There are some difficulties that go with working at home. Perhaps half of the people who start working from home don't succeed, mostly due to lack of personal discipline or family discipline.
There are freedoms of working from home and along with freedoms go responsibilities. Those freedoms of working at home can also be challenges to responsibility which will lower your production and moral as you fail to meet deadlines and quotas.
I have been telecommuting or teleworking; since we imported the term teleworking from the Brits and it's now used by our Federal Government; and believe me I would rather work from home and my car than from a cubical. Since I entered the work force, I prefer me as my boss and get more done that way. I get to decide importances and have seldom found a boss that is not prone to wanting sillier busy-work than I'm willing to do.
One boss I had, my brother, had over 150 pieces of paper to fill out for selling a mobile home. On my own, I used two - the sales contract and the certificate of title. In the 8 hours it took me to fill out the 150 pieces of paper, I'd get "interrupted" by sales calls and showings of homes, so the paperwork of one sale took a week at times.
As a home-worker I get to determine what works and what doesn't. One boss I had, a client who bought about 50 properties from me, was convinced that I should advertise her properties for sale with no price - so I would get calls. That was, and is, stupid. I did not want calls. I wanted prospective purchasers.
One of my clients wanted me to run these blind ads, ads with no price and I wouldn't do it. So, he placed an ad in the New York Times and another in The Wall Street Journal. "Waterfront home, 3 BR, 2BA, Fireplace, Boat Dock, Scrn Prch, at the Beach -- $39,000" and put my phone number on the ad. I got several hundred phone calls and not one, that's right not one, was a prospective purchaser. Why? Because it was a trailer on a rented lot in a trailer park and it was 500 miles from New York City. His idea was to make the phone ring; an altered priority. Now, when you go to my web site you will find properties for sale that tell everything about the property and usually with a map.
You see I don't want calls that are not interested in what I have to sell at the price I need to get. As my own boss I do the ads my way and not based on somebody else's "idea" of what is right or workable. These freedoms, chief among them the freedom FROM idiocy of bosses, are precious. However, I also have to find out what works and take chances without a boss to blame the errors on.
Working at home is great, but not easy. To excel; to make it even, you must have exceptional personal discipline, organizing skills and persistence. Those who work less at home than in the office will certainly make far less working at home than working in the office. In the office you may take a thirty minute coffee break and not get caught. At home, with that sort of discipline, your coffee break may go on for hours or even days. Or you may just sleep in and not even get up to make the coffee. for hours, days or weeks. And there goes the rent or mortgage payment and there goes the house.
Working at home is freeing. There is no dress code. You can work in your pajamas, your shorts, or even work at home in the buff - naked. However, we all know that when we dress up, at least some of us act more professional. And with no bosses slipping by the cubical to check over your shoulder - what are you working on?
I will tell you this: when I did some work as a business consultant for a large consulting firm - the PRIMARY CAUSE OF BUSINESS FAILURE WAS COMPUTER GAMES. Believe it or not, almost every one of the businesses that was going under and had to hire us had one or more people playing Solitaire or some other computer game dozens of hours a month. Most of the time it was the boss, his wife, his girlfriend, or all three that were bankrupting the business with solitaire or Doom. When no one else is forcing you to produce - some people won't. Here are some reasons that those who have failed at telecommuting have failed.
