Skills and Traits You Need to Successfully Work At Home
It doesn’t matter if you want to have a telecommuting job, a home business, or online venture, if you want to earn a living working at home, there are some skills and traits that you need to have. The better you are at self-motivation, organization, flexibility and problem solving, the easier working at home will be. Here are a few important skills and traits you should have:
Work ethic: There are a lot of “gurus” trying to sell you their automatic-3-click-do-nothing program to make riches online. But the key word in “work at home” is WORK. If you don’t do the work (or hire someone to do the work), you won’t make money.
Organization: Granted, I’m organizationally challenged, but it’s not from a lack of trying. I have all sorts of organizational systems in place to help me stay focused, do the work that needs to be done and find what I need to do the work. This includes a weekly schedule with appointments and to-dos in one place, Evernote for organizing and storing ideas and resources, and a routine.
Accountability: If you can’t meet your obligations, you’re going to have a difficult time keeping a job or building a business. Bosses and customers don’t care if you can’t meet a deadline because your computer went kaput. By working with you, there is an expectation on their part that you’ll be able to deliver what you promised.
Resourcefulness: Stuff happens. The Internet goes out, you lose information on your computer, an important email gets deleted. Because you work at home, alone, you don’t have access to the resources you’d have at a job. It’s up to you to problem solve and figure out how to get up and running again.
Hey Leslie,
I totally agree with all of the points you’ve made above when it comes to the traits you need to work from home. I would also add self-discipline to the list. It goes along with your point about accountability.
There will be no boss looking over your shoulder to make sure that you hand something in by a certain deadline, so you need to figure out a schedule that works best for you in order to get it all done.
You have to be disciplined enough to turn off all the external stuff while you’re working, like social media or phone calls. Focus on work when you need to and then, just as important, set your boundaries and make time for family and friends without checking your email. 🙂
I totally agree with you Alicia. Working at home requires figuring out how to focus and get the work done. It’s harder than some people think, because there are so many things that distract or suck up time. Thank you for posting Alicia!