If you haven’t heard the news, working from home has become the so-called new normal over the past twelve months.
However, this isn’t just related to employees.
More and more people have decided to start their own business from home, while some have decided to ditch their commercial office space entirely and work from their domestic property.
If you fall into any of the above camps, today’s article is for you.
We are now going to take a look at some of the top tips that you can tap into, if you are making your home your place of work for your business.
Separate your work and home life
This first tip can apply to anybody; whether they are employees, or the business owner themselves.
Put simply, your two lives can blend into one as soon as you start to work from home. Gone are the days of finishing at 5pm; there’s no building closures to contend with, your hours of work are entirely down to you.
In addition, you’ve also got to make sure that once you close your laptop – that’s it for the day. In other words, perching your computer on the kitchen worktop just isn’t going to work. You need a permanent office space that you aren’t going to stumble over during your normal, leisure time.
This isn’t just about physical equipment
Something else we should add is that this doesn’t just revolve around physical equipment and furniture. You also need to make sure that everyone in your household is on the same page.
One of the biggest misconceptions we see is that working from home means that you are available to do other things. Particularly if this is your own business, you understand the challenges this brings, and you simply can’t be getting distracted by standard household incidents. Whether it’s friends coming over, family that need attending to or chores that need to be done, if you are working at home, this is something that you can’t be responsible for (within reason, of course).
Don’t be afraid of treating this as a test
For some people, running a business from home will be the dream. It will allow them to save on office costs, as well as providing them with a much better work-life balance. There are now plenty of local office storage solutions, and these can be just the trick if you’re going to dip your toe into the water.
However, it’s not going to work for everyone. Some people will find that the distractions becoming all too tempting, while there might be plenty of other business reasons why it’s just not sustainable for your line of work.
For example, a common reason along these lines is that it becomes too difficult to have meaningful conversations with employees in your business. This is something that a lot of companies around the world are currently in two minds about, and if you fall into such a category, there’s nothing wrong with testing the WFH approach first to see if it works for you.
