Is Working From Home Right For Me?
Almost everybody likes the idea of working from home, but working from home isn’t for everyone. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. While the freedom and flexibility of managing yourself is its own challenge, you might be relieved to discover that it’s highly possible to learn how to work from home, make the most of your time, crush goals, and achieve results from the confines of your couch.
How to Know If a Work from Home Job Is the Best Fit for You
What is telecommuting? It’s an opportunity to do your job from anywhere in the world with a digital connection. If you find yourself asking, “I want to work from home, what can I do?”, start by creating a list of the skills you’ve already developed.
Working from home means you have to be responsible for your own time. That includes motivating yourself to put aside distractions and giving yourself deadlines to stick to. Many people do not have this level of self-discipline.
Discipline aside, you’ll need reasonably strong organizational and time management skills to work from home. You don’t want messy housekeeping to get in the way of business, nor do you want to gravely underestimate the amount of time a project will take.
Independence has its downsides. You may have nobody to turn to when something comes up. What happens if your computer freezes or you can’t get a necessary file to download? Working from home means you need to be ready to take on these kind of “not my department” issues.
Personality Types and Non-Verbal Communication
Most humans are non-verbal communicators, which is why cross-culturally, people tend to prefer face-to-face interactions. It’s also why doing the majority of your interaction with colleagues through emails and calls isn’t going to be suitable to everybody. Working from home often means you must be comfortable being alone.
Extroverted people, who are in need of constant external stimulation, are often unsuitable to this type of work. Introverted people tend to do better in these types of roles, but being introverted doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to like working from home. It’s actually a little more complicated to match a career based on your personality type.
Finding a Work from Home Job
Your list might include experiences from hobbies, previous employment, volunteering, and other related skills. You might even include skills that you haven’t developed, but would like to develop. Once completed, start at the top of your list and study the commercial applications of your passions.
It isn’t always obvious how your passions may lend themselves to a profession, but with a little research, they can become far easier to see. After you have a few in mind, the next step is to research companies and employers with work from home policies.
How to Work from Home
Having found a job that will let you work from home is great. But if you want to succeed at your job, there are a couple of guidelines you should consider the following:
Workspaces
Psychologists recommend people with sleeping issues shouldn’t watch television in bed before trying to sleep. Why? It breaks down the mental association between being in your bed and sleeping in your bed.
For the same reasons, it helps to set aside a workspace that can be used specifically for productivity. It’s self-sabotage to work from a space where your brain is accustomed to enjoying YouTube videos, music, and social media.
If using a new workspace isn’t possible, there are a number of free tools that allow you to block your devices from viewing certain websites during certain hours of the day.
Scheduling
Though working from home means having the freedom to create your own schedule, this shouldn’t be confused with not having a schedule. Planning out your workload is essential to time management. For creating a schedule, it can be useful to determine your most productive hours, and then try and stick to them.
Attire
Many people love the idea of working in their pajamas. But the truth is, in addition to maintaining a regular schedule, getting yourself into a work from home mindset often requires that you get dressed.
Even though you may be sitting alone in your room, a solid work from home tip is that feeling presentable can help your mind make a gear-shift into productivity -- that’s usually hard to do when you’re not dressed for work. Because of the solitary nature of the work, it can be helpful to schedule a trip out of the house on a daily basis. It only helps if you’re already dressed up.
Successfully Working from Home
Again, working from home isn’t right for everyone, even if you tell yourself “I need to work from home to get things done”. But whether or not the working from home lifestyle is right for you, there are always ways to find jobs with great work-life balance. And if you’re trying to determine the right career path for yourself, take a moment to check out the Career Wizard Quiz to see what kind work-from-home insurance careers might match you.