How to stay motivated when running a business from home
Running your business out of your home is a dream scenario. You get to roll out of bed and get to work, avoiding the time and expense of commuting while earning tax breaks on your house payments.
Without a boss breathing down your neck, you get complete control over your career, which means you can achieve an ideal balance between work and home. You can work when you want, how you want, to build the lifestyle and career you want.
Yet, the reality of running a business from home isn’t as dreamy as you might expect. Your home is full of distractions: the sink full of dirty dishes, the chaos of the kids’ playroom, your TV and couch, your warm and comfy bed. When no one is watching, you might be tempted to take a break, and another, and another – and before you know it, you haven’t gotten anything done for weeks.
Whether you are about to start your work-from-home journey or you have tried and failed to stay motivated toward building your home-based business, you might benefit from the following tips for staying focused and productive while running your business from home.
Create a home office
The best way to deal with all the distractions in your home is to hide from them in a space dedicated to work. Though it is possible to run a business from your kitchen table, you will probably find greater success – and more motivation – when you create a home office space that is perfectly tailored to your needs. You should control every detail of your home office, from the available tech tools down to the wall color, to ensure that the space keeps you happy and motivated.
Ideally, you will set up your home office in an unused room in your home. However, if you don’t have any rooms to spare, you might look into transforming other areas into functional office spaces. It takes less effort than you might expect to transform a shed or convert a garage into a home office. So long as it has room to fit your workplace necessitates, it can do perfectly.
Organize your goals
Most people find it easier to dive into work when it is obvious what tasks they need to accomplish. To that end, you should strive to set yourself clear goals to work toward on a schedule that makes sense for your business. A
t the very least, you should have daily objectives that determine what you will be doing any particular day, but as a business owner, you should probably also maintain weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual goals, which can drive your behaviors and keep you invested in forward progress.
While a sticky note might be enough to keep track of your daily goals, broader business goals are likely a little more complex. It might be necessary to use frameworks like Strategy Canvas to better visualize information about your business goals and coordinate them with useful data like competition factors.
Start workdays strong
When you work and live in the same place, the boundaries around work time and personal time can become blurry, which impacts your ability to focus on your work. Therefore, you might consider creating some kind of ritual that puts your mind and body in work mode.
The ritual doesn’t have to be complex, but it should be closely tied to your work; if you drink a cup of coffee every day, even on non-work days, that probably won’t work by itself. Some ideas for startup rituals include:
- Journaling about your goals for the day
- Meditating on focus and motivation
- Reading your calendar or planner
- Lighting a candle on your work desk
You might consider making another ritual for the end of your workday, to prepare you for your personal time. Your shut-down ritual can be related to your startup ritual – snuffing your desk candle, for example – or it can be something else that gets your mind and body out of work mode and ready to relax.
Schedule outside time
Humans are social creatures that crave face-to-face interaction. No matter how many emails you send or phone calls you make during your working hours, you probably aren’t filling your social battery when you are working alone at home. Every so often, you need to leave your home office and experience the outside world, ideally in ways that allow you to connect with living, breathing people.
You might try to find ways to work outside your house occasionally, such as through co-working dates with fellow home entrepreneurs or for in-person meetings with partners, suppliers, or clients. If your work doesn’t present an opportunity, you might take a break during the workweek to attend an exercise class or grab lunch with friends. These little trips out of the house will prevent you from going stir-crazy and boost your motivation to ensure you get enough done to justify them.
There certainly are real advantages to running a business from your home – but those advantages only manifest when you can stay motivated to complete your work. Motivation can be difficult to achieve at first, but with the right strategies, you should notice your focus and commitment increase and your home-based business grow.
