How to Work Online From Your Own Home Office and Keep the Costs Down and Work Ethic Up!

Working online is a fantastic way to not only be self-employed and achieve financial independence, but also to enjoy the freedom of being able to work from wherever you want, to set your own hours and to pursue something that interests you as your career. In short, if you can work online you'll likely find that you naturally improve every aspect of your lifestyle.

And what you might not also have realized is the sheer amount of money saved when you work from home. Think about it: you'll no longer have to pay to commute to work which might mean saving hundreds a month on rail transport, or perhaps a similar amount on parking. You'll also have to spend less money on eating out and you'll get an extra two hours or more of your day to yourself because you won't have to travel… it's glorious.

But while there are lots of benefits to working on the web and having a home office, it's also important to consider that there can be some downsides too. This is a very unique and unusual lifestyle when compared to what most of us are used to and it's actually very different to adapt to for many people in the early stages. So let's look at how you go about working out of a home office while keeping costs down.

Stocking Your Office

The problem that many people make to begin with is that their home office is not really a home office. At least that is to say that they don't treat it like a genuine home office. Rather than kitting this space out with the correct professional grade furniture and technology, many people will simply keep the furniture they already have in there and essentially they'll be working out of a home study or the like. This might be a nice space, but it is not going to be as conducive to work as a real home office.

Unfortunately though, many people just don't want to stock out their home office because it can feel like a waste of money. Essentially, if you are working from home to save yourself cash, then spending more money on that property in order to add furniture can seem a little counter-intuitive.

A solution is to invest in second hand furniture, or refurbished furniture. This way, you can stock out your office with much better quality products, without breaking the bank!

Supplies

You might find you also need a number of different supplies for your home office – things like paper and pens for instance. The trick here is once again to treat your office like a real office and to buy in bulk. That means a bigger upfront expense, but the result is that you’ll never run out of the things you need, and you’ll be able to make big savings. You can even try buying from wholesalers and manufacturers using sites like Alibaba!

Bills

Finally, remember that you may be able to write off your bills as an expense. That means things like electricity, internet, and more. You can also often find deals for businesses.

How to Look After Your Health and Fitness When Working From Home

Working from home might seem like an amazing opportunity to relax and take it easy. You can wake up later, you don’t need to commute to work, and you can avoid to speaking to anyone you don’t want to.

But while all that might sound amazing, it can actually end up being too much of a good thing.

Going outdoors is actually rather crucial for vitamin D and fresh air. Speaking to people is good for our mental health. And not commuting might well mean only getting 1,000 steps a day. This can all cause serious damage to your health!

So what can you do? Here are some tips that will make a big difference.

Spend Time Outdoors

One way or another, you NEED to spend time outdoors. A powerful tip is to go outdoors in the morning, as this will also help you to adjust your body clock to ensure better sleep.

At the same time, going for long walks can also be useful. Try wearing a fitness tracker which will count your steps and that way tell you if you need to get more exercise – the results can be shocking once you start working from home!

Protect Your Sleep

If you don’t get enough sleep, you won’t be able to exercise optimally. It really is that simple. So make sure that you protect this and try looking up the phrase “sleep hygiene” on Google for some more ideas.

Separate Work and Downtime

One of the biggest dangers when working from home, is that you don’t give yourself any real “time off.” You can end up always “half working” and never fully relaxing.

To make sure this doesn’t happen, make a strict rule that you will always finish work at the same time every day – and then stick to it. At the same time, turn off notifications from work related apps in the evening, or use a separate work phone.

Your ability to work is based on energy and motivation. These are finite resources, which means they need to be replenished!

Exercise!

We have already touched on the importance of walking, but any kind of exercise is important to avoid letting your stay-at-home lifestyle get the better of you.

Try engaging in yoga, some functional fitness movements, or even just go for a jog. This will not only help prevent health issues, but will also improve your energy and focus thanks to the positive impact that exercise has on the brain.

3 Ways to Avoid Loneliness When Working From Home

While working from home has a lot of upsides, it also has a few challenges. One is social isolation and loneliness. Here are just a few ways you can overcome that.

