Working From Home and Having a Social Life
August 13, 2007 | Author: Eve Lester | Filed under: Time Management
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
When you think of working from home, what is the first thing that pops into your head? For many people the answer is the chance to be their own boss. Getting up later in the mornings, being more relaxed throughout the day and having the freedom that they need. However, there is one major disadvantage to working from home that many people do not even take into consideration and that is your lack of a social life.
How a Lack of a Social Life Can Affect Your Business
The lack of a social life that you will have when you work from home is very rarely something you think about when you first start out. However, it can be extremely isolating working from home and often that can affect your business too. Not getting out enough and not having regular breaks away from your business can be bad for your health and it can cause you to feel extremely lonely.
Feeling lonely and depressed can then have an affect on the way that you work. It can be great for the first few months when you really get stuck into your work. However, it soon starts to wear off and you start to realize that there really is no point in having a successful business if you also don’t have a life.
Getting out for a while can help to lift your mood and even give you fresh ideas for your business. Think about it – you do not work seven days a week when you work for a company as it would be a health concern. So why do it when you work for yourself? By getting away from the computer you have a chance to refresh your mind and to focus on something other than work. Often when you spend so much time focusing on something, you can lose your perspective and the work that you do may not be overly productive. By getting away from that and then coming back to it later, you get to see things from a whole new angle and that can really help to make you more productive.
What you can do about it
So overall you really do need to keep your personal life as well as your business life if you want to be your best. Set aside two days off (or even at least one if you are reluctant to take two full days off). Do whatever it is that makes you happy and don’t even turn your computer on. It is extremely tempting to check your business emails even on your day off, so to avoid this it would be better to leave the house all day. Go out for a coffee; meet up with friends and family. Just do anything that doesn’t involve a computer. You will soon start to realize that life is a lot more fun if you take time off every now and again.
This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 and is filed under Time Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.
Join me on Twitter
- Blogging
- Business Advice
- Design
- Funny
- Money Matters
- SEO and Marketing
- Technology
- Time Management
- Uncategorized
- What I am Doing
- Working at Home
- Get Your Children in Debt to Keep Them Out of It!
- TOP 10 Yay PLURK Nay TWITTER Reasons
- Great Work at home message boards
- Making No Money? This Could Be Why!
- Carnival of Blogging Sucess
- Investment Opportunity - Self Storage
- 5 Reasons why Your Home-Based Business Website Should Not have AdSense
- Only in America
- Twitter Replacing Traditional RSS Feeds?
- Quality First - Quantity Distant Second
5 people have left comments
You’ve inspired me to try and start something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time — have computer-free Sundays. I heard about it on the radio from a woman who was just swamped with e-mails and really needed some family time. I wanted to try it then, but haven’t stuck with it like I should.
Yup, “ain’t that the truth”. When I was hanging out on Technorati and I saw the title of this post I just had to come a read it.
Anyway, I find that a lot when I talk with home businesses or small business owners. They don’t realize how to build a business around their life style. And they try to build a lifestyle around their business except with that formula they always find themselves without any life. Just business. Well great topic and post.
Kenney
Shake-A-Stick Marketing
Ok, I don’t know why, but for some reason I just felt compelled to do this. If you approve I wanted to make this flowchart (pdf) available to your readers. This is usually only available to members of my site but here it is…
I call it the Lifestyle Achievement Chart…
http://themakemoneyfromhomeblog.com/flowcharts/LifestyleAchievement.pdf
Anyway, I know that it will be of great importance to many of your readers.
Kenney Jr.
I often work from home and whilst it is not each and every day I do agree that making time for yourself is important.
Most people have heard that we are all subject to body rythms and we all function differently at various times of the day.
Knowing when you are at your most alert will indicate the best time to be focused on work. At other times of the day you may not feel energised to work so take some time out as suggested in the post.
It’s often been said but your body is probably your best indicator of how you should react to the different parts of the day. All you have to do is be sensitive to the signals.
Great points everyone, I need to stat listening to my body more. And that is a great sheet Kenny Jr. - thanks for sharing it!