Business Without a Building: Working from Home
A few years ago, my mom retired from her career as a pharmacist. Going into retirement, she was excited to rest and enjoy her newfound free time, but she also had lofty goals to clean and organize the whole house, paint the porch, and establish a workout routine for herself, among many other things. The trouble was, without any external structure dictating her schedule, and with an abundance of time, she sort of ended up not doing much since she could always “just do it tomorrow”. Occasionally a flurry of inspiration would hit her and she’d accomplish one of the big projects on her list, like starting a new garden, but a lot of her time is spent either maintaining the house with routine cleaning or scrolling through Instagram.
My mom discovered through retirement what many of us work-from-home entrepreneurs found out through our businesses: managing your schedule solo is hard. With very little accountability and what feels like the whole day to get a task done, it’s all too easy to let your to-do list slip through the cracks. And, on the other side, it’s easy to get so caught up in the routine housekeeping tasks that you never schedule time to move your business forward to grow in the direction you want. You get stuck.
So what’s the trick? How do you keep yourself on a schedule that supports building your business towards your dreams? Especially when there’s no office to get to on time and no boss to hold you to your deadlines?
(And on the flip side, how do you create a balanced schedule and routine to where you’re not always working – because let’s be real, when work is at home, it’s easy to “always be on”.)
The Keys to Productivity and Business Growth
It’s definitely not easy, but the good news is it is simple. Here are our three “keys” to keeping yourself on track to reach your goals when you work from home:
Key 1: Plan Ahead and Give Yourself Deadlines
The simple truth is if you don’t plan ahead and set deadlines for different objectives, your bigger goals will never get done. There will always be something more important, more urgent, or less mentally draining to do instead. Plan out your quarterly goals and break them into smaller steps that you can achieve as you work towards those bigger milestones and goals.
Key 2: Manage Your Time Wisely
Likewise, if you don’t actually schedule time to work on the tasks needed to reach your goals, the deadlines you worked so hard to plan out will be functionally useless. You have to capacity plan – plan your work day around what you can actually accomplish, instead of what you want to finish.
If the schedule you’ve set for yourself is too demanding, it’s usually the work you need to do for your own business that gets set at the lowest priority. Again, there’s always something that feels more important or more urgent to do, especially when you have clients waiting on deliverables. So manage your daily schedule so that you’ll have the time and energy to work on a rebrand, or a new product, or your YouTube channel.
Key 3: Hold Yourself Accountable and Give Yourself Grace
At the end of the day, no one is going to manage you but yourself. Which means you have to hold yourself accountable to your deadlines and make sure that you get the work done by a certain date so that your 2025 goals move forward at a pace that will let you reach them in 2025. Sometimes that means making yourself work late one day, or work on a weekend. Sometimes that means being willing to say no to a new client when you know you can’t handle the accompanying workload.
And, sometimes, that means being willing to push a deadline. You have to be willing to give yourself grace too. If my daughter gets sick and can’t go to daycare, I have to spend that day taking care of her. I can usually get a little bit of work done while she naps or watches a movie, but taking care of a 3-year-old with a cold has a tendency to disrupt your productivity. And that’s okay! Life happens; after everything is said and done, most of the deadlines in the business world are arbitrary and it really doesn’t matter too much if you push them back a couple of days or even weeks. The key is not letting yourself perpetually kick it down the road to the endless “someday”.
Balancing Flexibility and Discipline as a Solopreneur
The beautiful and difficult part of working from home and being your own boss is that it gives you a lot of flexibility. That means you have to be twice as disciplined to make sure your business keeps growing in the direction you want it to. The three tips above are easier said than done, to be honest.
The brilliant, creative visionaries who start businesses are rarely the sort of people known for their organizational skills and self-discipline. That’s part of what makes you such a great entrepreneur – you have the unique ability to see what could be and take an idea from a concept to reality. Don’t beat yourself up if maintaining and growing that business is a little more challenging than expected – I promise, you’re not alone.
If you’re a solopreneur struggling to navigate this space, consider the Solopreneur Capacity Planner available in our digital shop, the Visionary Vault. It’s an affordable and easy-to-use tool to help you organize your work and plan your schedule strategically so that you don’t overwhelm your days and can make time for your dream projects. With our Capacity Planner, it’s a lot easier to accomplish Keys 1 & 2, so that your energy can go towards the work you truly care about: turning your ideas into reality and growing your business in the right direction.
