3 Problems You’ll Encounter Working From Home

Everyone wants to live the financial freedom lifestyle, and that means not having to report to work every day at an office full of cubicles. If you want that level of financial success, house flipping could be the right career move for you. There is one drawback, though… You have to do a lot of your work from home, which sounds pretty great at first. Then you actually try it, and you find out that there is a whole unique set of problems that only people who work from home encounter. Here are a few of the big ones that Tarek and I have run into and how we’ve dealt with them.

“Productive” Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “On Task”

When it comes to working from home, my biggest downfall has to be productive procrastination. If I don’t feel like searching the MLS or calling motivated sellers to follow up on potential deals, I’ll do a load of laundry, clean the kitchen, or work on Taylor or Brayden’s room. Those are all seriously productive tasks that mean a lot to me, but not a single one of them gets me closer to a new deal on a flip house.

So what do you do when you keep prioritizing household chores over the work you need to do for your business? I usually find that one of two things will help. I start by making myself a to-do list and putting it in order of highest priority. Then I start checking things off. Every hour or so, I’ll give myself a little break to keep my head in the game, but I always set a timer to make sure I don’t wander off and completely forget about what I was doing.

If that doesn’t work, I move to a more work-oriented space. Sometimes I like working in our home office because it feels like a destination for work, but other times I take my laptop and go to a coffee shop where I can pop in my ear buds and really focus.

Forgetting to Clock Out at the End of the Day

Sometimes, when I get on a roll with work, I’ll find myself saying, “Just one more…” and then, “Okay, really just one more…” again after that. At some point, you need to put your work down and make some time for your family. If you have trouble with that, set yourself an alarm to remind yourself to clock out at the end of the day and go do something fun and relaxing with your family and friends.

Loneliness

This isn’t as much a problem for me because I have Tarek and the kids around, but if you work from home alone a lot, you’re going to start feeling lonely. You don’t have the everyday social outlet of office relationships, so you’re going to have to find another outlet to combat that. It might be going to the gym or getting together with friends once or twice a week. Whatever it is, make sure you work that outlet into your schedule, or you could end up feeling kind of sad, even as your business starts to take off.

Living the financial freedom lifestyle takes some adjusting to, and it definitely involves some balancing, too. If you see these problems coming before you experience them, you’ll have a lot more fun and be a lot more productive as you reach for (and achieve) financial success with house flipping. Good luck!