You Know You Work from Home When...

Maybe you choose to make your money through affiliate marketing. Maybe you run a highly successful eBay store. Or maybe you choose to take the freelance writing path like me. Whatever the case, you may have taken the plunge and are currently working from home.

While there is certainly a community of work at home moms online, you also have to remember that there are other people who choose to make their living from their living rooms too. Buzz Bishop, for example, reminds us that there are work-at-home dads too. And then there are people who like me who are neither moms nor dads, but we treat our home-based businesses just as seriously as someone who chooses to open up a coffee shop or clothing store.

When you are first transitioning from a conventional job to one where you work from home, you may not really feel like you’re a “work at home” kind of person right away. Soon, however, you’ll start to discover the symptoms of home-based entrepreneurship.

  • You get an oil change on the car once a year, not because you can’t afford a more frequent schedule, but because you only rack up 6,000km (~3700 miles) in 12 months.
  • You’re the only one there when you go to visit the zoo. That’s because it’s a Wednesday afternoon.
  • You sit at your computer well into the wee hours of the night, because you have a client’s project that absolutely must be finished by the morning. Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert is cracking jokes in the background.
  • You have an alarm clock in your bedroom, but you don’t set an alarm.
  • You don’t really notice when it is a public holiday, because you’re probably going to treat it like a regular work day anyway.
  • You haven’t taken a vacation that wasn’t work-related in over two years.
  • You take a long look at each sales receipt, thinking about whether you can write off any portion of the purchase as a business expense.
  • You swear never to work in a conventional office ever again.

Do any of these symptoms sound familiar? Congratulations and welcome to the world of working from home.