Work Challenge

In my last post I discussed how people that run a small business from home might work in a fifteen minute break for every four hours of work time. It is not something I have managed myself to implement, but I am going to make a strong effort to make it work for me. So, a challenge...

Schedule your work day to include specific breaks and stick to that break plan.

I am going to set up my work day so that after every three and a half hours of working at the computer doing my writing, I take a fifteen minute break. I will also have a thirty minute lunch break in which all I am allowed to do is prepare and slowly eat a scheduled mid work day light meal.

I am going to keep this up for one week starting tomorrow, then at the end of the week, on the following Wednesday, I will report how successful (or unsuccessful) I was in maintaining my 3.5 hours of work and fifteen minute break. And if it gave me better focus in the time that I was at the computer working.

If anyone else wants to participate in the experiment, I would love to hear their results.

Working at Home and Fifteen Minute Breaks

According to the Department of Labor, there are several states that require paid rest periods as part of a work day, with the average being a ten to fifteen minute break for employees to use the bathroom facilities for every four hours of time worked. That equates to two fifteen minute breaks in an average 8 hour work day.

People that work at home should keep in mind the necessity of taking a break after four hours of work. In fact, in Washington it is required that no one be made work longer than 3 hours before they are granted a paid ten minute break in which they can stretch their bodies and use the restroom facilities. Employees with work times of less than 3 and a half hours in several states, including Nevada and California, are not required to be given paid breaks.

When you are determining your work time for a project or for a day's work, you should schedule for taking a break after four hours of work. This is in addition to a thirty minute unpaid break for lunch.

Now... reality check time. Who can afford to take a full hour out of their work day? And what person running a small business can afford to pay themselves half an hour's wages when they have done nothing in that time to earn the money?

It is all well and good to draw out a timesheet that says that you will work for 8 hours, taking two fifteen minute breaks and half an hour off for lunch. Just try, however, to put that into practice for more than a couple of weeks.

Working from home means mastering the art of multitasking in everything that we do. As I am writing this I have a sink full of dishes behind me in the kitchen waiting for the water to cool a bit so I can finish the last of the more baked on foodstuffs, I have a nephew I take care of for several hours a day under watchful eye in the living room next to me, and I have a little dog wagging its tail and woofing at me asking for attention (I already got him water and food and let him outside).

I think the better idea - and oh shoot! I need to feed the fish! They can wait until I get this thought out though. But that is what it is like to work from home. You have all kinds of distractions pulling your attention this way and that, and I have not even mentioned phone calls and visitors and all of the other things that can distract a person over the course of an average at home work day.

So, yes, working at home and trying to take fifteen minute breaks is pretty much a failed plan as soon as it is set to paper. There is, however, hope!

While we can not, no matter how much we want to, just close the world out and do our work like people in office buildings can, we are able to take some control over the world around us and make our distractions less. Plan those fifteen minute breaks into your day, and use them to battle back the things that would force you to be pulled away from working.

Do you have children? If they are old enough to understand the "please don't bother me right now" requests make a bargain with them. Set a kitchen timer for three and a half hours when you start working, and let everyone know that until the timer goes off, you would prefer not to be disturbed. You have to stop work when the timer goes off, however, visit the restroom and then give your kids your full undivided attention for the remainder of your fifteen minute break so they can ask you about sleepovers and if they can get a particular video game and any other "water cooler" talk that happens in your home office during work breaks.

No kids? Do what I do, get up and take care of animals or wash the dishes or load the laundry into the washer while you stretch your legs and get away from the work for fifteen minutes.

I have, I admit, not yet successfully implemented the butt in chair hands on keyboard for three hours rule. I simply do not, at this time, have the necessary focus, but I am getting a lot better at it and can manage a couple of hours before I suddenly think of something else I just HAVE to take care of.

I am going to issue a challenge to everyone, but it will be in my next post, so make sure you check out the Work Challenge post that I am going to post next.

Alphasmart 2000

I took my little Alphasmart 2000 that I got off eBay with me on the road trip and got a bunch of writing work done on it, including adding a bunch to my novel-in-progress Heir To Magic.

I'm really happy with how that little machine is working. Its batteries (old dead ones from an old flashlight) ran dead on it and it powered down on me, I popped more batteries in and turned it on and found to my delight that it had not lost even one letter of what I had been working on.

That little machine is going to save me as far as my novel writing dreams are concerned.

