Teaching Yourself To Work At Home
Over in our forum we’ve been having a discussion about how to go to work when you’re working at home. The concern is it’s awfully tempting to go back to bed.
It’s a valid concern. When I first started freelancing from home I had to make an appointment with myself to get up, get dressed and go to a restaurant for breakfast and an hour or so of writing. This was before laptops(!) and although I had an Apple II+ at home, I hadn’t made the transition to drafting on screen, so I came equipped with a pad of yellow legal paper and a couple of pens. I’d write away over bacon and eggs, then go home and add to the manuscript on my computer.
It worked – after a month or two, I could trust myself to get up and go to work without being tempted too often by the often unmade bed. There are all sorts of tricks which, one way or another, boil down to teaching ourselves to take our jobs seriously.
Of course working at home can bring some, well odd, moments. Kristen King tells of one in Uh, no, that’s just my puppy!
I’ve had to call clients back because of noisy trash trucks, low flying airplanes or to stop a cat fight.
On the whole, however, I love my commute of a couple of steps, the freedom to take a nap and the ability to start work as early as 5 or 6 in the morning.
Write well and often,
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Tags: freelance-writing, work-from-home, writingRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Musings From A Freelance Writer, Notes from a Writing Coach
2 opinions for Teaching Yourself To Work At Home
Kristen King
Nov 19, 2006 at 10:51 am
The more I talk/read about it, the more mortifying it becomes. :] Thank goodness the subject was a cool guy with a good sense of humor.
Anne Wayman
Nov 19, 2006 at 8:07 pm
most clients are pretty neat… not all, but most
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