Overcoming Isolation in Your Home Business

Written by Elena Fawkner


Continued from page 1

ORGANIZE YOUR OWN FUNCTIONS

Once you have joined various associations and formed joint venture partnerships, takerepparttar initiative and organize functions that bring you all together. These could be business-oriented networking sessions or purely social get-togethers such as a barbeque inrepparttar 117954 local park. Either way, you are forging a relationship with people in your new arena, just as you did when you were working in a corporate office. The only difference is that now you must takerepparttar 117955 initiative to forge these relationships. These are not people you are going to be seeing every day atrepparttar 117956 office.

JOIN A GYM

You are, of course, health conscious and physically active, right? Of course you are! So, why not kill two birds with one stone ... stay fit and meet new people. If you establish a routine that allows you to be atrepparttar 117957 gym atrepparttar 117958 same time every day, you will run into many ofrepparttar 117959 same people and get to know them.

USE THE INTERNET

Making online friends is another way of staying connected withrepparttar 117960 outside world. Be very disciplined here though. It's way too easy to spend a lot of work time on social email exchanges and in chat rooms. Don't fritter away your time, but do seek out and maintain internet friendships.

BACKGROUND NOISE

Sometimes, it's only silence that reminds you you're alone. If you come from a corporate environment, your workday was punctuated byrepparttar 117961 constant background noise of telephones ringing, other people's conversations, hysterical laughter fromrepparttar 117962 other end ofrepparttar 117963 office and lunch trolley pages overrepparttar 117964 intercom system. If you find absolute quiet irksome, turn onrepparttar 117965 radio and have it playing inrepparttar 117966 background while you work. Talk stations are good because it's like having other people inrepparttar 117967 next room, but if you find yourself becoming so engrossed withrepparttar 117968 talk topics that you stop working and start listening, switch to a music station.

There is no avoidingrepparttar 117969 fact that makingrepparttar 117970 transition from a corporate environment to a home-based business is just that ... a transition. Most people will have to grapple withrepparttar 117971 isolation monster inrepparttar 117972 early days of their work-from-home career. But, as you can see, there are many ways of keeping isolation and loneliness at bay just by reaching out and forming new associations. Remember, just because you work alone doesn't mean you have to go it alone.



Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online ... practical home business ideas for the work-from-home entrepreneur. http://www.ahbbo.com


The 9 to 5-Home Business Tug o' War

Written by Elena Fawkner


Continued from page 1

By eliminatingrepparttar "scatter gun" approach you will find thatrepparttar 117953 limited time you do have will be much more productive.

There are going to be some activities that you have to do day in, day out. Decide what time ofrepparttar 117954 day is best for you to attend to these routine tasks. The more you can integrate business activities into your daily routinerepparttar 117955 more efficient will be your use of time. Let's take email, for example. Anyone running an online business has to deal with email on a daily basis. I userepparttar 117956 time between when I get up inrepparttar 117957 morning and when I start my workout for this. It gives me time to wake up before I launch into physical activity and it is a relatively undemanding task that does not require precision concentration.

Make use of autoresponders for as much of your email processing as possible. This will further reducerepparttar 117958 amount of time you have to spend on this aspect of your business.

Other routine activities include things like site promotion and search engine position monitoring. Now there are a lot of great tools to help webmasters with this part of their business. For example, WebPosition Gold will automatically review your position in allrepparttar 117959 major search engines and report back to you withrepparttar 117960 results. It can also be programmed to auto-submit at appropriate intervals. Be sure to use quality automated tools wherever possible. They can save you literally hours of work every week and as we all know, time is money in this business.

Keep a journal for a week. Record in it everything you do duringrepparttar 117961 day fromrepparttar 117962 moment you get up inrepparttar 117963 morning torepparttar 117964 moment you go to bed. What activities can you eliminate in favour of freeing up some time for your business? Maybe it means getting up an hour earlier. Maybe it's forgoingrepparttar 117965 sleep-in onrepparttar 117966 weekend. Maybe it means giving up those two hours of TV every night. You will find even 15-20 minutes blocks here and there can add up to a sizeable chunk of time over a week or a month.

If you travel, keep a copy of your website on your laptop and work on it while you're inrepparttar 117967 air or waiting for a flight. Or answer your email ready to send it when you get plugged in again.

As you can see,repparttar 117968 trick is to practicerepparttar 117969 "nibble" technique. If you wait until you have a great chunk of time in one block, such asrepparttar 117970 weekend, you'll only waste all of those little bits of time you could have put to good use duringrepparttar 117971 week and fritter away your "quality" time on routine tasks rather than business development.

One final piece of advice. Take time every week to just relax and do something you want to do. Althoughrepparttar 117972 pressures of a new business are demanding, failing to take time out will only lead to burn out.

Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online ... practical home business ideas for the work-from-home entrepreneur. http://www.ahbbo.com


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