How To Find Out If Working From Home Is For You

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Admin

Juggling work and home life can be a real struggle. That's why more and more people, especially mothers, decide to look for work that they can do from home to fit around childcare.

This article covers many of the things you need to ask yourself before embarking on the working from home route:

Discipline
Are you disciplined and self motivated enough to make this work? You will be the only person who knows what you're actually doing and will be accountable to yourself only. It's all too easy to do things during work time, such as checking your personal email, doing the washing, etc. that should wait until the evening, unless you're prepared to make up the lost time in the evening.

Being on your own
Working from home can be lonely, especially if you don't go out and meet people regularly, either as part of your job or socially. So think about how you would cope with being on your own rather than being in an office where there are other people. On the positive side, you get much more done in the same amount of time (or get things done in less time) because you're not being interrupted by other people.

Office space
Do you have a room that you can use as your office? It's not a problem if you don't, as long as you can make a clear distinction between work and home. A separate room is good for this but you can be creative if you don't have the space - yet - for your own office.

The right business
Think about what business you'd like to be in. You're far more likely to succeed with your home business if you're doing something you enjoy and are good at.This is probably the most important consideration when deciding to work from home.

Personal development
Make time for personal development. Many companies provide a number of training courses for staff and if you want to improve any skills or learn new ones, it's up to you. Reading personal development books is great in this respect, as they're not as costly as a training course and you can read them in your own time. Just make sure you do make time to read them.

Hours available/desired income
How many hours will you have available to work from home and what income are you looking to generate? It's no good if you only have 10 hours a week but want to earn £100,000 p.a. Be realistic in how much you can earn in the time you have available. If the two don't match, think about what you can do to get them closer to where you'd like them to be.

You hopefully have a better idea now of what it takes to be successful at working from home. Whatever you decide to do, good luck!