Home based professionals, solopreneurs and small business owners do a unique juggling act. There’s nothing like commuting to the next room, a dress code that includes pajamas, and getting to kids’ concerts and games. But the flexibility of working from home has a front and a back. The front is an incredible blessing to everyone in the family but the back can lead to burnout unlike any other.
As a mother with a home-based international coaching/consulting practice, I coach successful professionals in the same way that Olympic coaches work with athletes. My clients run the gamut from United Nations members, corporate executives to solopreneurs in the US, UK and Canada. Many are parents either based at home or who have created a work life that highly values family time. They’ve taught me 5 important things about successfully working from home:
Expectations:
Discipline is necessary to make it from home but unrealistic standards cause stress. Stay at home moms and dads who aren’t running businesses can’t be the standard for those who are. Likewise, people who are on someone else’s payroll can’t dictate work parameters. Too often stay at home workers and the people around them believe they should produce full time homemaker results while producing more than full time work results. People are doing amazing things from dining room tables but unrealistic expectations are a set-up for personal and social angst.
Boundaries:
While home-based businesses break the confines of the standard workweek, they also require constant boundary setting. Many at home workers just don’t set clear enough ground rules like hours of operation, restrictions on interruptions, clarity on when it’s ok and when it’s not to throw in laundry, start dinner, do a favor for a friend.
The most successful at home workers allow their inner “diva” to prevail. Family and friends often just don’t get it about being self-employed so boundary crossings are an occupational hazard. Women are especially reluctant to say, “even though I’m technically home, I’m not available.”
Being able to set clear boundaries requires getting enough down and alone time – a Catch-22 because it takes serious boundary setting to create that quality of time. Recharging batteries isn’t a luxury. Too few home-based professionals account for cabin fever and the value of fresh air, mental stimulation, and new faces. It’s easy not to know where your boundaries are if you never get to see them from the outside.
Scheduling:
Especially when kids and/or businesses are young, it’s not only tempting but critical to break up the work day – and probably to work extraordinarily late or early hours. Very few jobs in the world require the extreme hat flipping and very few workplaces entail the range of agendas and unique surprises that work-at-home parents manage.
As the kids and/or the business hit subsequent developmental stages, new rhythms have to be established – a task compounded by the number of people in the family. Families and businesses have long range and day-to-day rhythms. It’s important to create leeway in the home-based schedule to account for the inevitable chaos between the times when work and family are in sync with one another. The solopreneur walks a delicate balance between honoring the family rhythm and honoring the rhythm of the diva s/he needs to be to realize professional and personal potential.
Since the office is always there, sometimes stay-at-home workers habituate to working when they know deep inside that it’s time to play with a kid or to date their spouse, which leads to all kinds of interpersonal stresses. It helps to stick with set hours unless certain pre-established criteria kick in, like a large order or a significant deadline, or to schedule time for some extra delicious playtime. Publishing a schedule/contract (often done on the refrigerator) and regular meetings with a peer mentor or coach can make all the difference for striking a satisfying balance of priorities.