Go Out

Working from home is really more of a figure of speech rather than a literal description of where you are going to work (unless you are reading this during the Coronavirus outbreak!) – because actually when you’re self-employed or working at home, you can work anywhere. Why not then go and work in a café in town? This way you will at least get to chat to the staff that work there and maybe some other people sitting in. Or alternatively of course you can sit in a bar or pub, or when it’s sunny relax on the grass in the sun with a glass of juice. This way working for yourself becomes a much more desirable, and at the same time you’ll be likely to encounter more people, have more conversations and possibly even meet attractive members of the opposite sex. Of course, you also need to be open to chatting to people for this to work.

For those that can’t leave the house, working in the garden is an option. And in the front garden, you’ll be able to tip your cap to people as they walk by!

Meet Up With Others

You can also make blogging, coding, or entering data more sociable by using the opportunity to meet up with people you don’t normally see. For instance, you can meet your friends for lunch on their lunch break, or you can meet them after work if they finish early. You’ve got the time, and you can even do things like design work while you chat. And in fact, this will be a lot more sociable than most people are in the office anyway. Apart from anything else you’ll be chatting to people who are actually your real friends rather than just colleagues.

If this isn’t an option? Then you can always call them over lunch instead!

Network

Networking and interacting with others in your industry is very good for your career and a great way to promote your business and make contacts. At the same time, it can make your business less unsociable, so try attending networking events, working face to face with designers and marketers, and responding to your fan mail rather than locking yourself away. It’s good for your site, and it’s even better for your mental health...

7 Advantages of Letting Your Employees Work From Home

Thanks to increasingly fast and reliable internet connections along with a host of new software options, it is now more viable than ever to let your staff work from home. Give your employees the right software and they'll be able to work on collaborative projects, answer e-mails, take calls and even attend meetings via video conferencing systems. All-in-all there are increasingly few reasons not to allow your staff to work from home and a whole host of reasons why you should. Read on for seven of them…

1 They Will Often Get More Done

Believe it or not, staff who work from home will often actually get more done than they would working from the office. This is because there will be fewer distractions in many cases, because they won't be tired out by the commute and because they'll have access to all the tea and comfy clothes they want. What's more, they will feel they need to earn the right to work from home which means they'll work to do at least as much as they would in the office and probably more.

2 They Will be Happier

This shouldn't be understated. People who have the option to work from home can do more of the things they want to do and design their work to fit around their lifestyle. This is the way that work should be and the result is happier staff who will ultimately work better as a result and at the same time be more likely to stay with you.

3 You Will Attract Better Staff

And when you tell your prospective employees they'll be able to work from home, they will be more likely to want to work for you – thus meaning you have the pick of the best staff rather than being everyone's last resort.

4 You Will Appear More Forward Thinking

Let's face it, in the next few decades working from home is going to become the norm anyway – you might as well embrace it now and thereby look like a forward thinking organization rather than a dinosaur stuck in the past.

5 You Will Cut Overheads

If your staff work from home some of the time you will be able to work with a smaller office and reduce your energy bills. You'll still be paying them the same and as mentioned, their output will still be the same so the result will be better profit margins.

If you’ve been working hard but not getting the results you want, it's time to reevaluate. By taking the time to review your goals, your plan and your current strategies, you may discover smarter ways to reach your goals. You may see previously overlooked issues that are hindering your progress.

Once you've completed your reevaluation, there are other things you can do to give yourself a boost.

Build Trusting Relationships

If you look at successful people, you'll often see they are surrounded by other successful people. They've networked and created trusting relationships with others who have similar goals as they do. These are people they can call in when they need help and who they can aid when needed.

Start networking and building trusting relationship with others who can offer advice, guidance, and support when you need it.

Find a Mentor and Be a Mentor

If you’re not moving at an acceptable pace, find a mentor who is. Search for a mentor who matches your values and morals and who is living the life you want to live. They can give you tips, introduce you to the right people, and help you to move forward. Likewise, when you reach your goals or are moving steadily forward, be a mentor to someone a few steps behind you.

Get a Coach

A professional coach can help you accomplish most anything you can dream up. Find a coach who specializes in the area in which you are stuck. You may find that, over time, you hire more than one coach to help you punch through to the next level.

Learn Something New

If your current strategy isn't working, look for other ways to reach the same goal. Research and read up on various methods until you find one that seems doable. Alternately, choose to learn something new that isn't related to what you are stuck on. Sometimes, taking your mind off the problem and learning something completely new will reenergize your mind and body, giving you a new perspective on things.

