Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

The Two Biggest Problems with Being Your Own Boss
Lots of people make a mad dash for a work-at-home existence, thinking it will be an absolute utopia. But once they start sitting at home every day, they start to realize how many positives from the workplace they need to replace.

The two that hit me especially hard were structure and interaction.

With the lack of a structured quitting time to focus me on getting things done, I found it easy to divide my focus between the task at hand and a half-dozen other future options that I should have filed away as separate projects, each with their own designated times and focus. That was what led me to 12-hour-a-day, 7-day work weeks (with me usually accomplishing less than I had accomplished in the office in a 40-hour week).

The lack of interaction was probably even a bigger killer. If you're the only one expressing an opinion on your ideas, you always get exactly what you want.

The problem is that you never get anything better than what you want. Bouncing an idea off of someone else and seeing them validate it as a good one frees you from that nagging doubt that maybe there's a better way of doing this.

Similarly, bouncing an idea off someone else and having them bounce back an even BETTER idea puts you that much further ahead in your work.

I almost chucked it all and went back to the confines of the office just to get that interaction back. Fortunately, I found like-minded people to interact with online.

Never go it alone when you work at home! You need human interaction in your business, even if you're a lifelong introvert like me.

There are many more elements of a 40-hour, on-the-job work experience that you need to consider when you make the jump from employee to entrepreneur. These two are two of the biggest, though.
Jeff

Labels: entrepreneurship, start business