The Self Employed Mom » 2007

For more impact on clients, pick up the phone

In today’s hyper connected world more and more people are working from home at least some of the time. In fact, in May of 2004 the U.S. Department of Labor reported that nearly 21 million persons worked from home at least once a week as part of their primary job. About a third of these home workers (or 7.1 million) were categorized as self-employed.

This same report states that 8 out of 10 people use a computer while working from home. This is no surprise to me. In fact, it was the heavy reliance on my computer that inspired me to want to work from home in the first place.

My former day job required me to spend up to eight hours a day (often more) hunched over my computer, communicating with people via e-mail, instant messaging and (less often) phone. Even those people in the very same office as me!

When I struck out on my own, I really expected the transition from full-time in-house employee to full-time remote freelancer would be seamless. But I never accounted for the value of on site collaboration with colleagues, clients (and other adults). Nor did I plan for the daily challenges I face as a remote worker.
Too much focus on email

My biggest mistake was relying too much on e-mail instead of picking up the phone to follow-up with people. I was very dependent on my computer for companionship. It became my coworker, in a sense. We were inseparable. I spent long laborious hours crafting e-mails to clients and explaining things via instant message.

There’s nothing like plain black text on a white background to completely strip all personality and dimension from a person. When you don’t have facial expressions (other than yellow smileys), voice inflection or eye contact then it can be difficult to move any relationship forward, even a professional one.

My aversion to picking up the phone was a problem with bigger clients, in particular. Large organizations with a lot of on-site personnel are driven by the culture of face time. For example, the larger a company gets, the more internal meetings it seems to have. Often these meetings are the catalyst for moving projects forward.

I eventually realized that picking up the phone was my next best option to the internal meeting. It’s easy to ignore an e-mail or three, but it’s hard to ignore voicemail and e-mail requests for information or follow-up. It’s still a stretch for me to consider the phone as essential a tool to my business as the computer, but I’m getting better at it.

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This article was published in the Poughkeepsie Journal on Saturday, September 8, 2007.

Posted in Work-at-Home

Time for back to school regimen

Sep 11
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Planning for a new school year is not unlike planning for a new business year. Creating a budget for back-to-school spending, structuring my hours to accommodate school, organizing paperwork and coordinating everything with my husband are all pieces of a complex plan I’ve put in place to keep things running smoothly.

I’ll need to work a minimum of 35 hours per week to recover from the financial hit we took by reducing my hours at the beginning of the summer. I worked about 20 hours a week since June, which means I’ll spend 75% more time in my office starting next month. In order to accomplish this without too much fallout, the entire family is going back on a fairly regimented schedule.

My husband created a weekly dinner menu which ensures we sit down promptly at 6 pm and we’ve agreed to put the kids to bed by 8:30 pm, latest. My alarm clock goes off at 7:00 a.m. sharp, even if I don’t have any place to go, so that we’re all up and moving around at about the same time each day.

Budgeting for extra expenses is also an important part of getting ready for the school year. A good friend of mine gave me great advice for sticking to a back-to-school budget. Namely, don’t set foot into any store without a list. I budgeted $150 for each child’s back-to-school needs including clothes, shoes, school supplies such as bags, pencils and paper and I’ve really challenged myself to stick with this budget.

A quick word about organization

When my daughter started kindergarten last year I had no idea how much paperwork she’d bring home with her each day. Every available surface in our house was buried beneath a pile of memos, artwork, homework and critical school forms that I spent way too much time hunting down.

My preschooler also brings home lots of paperwork and between the two girls, my business and our personal mail, it’s a wonder I can find anything. To combat the growing tide of paperwork, I spent an entire weekend updating my files and devising a system for handling what’s sure to be a mountain of new papers. Most importantly, I communicated the new system to my husband (who prescribes to the paper bag method of filing).

Hopefully this means that the phone doesn’t get shut off again (which happened TWICE in the last year) because the bill was lost in a pile of artwork, and neither girl misses the opportunity to go on the field trip of their dreams because I forgot to send the signed permission slip back.

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This article was published in the Poughkeepsie Journal on Saturday, September 1, 2007.

Posted in Work-at-Home