Ah, the perfect career path! Stay at home work. You get to enjoy the family and make money. What could be better than that? Well, it’s not all easy and perfect living for the at home entrepreneur. For the successful work at home parent to stay at this long term it takes discipline and dedication. Believe it or not, not everyone is cut out to be a self employed business owner.
I want to discuss the realities or the down sides of working at home today. Now that I have been doing this for over seven years, I have some insights. We were all sold initially on the idea of working from home. Sounded, great, didn’t it? – work when you want, in your pjs with the kids playing under your desk, or wearing your swimsuit while you’re staring at the ocean on your latest vacation. Yes, working from home gives you a huge amount of flexibility, but there are also quite a few pitfalls that you don’t really hear about until you’re knee deep in it already. Here are some of them. Let me know if any of this sounds familiar…
You’re constantly interrupted by your spouse, kids or friends who just want to ask you something quickly. (Really, it won’t take a minute!)
Your “office” also happens to be the living room, so you end up trying to focus while the television is going, and people are running all around the house.
You spend almost every waking hour either actively working on your websites or thinking about marketing strategies, product ideas and such when you should be spending quality time with your loved ones.
You waste hours each day surfing the net (and call it research), checking your stats or answering email.
The point is, we all develop these bad habits that don’t make us very productive. I bet that almost everything you’re doing in your usual 10 hours plus workday right now, you could accomplish in under 3 hours provided you set yourself up to be really productive during that time.
I still don’t have it down to a fine process or even a science loosely structured, but I do have routines and certain habits that help me stay productive and focused. I found this great report that helps put it concisely. It is exactly what you will learn in this report called “Homepreneur Habits: How To Run A Successful Home Business”
Find out how to set up your workspace, structure your day and most importantly, structure your business for maximum productivity and results. This report wasn’t created by just anyone, either. It was written by Jimmy D. Brown, one of the most successful Internet Marketers who fell into all the traps you and I’ve been falling into and then turned it around to a point where he is running and growing a huge home business spending just 3 hours a day working. I promise if you implement his advice you will feel tons better about your work at home. It will be structured and when you close shop for the day you won’t have that nagging feeling that if I could just get this last (fill in the blank) done, I’d feel like I could really enjoy my family tonight blues any longer.
Here’s a quote from the report:
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it happen. The intent is to start a home business to free up time for family and personal interests. The end result is less time for either of those two things. Oh, and there’s always the excuse … it’s the trapdoor … “I’m working hard now to build the business for later … just a few more days/weeks/months and I’ll have everything in place and I’ll be caught up.” Listen to me carefully: that day never comes. You’ll never get caught up. You’ll never have it all done. You’ll never find yourself in a place where there is nothing left on the horizon. There’s always something more.
~~~This isn’t just some dry theoretical report. Jimmy shares exactly what he does and how he has is office set up (with plenty of pictures) so you have plenty of “real life” examples. Grab the report here: Homepreneuers special report You even get to see Jimmy in his PJ’s. 
So, leave a comment and let me know if any of the business hurdles I mentioned resonate with you and if you have found a work around. I’d love to hear more pointers!
Photo credit Dorky Spice
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Point well taken. I’m really struggling with it this week. I want to learn everything YESTERDAY! Seeking to find the balance…
Thank you for your thoughts, Marya. I am so with yo on the learning it and becoming imbalanced with the time. Jimmy’s report really did help me ALOT.
I love running my own busines, but you couldn’t have been more right when you stated how you end up spending every waking moment working on the business. I hated that because I started a business for freedom. I figured out I was trying to do too much, so I became more focused. Most of my marketing is done now in online video. Plus I post at http://www.Adwido.com so it’s free. I also save time because Adwido targets specific keywords for me which sends me a steady flow of traffic.