When you work from Home

Dealing with clients

There are two things I would say are more important than anything I’ve mentioned up to this point.

1. Be transparent: Be upfront and honest with your clients about how, where, and when you work.
2. Be discriminating: Be choosy about your clients. Select only those you think will be able to work with your schedule and environment.

On transparency

This is an area for caution. You don’t want to spill your guts to a potential client in your first meeting, telling them all about your family and how one time Susie spilled her juice on your keyboard and you were backed up for two days. Still, you don’t want them to assume you work a normal 9-5 schedule in a brick office downtown, free to design in quiet until the sun goes down.

External communication channels

For some, Twitter is a huge distraction: it’s like having a chat window open all day. Others have a problem with new e-mail popping in all day long. If you’re trying to get some serious work done and you’re not the type who can tune out a conversation going on near you, it’s probably a good idea to turn off the Twitter or chat client, and even close e-mail if you’re inclined to read and answer each one as it comes in.

Family responsibilities

Maybe this is different for women than for men. I’m generalizing, but some mothers tend to have a stronger “home” instinct that makes it more difficult to detach work from family duties. We see a pile of laundry and feel the need to stop everything else to get “just the one load” in the washer, and before we know it, we’re running a laundromat. Likewise, we hear a child cry and stop everything to make it better (even when Dad or a sitter is there to take care of it). It’s not easy to stay put and keep working when our instincts are so powerful.

Recognizing and curbing distractions

The most common complaints about working from home are family-created distractions and self distractions. The distractions I experience now, though, are so different from the “cube” distractions I dealt with in my corporate jobs, that sometimes they seem worse. Where in an office I had to contend with “gossip girls” and candy dippers (don’t ever put a bowl of candy on your desk), at home I have crying babies and “Mom, when you’re done, can I play on the computer?” The difficulty lies in finding a way to recognize what’s getting in the way and nip it before it stops production.