How Hard Do You Need to Work at Your Own Business?
Making money online is often a solo affair and those that do it full time are usually self-employed. So, this counts as a business. The question that I want I want to debate today is just how hard should we be working at our own businesses, especially when we work from home.
This post has been prompted by an article by Don Miller that I read recently. It’s about Running a Home Based Business Like a Business. Don talks the merits of treating a home based business just like any other business and warns us to be wary of the freedom that comes with working from home.
With Freedom Comes The Need for Disclipline
I love the freedom that my new life gives me. It used to really annoy me to have to turn up at work at 9am 5 days of the week! I hated having to ask for days off or explain that I wasn’t feeling well and I simply hate being told what to do on a daily basis. Employed life was just not for me.
So now I can get up when I want, work when I want, do whatever work I feel like doing, and I can take as much time over it as I like. It’s easy for me to go to the gym or run little errands around town. I don’t have to explain to anybody what I am doing, I don’t have to justify myself in any way. Well I suppose those last couple of points aren’t quite true as I do feel a certain responsilibity towards my blog readers but that is self-imposed and not a result of my circumstances.
Of course the trouble with all this freedom is that it is so easy to abuse it. Just last week I had a couple of days where I had nothing planned and I had intended to work really hard those two days. I was going to write a load of blog posts, do some more marketing for my ebook, catch up on some courses I am working through and so on. On the first day I got to about 4pm having done pretty much bugger all and wondered where on earth the day went! The next day was pretty much the same!
I Used To Be More Organised
After reading Don’s post I felt rather guilty because he suggests I should create a schedule that mirrors my day job, use a to-do list, curb my email time and basically discipline myself much more!
This is just what I used to do. In fact, before I had even quit my day job I had created myself a time planner and plotted out just how much time I was going to spend on various activitied related to work. For the first few weeks in business I worked extremely hard and I tracked all my hours diligently.
There’s More to Life Than Work
The trouble with all this hard work is that it came at a price: I sacrified many of the important things in life in order to make time for all this work. I stopped going to the gym, I stopped doing Karate, I didn’t see my friends and I totally neglected my home life with my family.
The reason that I dived into work so heavily is that as long as I was not earning an income, I was eating into the equity in my home so of course I wanted to start earning money as quickly as possible. However, money is not everything and that really hit home when the relationship with my partner broke down.
Since then, I have been unable to get back into my previous groove and to be honest, I have absolutely no desire to do so. Nowadays I work the equivalent of no more than 3 days a week, sometimes less than that. Instead, I spend time with my family, with my friends, I exercise, I go on days out, I do sports… in short, I’m enjoying my life!
Work Smarter, Not Harder
I’m sure we’ve all heard the expression that it is better to work smarter and not harder. Back in October I reported that I had worked 235 hours in the month and that I had not earned any money. In that post I also shocked myself (and my readers!) by realising that a huge proportion of my time had been spent on activities that were non-essential - lots of reading and not enough doing.
That’s all changed. For instance, as a blogger, I love to read blogs and I have a ton of great blog feeds in my reader. I used to read them all dilligently but now I just scan through the posts and will only read those that stand out and even then, I tend to scan the content a lot more.
Now when I get to work I know that I’m only going to work for a few hours (usually) and quite often it may be several days before I do any more and as a result I have to force myself to concentrate on what’s important rather than feeling as though I have to do everything.
The cool thing is that since I’ve been working less, I’ve been doing better. For a start, I’m actually earning some money now which is nice!
Goals, Plans and All That Stuff
In his article Don says that we should set out each day with goals and that if we don’t we’ll be headed for mediocrity!
I used to be a planaholic! Is that a word? Well anyway, I absolutely loved to make plans and I loved to set goals too. I had pieces of paper with hundreds of goals written on them and I’d make pages and pages of plans on how I was going to achieve them. And then something would change in my circumstances and I’d end up having to re-write a lot of those plans.
To be honest, I spent way more time planning to do something than actually doing it! I was always stuck in what we programmers call ‘Analysis-Paralysis’. It made me feel good to plan, I felt like I was achieving something but I was just kidding myself! Most of the time I wasn’t getting anything done at all!
It’s so different now - I make a few notes such as ideas for blog posts but generally speaking I just take a few minutes to decide what’s important to work on at any particular time and then I just get on with it. I totally go with the flow. I don’t have kind of schedule whatsoever, I just wing-it and it’s working for me.
State of Mind > All Else
Recently I shared my theory of successful blogging and stated that I believe that a blog does well when the writer is true to himself in his writing and doesn’t try to force out posts. I said that the state of mind that you’re in when you blog comes through in the writing and the readers pick up on it. If you blog with passion then your readers will feel passionate too and are more likely to subscribe.
Now I think that this state of mind applies everywhere! Right now, I feel good about my business. I feel that quitting my day job was absolutely the right thing to do and I also feel that I can succeed in business by going with my intuition with regards to work. If I feel like I have been slacking then I’ll take a step back and put more effort into work. If I feel like I am neglecting my personal life then I stop work immediately and go do something else.
I’ve ditched all the plans and schedules in favour of gut feelings and instincts and that’s quite a big thing for me because it’s a huge change in personality.
I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this topic - both from people who have the luxury of being in business for themselves full time and those that are doing it part time.
