How to Work at Home

I have worked from home for ten years. People say, "Oh, real tough. Pajamas all day." Working from home has serious dangers: burnout, weight gain, backache, poor overall health, depression. I share here advice I learned the hard way:

• Allow yourself time off each day.
• Eat three good meals a day. Not all at once.
• Draw strict boundaries between work time and time off. Do not be always available.
• For best results, start the day with work. Also known as "start strong."
• Keep two-column to-do list with "must do today" on one side, and "universe, you take care of it" on the other.
• Don't keep sweets around, including dry cookie mix, because you will pick all the chocolate chips out of the dry cookie mix and then eat by the spoonful what's left.
• The only snacks in the house should be terribly fibrous items such as raw carrots or Triscuits. 
• Drink water.
• Social media and surfing will exhaust you via cumulative decision fatigue, and social media as a business strategy does not work.
• Exercise or do physical labor or your body will rapidly age and your mood deteriorate: no joke.
• Demons hate fresh air.
• Those working at computers need real office chairs that fit them and maintain good posture.
• That little skin tag is not cancer.
• Specs wearers, have an optometrist make you "computer glasses" with single-vision lenses that show clearly only that which is 18 to 23 inches from your face. "Computer glasses" reduce squinting and neck craning, and are cheap.
• Shower in full and dress in fresh clothing twice a week, such as on Wednesday and Sunday.
• Limit pasta to one day per week. Something to look forward to.
• Never try to trim your own hair.
• Doing the impossible trains your employer to expect you to do more impossible assignments.
• One day per week is laundry day. Do not do laundry on any other than the designated day, unless you have kids.
• Do have three working computers in the dwelling, especially if one of them has Windows 10.
• Back up your work, and your clients', into the cloud or onto a thumb drive.
• Pull the plug from the TV and do not use it except to play exercise DVDs.
• Sleeplessness, a very much changed appetite, or feeling sickened when you approach your work station, are signs of burnout. Stress is about to ruin your health. Recovery might take months. Reduce your efforts at once.
• When you find yourself reviewing the same thing over and over, or reading and not comprehending, quit for the day.
• If your ears are ringing, quit for the day and go to bed as soon as is feasible.
• Do what you promised your boss or client you would do, and offer no more than that unless you are offered more money.
• Withhold information about your personal life. Bosses, clients, and students are not co-workers or friends. Avoid volunteering unnecessary information, such as describing how hard you worked on a project or that your son is graduating next week.

Best of luck.

Happy Labor Day

Labor is beautiful.

"A job is the worst way to make money." Let me second that. For 20 years my day job actually paid me LESS take-home every year. They instituted a shocking parking fee (half a month's take-home), taking it out of our paychecks, then decided I had to pay part and then one-half of my health insurance (both benefits had been free). They kept taking out and taking out. When anybody complained we couldn't live on our salaries and 1.5 or 2 percent raises the bosses told us to get a second job. I did. And a third job. At one time, with spouse unemployed, I worked seven separate jobs: webmaster, freelance webmaster, freelance editor, night school teacher, guest night-school teacher, freelance writer, and jewelry crafter. (The bosses asked me why I didn't show up at the department's evening events.) I diverted 16 percent of my day-job check into a 401K; wasn't nobody gonna do it for me. For three years I paid my dying spouse's health insurance at an extra cost of $4000 per year. Now I was really stuck with that job solely because of insurance. After 11 years the comptroller decided to downgrade my job and salary from Level 9 to Level 6. Finally in 2010 I was laid off with a nice severance so I wouldn't sue them for age discrimination, and right there in front of the two lead-bottomed bosses (who had a cellphone out on the table in case I got violent) I went into ecstasies. Being laid off was the best thing that has ever happened to me.

I set up my own successful business, have an awesome regular freelance gig, teach online, have passive income from stuff I wrote years ago, and make much more money than when employed in a "job." My job is to stay in my cabin and write all day. I'm insured by Obamacare. I employ an accountant, a housekeeper, and a man who mows the lawn. Happy Labor Day. I'm working today because I love my work.