Finding Work/Life Balance After Three Years of Working from Home and Running My Own Business

After three years of working from home and a year and a half into starting my own content marketing and creation business, I recently reflected on my experience and realized I’ve had my share of struggles adjusting to the work-from-home (WFH) professional lifestyle while also realizing how difficult it will be for me to ever go back to a corporate job environment.

To provide a little context, before my WFH experience, I worked in corporate marketing roles since the mid-1990s. Working as a Content Marketing Manager at my last job, I spent a year working from home remotely for my employer before I was furloughed in March 2020 due to COVID. My position was permanently eliminated in May 2020.

After searching for a replacement for nearly three months to no avail, I decided the time was right to make a go of it as a freelance writer, content creator, and marketing consultant catering specifically to brands within the powersports industry (my area of expertise). I started my business, Buzz Media LLC, in September of 2020.

To be completely transparent, when I started my business, we were in a good enough place financially that I didn’t have to stress too much at first about finances. That’s not to say I had piles of cash sitting around because that wasn’t the case either. In fact, there was very little money coming in for the first three to six months, and it was well over a year before there was any type of consistent income.

Running my own business from home was a huge adjustment, especially after spending my entire adult life working in a corporate environment. It’s been an emotional roller coaster ride along the way, with some months rewarding and others grim.

When the money is coming in, it’s easy to bask in the high of being a small business owner and being my own boss. Slower months often resulted in a renewed search for a corporate job to replace what I previously had. Not that I wanted to find another corporate job, it’s what I thought I had to do to get some money coming in: get a real job. Stress has a way of doing that to us. Often, we are our own worst enemy in situations where money is involved. It certainly stresses me out during slow months.

Now three years into working from home and a year and a half into starting and running my content creation business, I’ve grown my business incrementally and sustainably. My work has become more consistent, which has helped alleviate some of the financial stress of being a business owner.

I’m still a one-man show, and there are no guarantees from one month to the next, but I’m okay with that. The longer I work for myself, working from home, the harder it becomes to think about returning to corporate life.

One of the biggest adjustments I’ve had to make along the way is learning how to enjoy the free time that a work-from-home lifestyle  affords me. I struggle to allow myself to enjoy my free time. Because I’m no longer locked into a set daily schedule, I work when I need to and when I feel inspired, whereas; when I worked in an office, most of my day was taken up by random tasks, meetings, conversations, lunch, and the commute to and from work.

After 30 years of working in an office environment with set hours, I find it hard to enjoy my free time when I get my work done for the day and still have half the day left. It’s as if I’ve been programmed from so many years of logging days and hours in a corporate setting putting in the “seat time” that so many companies seem to value over productivity. It’s been tough to reprogram myself to enjoy my free time.

With a WFH lifestyle, I can get up and go straight to work if I need to. I can go to the gym at 11 AM or work at midnight if that’s when I feel inspired. There is much more flexibility when one works from home, which has resulted in increased efficiency and productivity while working less than I did in my corporate jobs.

Again, I have had my struggles along the way. I’ve had bouts of depression due to being alone so much, and if not for my dogs, I probably would have struggled even more. My dogs have helped me tremendously during the process, which I highly recommend if you work from home and don’t have a pet already.

Working for myself now, I aspire to work smarter instead of harder. Of course, there have been pros and cons along the way, and a few that I have experienced include:

Pros

• I’m the boss!
• More free time!
• No longer chained to a desk
• Less distraction (depends on your personality type)
• No commute
• No office politics

Cons