How to Make Your Mind Focused | Home Office vs Office in 4 Minutes

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer questions from one of my Facebook readers, Nishar, who wrote in asking about whether to have a home office or go to an office to work. So the specific question was, I've tried working from home but haven't been as successful as it's been at the office. Now people at home want me to work from home as they could also spend more time with me. What do you suggest for me, work from home or have an office? So a couple points for you, uh, it's a great question. A lot of entrepreneurs go through the same thing, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur or you manage a team that's remotely where you don't have to go into an office because there's people there. So you get the choice as to whether to go to an office or not. I can share with you my experience and hopefully that helps you make your decision as to what to do. I found that I'm more productive when I have an office that I go to, uh, and when I'm there I do my work and I'm more productive than if I'm I'm trying to do it from home. I find it's easy to get distracted when you're at home. You know, you can go to the fridge and get some food and you can hang out and you might get sidetracked by a home project that you need to get done. It's just so easy to get distracted. You need to have really strong discipline and ideally you want to make it easier to get your work done and not force yourself to get your work done. So I find going to an office helps me with that regard. The second thing is having boundaries. And I find it's again easy for people to overstep those boundaries if you are at home. I don't know if you have children or not, if they're knocking on your home office door and they want to come in, you know, you can say you're working, but then you're going to feel really guilty afterwards, right? Because you're not spending time with them. And then that's going to decrease your productivity of doing that work because you're feeling so guilty for turning them away. Or you let them come in and, you know, play in your office, and again, that's kind of taking away from your work time. So having those boundaries is important, and it's a lot easier to do it when you actually have a physical office. To go to. The last thing I found is a lot of entrepreneurs will blur the lines between personal and office, and you want to make sure that your personal time is for you, that you're spending time with your family and improving yourself, and your business time is focused on the business. If you're the kind of entrepreneur who's always, always, always working, then you're going to turn your family away and not going to have successful relationships. So I find it's important that if you have an office, you know you're going there to work, and when you come home, you may be still, you know, you may get a couple of ideas for your business. Write them down or send them, send an email to yourself. Don't let it take over your day so that, you know, when you're supposed to be spending time with your family, you're still thinking about work and doing work. If your home is your office, then it's a lot easier to blur the lines and always be working compared to If you actually have an office to go to, you know that that's your time for work, and then your home time is your time to be at home. In my case, right now my schedule, I'm in the office 5 hours a day from Monday to Thursday, and the rest of the time I'm at home or dancing or doing something with my son or whatever, whatever's on the schedule. I find that to do that effectively, it's enough time. So if I have 20 hours a week, that's enough time to to do everything I need to do for my business, but I need that time to be able to actually do it. So I need those 20 hours to be highly focused and really attentive on doing what I need to do for my business. I can't afford to be sidetracked thinking about other things or getting distracted. Otherwise, instead of taking 20 hours, it takes me 30 hours or 40 hours because I've been so distracted and interrupted. Then it's a lot harder to get your projects done. So the pitch to your family might be, I want to spend more time with you guys, but to do that, I need to be able to really focus on my work so that when I'm working, I'm working, and then when I'm with you, I'm with you. So you can probably end up working fewer hours, being way more productive in those hours, and get maybe even more work done than you usually do, and then have more time to go and spend with your family. So hopefully that helps. Again, that's, you know, my experience. If you guys like this video, please give it a thumbs up. I love seeing those come in, that makes me want to do more videos for you guys. And if you have a question about home office life, or you want to share your experiences, what you're doing, or different questions for your business, I'd love to hear it if you want to leave a comment under the video. I always read the comments and try to respond to each one when I can. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.