There are some people out there that think that those of us who work from home do not experience stress. Those people have probably never worked from home. While working outside of the home certainly has its share of stress, working from home can also be stressful. If you work from home or are planning to work from home, you may want to think ahead about how you can prevent stress and how you can cope with it when it does occur.
The key to preventing and managing stress is to identify what is stressful for you. Each individual has different things that can cause him or her to feel stressed. Some people may experience the stress that comes when friends and family are not respectful of their time and think that since they work from home they are not really “working”. If this happens to you, you might want to set rules and business hours and have a conversation with those people about respecting your time.
If your stress is the result of an imbalance between your work and the rest of the things that you have going on in your life, you may want to try keeping a detailed schedule and implementing routines for the various parts of your day. This will help you to stay organized as well as focused on whatever you are doing at the moment whether it is taking a conference call or watching your child’s soccer game. Another common cause of stress is work overload. If you work from home, you may be able to control your workload by only taking on a certain amount of projects at any given time. While it is great that your services are so in demand that there are many people calling you, it is important to remember that you need time to do all of the work and do it well. It may be better to take on fewer clients and serve them better, than to take more clients and produce work that is adequate but not your best.
These are just a few examples of potential sources of stress and potential ways of dealing with them. While stress cannot be completely avoided, having a plan in place for managing it can help you get through stressful situations more quickly. What stresses you about working from home? How do you deal with it?