Delegate

Sometimes slow progress is due to a lack of time. When you have too much on your plate, you cannot properly focus on what you need to do. You can buy more time by delegating to family members or paying others to help you. This might mean hiring a housekeeper, a bookkeeper, a marketing professional or someone to run errands for you throughout the week. Oftentimes, taking just a little off your plate can make a big impact on your results.

If you feel like you’re always working hard, but not making much progress, it's time for a change. Take a break. Assess where you are compared to where you want to be. Look for ways to reduce stress, gain new insight and start moving forward.

You don’t want to spend your life doing things that you don’t find fulfilling. It’s not fun to work hard to reach a goal only to realize you’re not really enjoying yourself. There are many people who feel that something’s wrong, but they can’t put their finger on it.

That’s where journaling can come in handy. When you journal, it allows you to see just how fulfilling what you’re doing with your life is. When you share your emotions in your journal, it allows you to see the connection between your emotions and your goals.

By doing this, you’ll see if what makes you happy is the too-high cost for the financial rewards or any other kind of success. If you’re not happy and you don’t feel fulfilled, then you’re just going through the motions in life.

Your emotions are linked to your habits and the reason why so many people fail to change their habits is because they don’t face whatever emotion is behind that habit. If you address the emotion, you can change the habit.

You’re not a robot, so obviously, you can’t turn off your emotions. But, if you want to find satisfaction with goals and your life in general, then you do need to determine if they’re behind why you’re doing whatever it is that you’re doing.

The thing about journaling is that you put your authentic self on the pages. You’ll open up about what your fears are. You’ll talk about what’s worrying you or making anxiety create knots in your stomach.

You’ll share how the ups and downs of your emotions might make you feel one way, when your behavior suggests something completely different is going on. If you want to be happy and truly successful, then you have to deal with the emotions.

You might have the habit of not being as productive as you could be. You put off doing tasks because the emotional link there might be fear. You’re afraid you’ll handle something the wrong way, so you keep putting it off until the last minute.

Then this procrastination makes whatever you’re doing a rush job, and it doesn’t turn out well so the failure feeds right back into the emotion of fear. Journaling allows you to see that your procrastination is rooted in fear of failure.

You’re hesitant to start something new - wary of going after what you really want. By facing those emotions, though, you can change or refine your habits and make the kind of progress with your life that you do find fulfilling.

Dig deep when you journal to see how you’re feeling whenever you’re engaging in certain habits. See if those emotions are attached to some kind of experience. See if the way that you feel betters your life or hinders it. By understanding how emotions guide your habits, you’ll be able to use their influence when they’re good for your success and appropriately respond to the ones that aren’t.

Successful people track and celebrate their achievements, but many will only take the time to do this when they reach a big milestone. Or they’ll only track success when it’s something major.

Those who are truly successful don’t just focus on accomplishing the big goals. They also pay attention to the times when they take small steps - when they accomplish a small achievement.

The people who do this end up having more satisfaction with success as well as in their life. Not only that, but they also create their own momentum. Everyone wants to be successful and many people strive for that.

They want a better life, they want better relationships, they want to build a business and the list goes on. But sadly, most of those people will drop out of the race after a short time because the end just seems too far away.

The hurdles from the starting point look bigger than they thought they’d experience. Sometimes people get started chasing after success only to reach a place where they believe that the effort is too much for them.

The problem is that people who want success but don’t find it aren’t like those who do. The ones who do succeed have a different mindset. Their outlook on the journey is vastly different.

That difference is that people who want success see themselves reaching their big goals and that’s what they track. As anyone who has ever wanted to complete a big goal can tell you, looking at an end that’s so far away can be discouraging.

It can allow you to focus on issues and problems and completely miss all the positives. You can become blind to the success you’ve already experienced when you only look at the big picture.

Those who are true performers have a way of looking at the stuff that doesn’t go according to plan as just part of their journey. They don’t see it as a sign that something is failing to work out.

They see instead that they’ve eliminated one path so it’s time to head onto to the next one. These successful people can reach the big goal because they recognize the importance of a small goal.

You must always celebrate your small achievements. These signify forward momentum. True performers understand that each small step they take is hugely important because that step is crucial to getting what they want.

