EggAndBean

Has the opportunity for you to work from home presented itself? If so, read on for some solid hints and tips about keeping disciplined, managing your time, and getting the job done while benefiting from the advantages.

The benefits of working from home are obvious - no commuting, no traffic jams, no packed trains. While its not suited to many types of employment, with the proliferation of technologies like DSL, VoIP and VPN it is within the reach of more and more employees every year. By the way, if you don’t know what any of those terms mean - don’t worry, they are simply things your company should transparently set up for you!

To be truly successful when telecommuting, you need to strike a good balance between work and home life. You may find you fall into one of two categories:

1) Find it hard to stop thinking about work
2) Find it hard to stop thinking about home

Lets look at the second one first, as it is pretty straight forward to remedy.
To stop thinking about home, you need to discipline yourself and your work environment. Having a home office is not just a nice idea, it is IMPERATIVE. Now, the office doesn’t need to be anything fancy, but it does need some kind of physical and emotional separation from your home. Don’t have a spare room you can turn into an office? No problem - get yourself a desk, a chair, and some kind of screen/blind that you can put in the corner of a room that separates you from the home. Consider this an extension of your workplace, and others in your home if they are there during your working hours should respect this also if it is going to work. From the time you go into your “office” until the time you leave, you are at work.

This brings us on the the first point, which is a little more tricky, but it is manageable too. The idea of a delineation between work and home is vital here too, so have yourself an office kitted out as described above. All your work papers go here, along with anything else that is solely related to work, including any work mobile phones and land line extensions.
What can happen to many people is that they find it hard to “switch off”. There is always a little more that can be done, a paper reviewed, and email written/read/sent. But the moment you start doing work outside of your set hours of work, is the moment your telecommuting has failed. Telecommuting is not about increasing the number of hours you work, it is about not having to travel and sit in a cubicle that is paid for by the company.

Set your hours of work, and stick to them.

Now, with all of that out of the way, its over to you! Any tips that you would like to share? Post them below!