your time, and crush your goals in business.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Alex Work .