Kid Proof Your Work

If you work from home and have children, or children visit you often, then you should consider yourself fortunate if you have not yet encountered the setback of little fingers. This is the event of a curious child wanting to help with a project and accidentally squashing a week's worth of working with clay into a mound more reminiscent of the mashed potato sculpture from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Or a carefully lain out beading project suddenly turned into something best picked up by a Dust Buster^®.

Craft projects, such as beading or polymer clay, are not the only things that can fall victim to little fingers. Fashion designs can be 'improved' with markers, computers can be bumped off desks while playing, and collectible vintage toys can be opened for playing with.

When I decided I wanted to be a writer my mom told me of a story she had wrote years ago. A full length novel that had taken her months of work. She had gone somewhere and when she got home my siblings had been so kind as to toss out those papers they had spilled something on. My mom just sort of lost the desire to write after that.

Whatever sort of work you do, you should look at it from the perspective of a child. Is it going to be enticing enough to override you saying "Don't touch"? Could you overcome having your project played with by designating clay that kids can play with and making it clear they can not touch the clay and figures that you work on? Can you close your work into a closet or a spare bedroom? Even if the area is not only for your work, would it be reasonable to ask the children to not get into the stuff you put away in the closet in the hallway? If you sell vintage toys could you get some similar non-vintage toys that the kids can play with?

Careful steps of precaution can help you as well. Such as, don't leave your fashion designs or building plans laying on the dining room table. Tuck the laptop away in your bedroom or a drawer rather than leaving it sitting on the coffee table. Set your bead work in one of those crates that can be slid under your bed or a couch when you are not going to be sitting there working on it.

Tip: use Open Source or Freeware software whenever you can

Sites like OSalt.org can help you find Open Source alternatives to commercial software, saving you hundreds and even thousands of dollars on the cost of software.

A few examples of free programs that I use include:


Firefox - a highly flexible web browser by Mozilla

Open Office - word processor and PDF converter

Audacity - a free sound mixer for music

GIMP - image manipulation program, Open Source and very nice

Thunderbird - Mozilla's e-mail program

Y-Writer - free to use (NOT Open Source) writing program from SpaceJock.com. VERY NICE!

There are a lot more programs than I have the time to list, so just look around and if you can't find what you're looking for drop a comment here and I'll see if I can figure out where there is a comparable free use program. Check out the programs that Space Jock has available, he has a lot of free to use programs on his site alone.

The Lunch Hour

In the same vein as maintaining a good work schedule, and sticking to it is the tip of taking a nice long lunch. Take advantage of setting your own hours to enjoy your food. Sit down at the dining room table with your spouse or the kids and listen to what they have been up to and plan to do that afternoon.

Enjoy the taste of your food rather than scarfing it down at the computer. I can not count the times I have been working through lunch or dinner and not realized I had finished my food until I reached for another bite and there was none.

Take a break, rest for a little while, and have an enjoyable lunch hour - a full hour if possible.

Maintain a good work schedule, and stick to it

This does not mean that you should have a 9am to 5pm "I'm at work, no one can talk to me!" rule with 'do not disturb' signs n the door, the kids chased away, pets locked outside, and your spouse forced to communicate via e-mail or calling your phone. Emerging from a home office at 6 pm like someone that has just walked in the front door after a day of work at a job outside the home may, on the surface, sound like a good idea, but realistically it won't work for most of the people working from home.

People want to interact with their family. They choose the working from home lifestyle because it allowed them to be there and be a part of their own family rather than a stranger that only sees the rest of the family for a few hours before dinner then straight to bed and do it all over the next day. Most work at homes work longer hours than others anyway, so if you locked yourself away for all the time you are working you may as well divorce your spouse, leave them the kids, and come visit them all on evenings and weekends.

A good work schedule means that you know when you can not be disturbed. For me, I have to be working from 6am to 9am, Monday through Friday. I *should* be working as well from 7pm to 9pm on those same days, but I usually do not lock myself away during that time unless I have to. Otherwise if someone comes over I have no problem dropping my work and going to visit, I can drop what I'm up to and chat with a friend on the phone most of the time, or pause work in the middle of the morning to take a long nap.

Don't let the kids get in the habit of playing with their Transformers collection on your office carpet if it is going to disturb you, but don't feel afraid to let one of them come in and have you help them get the robot to morph back into a dragon properly.

Find your own personal balance between work and family life and you and your family will reap more of the benefits of working from home.

