The co-workers are passive-aggressive back stabbers. The job politics are undermining and hypocritical. The commute is two hours each way. The taxes are absurdly devastating to the net paycheck. And the space for professional, personal, and/or interpersonal development is severely limited. So you decide there must be a better alternative to working for (and with) someone else. You decide to work as a freelancer.
The first thing you do is access some useful work at home tips, researching even before brainstorming a plan. In those work at home tips, you will likely find some helpful, empowering information. Here are some of the many work at home times I found over the first two years of researching and preparing to work as a freelance writer:
USE a MODEL
Study and read about those who blazed the trail before you. You will find numerous styles and approaches, with equally varied techniques and strategies, as told to you (in newsletters, on websites, in books, on tapes with work at home tips, specifically, etc.). Consider that which you feel and think will work best for you, your needs, your desires, and your skill sets (abilities and capabilities). Then, imitate that model, using similar steps and strategies. Do what works, according to those who have worked it!
PLAN AHEAD—FAR AHEAD
Make goals lists—short- and long-term goals lists. Make the lists complete with ideal outcomes, and as well, include things, people, and events or incidents that should be anticipated…and have a back up plan. For example, it is ideal to calculate your working seven days a week for the first five years, but it is unrealistic and therefore imperative you plan for life’s interruptions:
When the power goes out;
When the cat needs to be rushed to the vet, or worse, dies;
When the computer crashes;
When a client cancels an order an hour before deadline;
When the bank, pharmacy, grocery, or other venue doesn’t have what you need, sends you twenty miles out of your way, or is closed….
What tools will you have on hand, what back-up do you have?
HAVE SOME CAPITAL, FIRST
Do not launch without reserve fuel. I did. I had to get out of a ten-year job that was giving me migraines, making me fat, and that caused me to develop asthma—to say nothing of the political and social aberrations that were the source of these illnesses. I just stopped. Yes, I have wanted to write for a living since I was old enough to know what an adjective clause was, and yes, I knew if I did not do a kamikaze move, forcing me to work hard enough at freelancing to survive that I would stay at the destructive government job forever…. But if you are smart, and if you tae any work at home tips to heart, take this one: have some money in the bank, have a sugar daddy or mama, or work a part-time job that you can tolerate while your business kicks off. (It takes, on average, 3-5 years to determine whether your business will be a winner or a flop.)
ESTABLISH a REGIME
While one of my absolute favorite assets to working at home and for myself is that I do not have to submit to an alarm clock, I still wake up, eat breakfast, brush teeth, and dress (on good days). Normalize your workdays by acting as if…as if you still have to be at your job on time, as if you get regular and regulated breaks, as if you are a professional with clean hair, shiny teeth, and shoes that are on your feet instead of slippers.
HAVE THE SKIN of a LIZARD
Realize and embrace the fact that you are working a real job, even if it is in front of a TV set or overlooking a pond with deer and elk milling about. And convince others in the hose of the same: no one is allowed to interrupt during work hours, just as if you were at a building downtown where they would not be allowed to ask you where the ketchup is, if you would iron a shirt, or whether you minded if they blew a few joints while listening to jungle drums at 200 decibels. Discourage aberrant and invasive behavior from family members, roommates, and clients…who will also try to test you as a child does, and not pay, or email you ten times in one hour to ask you how it’s going, or who will try to get you to do unnecessary, extra, revisionary work for free.
And good luck enjoying the freedoms that really do eclipse the liabilities