When you celebrate the small things, you strengthen your focus and determination. When people get discouraged and fail to achieve success, it’s usually because they haven’t taken steps that allow them to measure their success along the way.

This is what small achievements do. Like a staircase, they let you look at how far you’ve come and what you’ve accomplished and this success gives the feel good hormones in your brain a boost.

It’s important to track what you’ve done so that you can appreciate the success you have in that moment. By tracking and celebrating your success now, you’ll be able to maintain the right perspective necessary to reach your goals.

It can be easy to fall into a pattern of living life based on what you already know. This is usually a zone you get into where you know what you’re doing and so you do it. With experience in any given field, especially if it’s a lot of experience, it can be easy to start to believe that you know everything about a topic, even if you don’t.

No area of life or topic is truly stagnant. There’s always something else that you can learn. You always want to make sure that you’re the kind of person who’s always leveling up with your education.

There are several good reasons for this. When you level up with what you know, it helps to make sure that you have the latest knowledge with whatever field you’re in. This can improve your skills and it allow you to be a lot more effective with reaching your goals.

If you don’t stay on top of what’s going on in your field or niche, then you’re no longer at the cutting edge. When you level up with your education, it can help you to develop your accomplishments.

It’s difficult to excel at something when you don’t know how things have changed or expanded. You might find that your skills in that area are leaving you behind and costing you valuable opportunities.

With the development of skills, you’ll feel more self-assured and up to whatever task you face in the area you’ve grown in. Growth is inevitable in any industry. By leveling up your education, you’ll be able to see a new view, which can lead to problem solving, introducing new ideas and more.

You want to track your educational efforts so that you aren’t simply sitting still and not practicing self-growth. Boosting your education doesn’t mean that you have to head back to college.

You can if you want. But you can also take classes online. You can take a course offered by someone who teaches in whatever area it is that you want to level up in.

You can develop habits that level up your education.

This might be something like determining to develop a new skill in your field. It might be by creating a circle of peers and using the power of collective knowledge to enhance yours.  Or you might find a mentor.

Join organizations that support the field you’re in and learn from the educational material offered. Go to in person training events. Find a tutor for what you want to learn. When you’re tracking, look over the new things that you’ve learned and see how it’s added to your success.

If you’re not being as productive as you’d like to be, there’s an underlying reason. You might be busy from the time that you rise until it’s time for bed - yet you don’t really feel like you’ve been as productive as you could have been.

It’s common for there to be several time zappers that occur during the day that end up causing you to waste time. Sometimes, one of the issues is that people don’t realize that a few five or ten minute breaks end up turning into something much longer.

One of the reasons for that is because when something disrupts your concentration, it takes a lot longer for you to get back into the flow of what you were doing. But by tracking your time zappers, you’ll be able to figure out what’s draining your productivity.

If you’re experiencing this, the first thing you want to check is your social media habits. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “just checking” what’s going on in your favorite online hangout, but the next thing you know, a half hour or even an hour has passed.

It’s a distraction that can get in the way of the success that you want because it steals the time you could use to further your goals. Your time zapper might be daydreaming. When you daydream, you’re creating imaginative scenes.

Your mind is wandering as part of an escape or fantasy that pulls your focus away from whatever you’re doing or supposed to be thinking about. Your mind can use daydreaming to create a mental image of what you’d like to happen.

Many daydreams focus on money, relationships, fame or create a picture of you in some other setting. Some people have a favorite time zapper such as streaming entertainment through Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus or Amazon Prime.

It’s easy to get lost binge-watching shows or movies. You can plan to check these for just a second and then realize you watched an entire season for your favorite show. Sleeping might be what steals your time.

You should definitely make sure that you get enough rest. But if you’re sleeping more than what you need, it can steal your time. A big time zapper is eating and that’s probably because a lot of people combine eating with spending time talking with others, having a cup of coffee after the meal, sharing a leisurely dessert and so on.

People can cause you to lose time. Socializing is one of the top ten ways to waste time and is also known as a form of procrastination in many situations. If you can track your time, you’ll be able to locate all the things that are robbing you of the time you could have to do what really matters.

By tracking your time, you’ll gain the ability to manage it, which means you’ll be more productive and able to accomplish your goals instead of having to put stuff off because you wasted time.