The Wealth in Health

July/August 2007 Issue: Page 66

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Balancing health issues and family issues when you work from home is sometimes an uphill battle. Here are some strategies to keep your back straight and your head clear.

A work-at-home marketer complained that he gained 30 pounds in the last few years when his home-run online marketing business became successful. In fact, his wife stopped working, he was doing so well. He published an e-book on how he made it and he moved his family to a bigger house. He loves riding bikes with his kids and happily juggles his work hours and a new 11-month-old baby. A great success story, except that he just can't lose that 30 pounds.

He does have a small office out of the house for the crunch times but also relishes the weekends when he can be with his family full time. He employs little tricks to keep his mind on his work, even getting up and dressing for work just to go downstairs and fire up his computer.

The trouble with being an affiliate marketer or any telecommuter is that working from a home office can be a strain on your health, family life and pocketbook if you don't know the strategies and tricks to keep everything in order.

Setting Priorities

The last U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report stated that more than 25 million people now work from home. That's about 15 percent of nonagricultural workers. It further breaks down to as many as 30 percent of management and professional workers (work-from-home employees were defined as those working at least one day per week from their home). That number is sure to grow by the end of 2007 and is the norm for affiliate marketers.

Many affiliates will say that business comes first, but keeping yourself and your family sane and healthy seems to fall by the wayside unless you have a set plan. It's not just about getting to the gym. Affiliates have said it's more a way of life – when you have a successful business, it gets harder and harder to balance work and sanity. There seem to be no clear strategies.

"My office was set up by trial and error," says Wendy Piersall of eMoms. com. "It took months and even years to get it right. I tell people up front: Get your own office space." Piersall is on her third home business, has kids and a husband with a full-time job outside the home. "The only way to figure how to balance things," she says, "is when you are out of balance."

Jeremy Palmer of QuitYourDayJob.com rents a small office but tries to use it only if he needs to have phone meetings. The rest of the time – if he has lots of computer work – he will stay at the home office, which is centrally located in his house. "We considered an office detached from the house," Palmer says. "I was in a basement before with one little window, but then an office with no window killed my productivity. Having a window is important."

Productivity as a Priority

Issues of productivity are not to be discounted. A BurstMedia.com survey indicates that employees are doing more of their personal business on work time. The survey said that 25.5 percent of workers said work hours were the "best time to conduct their personal online activities" and that 23.2 percent said faster connections to the Internet than at home were why they use the office connection for personal tasks while at work.

Some affiliates set down hard and fast rules to get them to be productive. Linda Buquet of 5StarAffiliatePrograms.com keeps a list of "reminders" of things to do to remain successful. She bought a watch that would remind her to say "thanks" to someone every time she looked at it. She believes in the "pay it forward" form of karma, where she will help out fellow affiliates just to help – without fee or commission. She keeps a "to do" list on paper and actually checks it off when things are completed. And she tries to blog about only the things she thinks will be helpful for readers in the industry and not just because the blog needs an update.

Shawn Collins of Shawn Collins Consulting also has a list of "daily habits" that keep him on track. He's big on structure and relies on his Microsoft Outlook to prompt him about things he needs to do. He works only from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and stops immediately at the assigned hour to be with his family. He answers the phone right away and answers email as soon as he gets one to avoid falling behind. He portions his day so that he does email and research in the morning, meetings in the afternoon and uses the last hour of his day for tying up loose communication ends. He tries to keep a clean desk and clean email inbox.

For QuitYourDayJob's Palmer, part of working healthy means streamlining your work processes. He has all the same equipment in his home office and his small satellite office so that he can just get in the car and go if the home walls are closing in on him. He uses GoToMyPC.com for remote access to his primary computer from any Internet-connected PC. He uses primarily Web-based applications – such as Gmail and Google Docs and Spreadsheets – so that everything he needs is virtual.

A Healthy Outlook

Apart from making lists, staying healthy doesn't begin at the gym but at your desk. Having the right equipment to work healthy means being aware of what is right ergonomically. eMoms' Piersall admits her ergonomics are not perfect. She says she began to have "major back problems." She says, "For some reason working from home makes it hard to get away from the computer." She went to the local store and tried every chair in the place until she found one that suited her. She says she may have read an article about choosing the right ergonomic chair but relied on intuition instead. The result was an "instantaneous difference."

In addition, she tries to exercise because she says, "The healthier I feel, the more productive I feel."

Palmer says part of his health regime – when he can't get to the gym – is to ride a bike when he can, take the stairs whenever possible and to park in the farthest end of the lot and walk to his destination. His gym is very close to his satellite office and he sets a goal to go there at least twice a week.

But the gym isn't for everyone. Continued on Page 2...

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