For home-based entrepreneurs, the line between work and personal life is often blurred.
Debbie Wiener started an interior-design firm out of her Silver Spring, Md., home eight years ago, and the breakdown in boundaries is now testing her limits. With two full-time employees and contractors in and out all day, finding private time just to get dressed has become difficult.
Complicating matters are two sons, 11 and 15, who often come bounding in from school yelling, “Mom, guess what?” — especially distracting when she’s on the phone with a client.
The challenges of a home office can sometimes supplant the bevy of reasons most entrepreneurs open one in the first place. Home-based business owners say the advantages are top-flight. There’s no commute. You can throw in laundry, walk the dog or take a nap at will. There’s usually no dress code, and you can spend more time with kids.
The drawbacks? It’s easy to get distracted, especially by household tasks or needy children or even relatives who don’t understand the “home office” concept and don’t get you’re truly working.
And for entrepreneurs who don’t have employees or children or pets, working out of the home can be a lonely endeavor. Jeff Louderback, a home-based publicist in Orlando, says he gets up every morning, shaves and dresses professionally, and then heads to the office, which is the spare bedroom in his two-bedroom condo.
While he’s happy to be free from office politics, he misses the camaraderie of co-workers. So he often takes his laptop to a local café “just to be around people,” he says. “I might not even talk to anyone, but just to hear the stir of human interaction, I just feel better.”
It’s important to come up with a set of rules and personal practices that make working from home an appealing proposition, experts say. For home-based entrepreneurs, “the day never stops — it goes into night,” says Lori Sokol, founder and publisher of Work Life Matters magazine.
She suggests that home-based business owners come up with a rigid schedule, and learn to draw lines when it comes to demands on their time. Parents with children at home, for instance, need to have an extra set of hands providing daycare, she says. Single people without children need to set a finite “end of day” (which for others can be marked when spouses or children arrive back home).
And then all home-based business owners need to communicate to neighbors, friends and family members that working from home doesn’t mean you’re “eating candy and watching soap operas,”
Photo by MSDesigns.
No comments yet.