Work tip - daily desk ledger

I've started keeping a ledger page on the desk beside me where I can do a fast notation of anything that happens concerning money for that day. I'm still working on just how it is to be set up, but so far it's working okay to help me see what is happening on a day to day basis and keep better track of money flow in the office and income - outflow on things.

I want to expand it as I determine what all is needed so that I can track each source of income and what is going on so I can see where I am making the most money each day.

current tracking is for

• Advertising sites
• AdSense
• Writing Sites
• Site hosting etc fees
  
• etc....

Customize your own ledger for what pertains to your site, such as:

• AdSense
• eBay
• Direct website sales
• website hosting etc fees
• other...

Be the boss no one loves

Working from home is not an easy thing to do. There are distractions both in the form of interruptions and in the form of things that need to be done around the house.

One of the points that you must learn to contend with in separating house work from working at home is the realization that there is a difference between the two.

Work at home entails all the various things that you need to do as a part of your business. The things that make you money.

Housework are the things that on any given day you avoid like the plague, but feel drawn to as a moth to a flame when you are supposed to be working. Things like mopping, ironing, scrubbing the toilet, cleaning the tub drain... stuff you decide is better than sitting in a chair working at the computer.

I am currently wondering if my time would not be better served today putting roofing paper on the back porch. It leaks when it rains and being a nice sunny day it's the perfect day to do that, and I would not be locked away inside at the computer working on stuff. But I need to resist the temptation. Yes, it needs to be done, but if I was working for someone else I doubt they would be amused by my calling in and saying "I don't want to come in today, it's too pretty for working indoors so instead I'm putting a roof on my back porch." I'd probably be told I was fired. And what if I had hired someone to do this work and they called me up with that excuse? Would I think it was a reasonable excuse even if it meant my business lost money because they refused to do the job they were paid to do?

Pause for a moment when you find that you want to go off and do something else, think about if you worked for someone else or if it were someone you had hired that wanted to do what you are planning. What would the reaction be?

You're the boss. Don't be lenient on yourself just because you are working for yourself, if anything you should be harder on yourself than any boss you have ever had before.

don't fall into the "But it's sunny, I want to play!" trap

As summer settles in it is getting harder and harder to face sitting in the office all day long rather than going out and working in the yard or playing on the ATV or going fishing or... there is so much to do in Alaska in the summer. From boating to hiking to planting flowers the list goes on. And with so few really good days (I hear that Anchorage was ranked last in the top 100 best cities for bar-b-cue days), it is so hard to be good and ignore that little devil on the shoulder telling you "work can wait, come and play!"

So, how do you appease that little devil when he decides to start encouraging you to go out and play rather than sit inside? Plan your weeks out.

You should have a good idea of what times you need to be working (for me I have to be at the computer from 6am to 9am if I want to make any money), you should also know when things are slow enough you don't have to be there (I can usually take it easy anywhere from 3pm to 5pm). Maybe your working is entirely dependent on you and you can work best at 2am, or maybe you have to be ready to go at exactly 9:15am. Whenever you need to be at work is the first thing to mark out on your weekly time sheet.

Now, you also know how long you have to be working to make ends meet. Or at least you know if you have to put in 9-5 hours or just a couple hours a week. Decide how much time has to be dedicated to working, deduct the areas you already marked as "must be working" and the remaining time is what time you can shift around and put wherever you want it to go to fill out your work week.

Check the weekly weather report now. Is there rain for the next three days then a few days of sunny weather? If you want to take the kids to the amusement park or zoo you would want to fill in as much work hours on the rain filled days as you can so that when the sunny weather arrives you have your work done and can go play with the kids.

More dangerous is the sun for three days, then four days of solid rain in the forecast. You plan for playing for three days and say "I'll make up for it when it's raining!" But what happens if the weather man was wrong? You're looking at sunny skies and are stuck with twice the work you should have had because of three days of playing. You need to decide that yes, it's sunny for three days then raining for four, but... do I really want to be working at a burnout pace for those four days? What if a movie I have been wanting to see is on and I can't record it? What if an old friend stops by or calls? What if there is an emergency?

Don't schedule all of your work in the last few days of the week, because you might have a hard time catching up when the time comes. Instead plan that you need to work a set amount of time on the sunny days as well, and stick with it. You have your reward times, and you can schedule to get to do the things you really want or have to be doing. If you balance out the work and play, then you are going to have a much better chance of making your work at home job work out and get to making you an income you can retire on.