When people I meet learn I work from home, the common perception is that it's too easy to sleep in, or watch TV all day. The reality is the exact opposite.
Since 2005, I've worked from home as a full-stack web developer building some quite complicated sites. Imagine the following scenario.
You're half way through a 2 week project. It's turned out to be a larger job than you anticipated and you're stuck on a PHP problem that's taken up your whole day. You're starting to worry about missing your delivery date. Another client just emailed you requesting urgent changes to their site which will take you a day or so. They are expecting a call back. Several sites you manage need updates applied and there's at least a dozen unanswered emails in your inbox.
Your wife pops her head in your office. "Dinner's ready." (she's awesome). Is it that time already?!
There's no drive home. No soothing train ride. No winding down.
With a frazzled head still in work mode, it's a 30 second walk to the dining room. Through dinner all you can think about is your looming deadlines and all the work silently calling out to you from a few rooms away.
There's no time for TV or relaxing for you, Mr. I Work From Home.
If you're committed to your freelance business - and you should be - switching off is VERY hard when work is in the next room. That's why I often tell people working from home is the same as living at work.
Two things to do to combat this.
Unless you have an urgent task pending, try to finish by 5:00pm every night and get some exercise. A 30 minute session between work and family time makes an incredible difference to your frame of mind. Without it, I'm in work mode all night and can't focus on anything else.
Turn off your work phone and avoid email from Friday night to Monday morning. Clients will email you and call you at all times. You've got no idea. If you happen to see an email on Saturday morning requiring your attention you'll find it hard to think about anything else until you've attended to it. The reality is, it can wait to Monday and your client will understand.
It sounds like working from home can even be more stressful. I've worked from home from time to time, and definitely, the wife always found ways to interrupt my work, so I would always end up renting a small office, thus ceasing my at home job.
On another note, I am a novice programmer, having finished the computer science program at my jr. college and I find programming to be rather interesting. But I was wondering if you could tell me if I'm going in the right direction. I have done a whole lot of personal projects, but I need something more structured, would you say the next step in my learning process would be to do work on github projects and download source code to be examined and hacked? I feel like I am at the second wall, I know all about loops and conditionals, methods and classes - all the Object Oriented stuff. I am just not sure where to go next to further my learning. Thank you.
Hey Anthnoyc,
That feeling you have, that you need to learn more and which direction should you take. It never goes away. It sounds like you already have enough skills to be able to build great stuff for paying clients.
This industry is constantly changing and you will always feel like you're a step behind. When I started programming for the web fulltime in 2005, github wasn't even a thing. Neither was responsive web design, Larvel, jQuery, composer, node.js, angular, etc, etc. You can't be an expert in all of them.
My advice would be to pick a technology that your enjoy using or excites you. Learn it inside out and become an expert in that field. People don't hire generalists they hire experts.
Thank you for responding, I really appreciate it. I had a hunch that they want people with very specific skills. It makes sense from a business perspective.
I'm glad that it's just not me who has the feeling that I still don't know enough. For what I would like to do, I think i need full stack, definitely the front end stuff like html css javascript jquery, but probably node. Programming is so in depth that after studying it for the last few years, I have great respect for someone like you who has persevered and managed to be successful in the field.