There are two risks when working at home: One, that you will blur the boundaries between home and work life and in effect over-work yourself, and two, which is the other extreme, that you will constantly push off work since after all, deadlines don’t really matter that much anymore and you won’t get very much work done.

In a sense, a self employed home worker is luckier than all. He has countless advantages, including no transportation or office space expenses, completely flexible hours, and no moody bosses. On the other hand when things are too good to be true, usually they need a deeper look.

A person who works from home needs to be completely self motivated and pace himself at a reasonable level. It is far too easy to just give in to the multiple tasks that suddenly are super urgent and put working on the back burner. One way to deal with this is to give yourself tasks and deadlines which you respect and will maintain.

The other extreme, as mentioned above, is that in a real sense the entire house turns into an office. Papers overflow from the office area and abound into the living room, dining room, and kitchen areas. Even if you are OK with this type of behavior, if you share a house-hold, you can bet no one else is.

The ultimate quest is to find the perfect balance. Make time for yourself, your business, your friends, and your family. Don’t let the risks weigh you down. The advantages of working at home are far too good to damage with an over-zealous or lazy schedule.

Key to good business: Imagination

When most people think of a business man they conjure up to mind a grim faced  well dressed “all business-no play” type of guy. The image we are saturated with is one of a super boring, non creative executive who rolls in all the money. This mold is at the least, entirely misleading.

The truth is that the most essential tool in business and what makes for the best CEOs is good old fashioned imagination. Imagination is manifested in two faculties: synthetic and creative. 

Synthetic imagination relies on the old, standard routines and concepts which we are used to and then channeling them into a broad new more efficient way of dealing  with them. An example of this would be following a recipe for baking a cake, and yet slightly adding or changing the ingredients. 

Creative imagination, on the other hand, is  something which is totally new and unprecedented to start with. A simple example, which I will use based on the above example, is a cake made from scratch. Napoleon Hill, in his book Think and Grow Rich basically sums up creative thinking as follows: ”Through the faculty of creative imagination, the finite mind of man had direct communication with Infinite Intelligence. It is the faculty through which ‘hunches’ and ‘inspirations’ are received. It is by this faculty that all basic or new ideas are handed over to man. It is through this faculty that individuals may “tune in,” or communicate with the subconscious mind of other men.”

An example of this would be Apple’s ipod which introduced an ingenious way of music ownership through customers paying for each song. On a deeper level we can even see when creative marketing can influence popular culture to such an extent that the red and white Santa Claus as we know him is actually nothing more than Coca Cola’s aggressive approach to marketing an item with their original Coke recipe.

Imagination for some reason is rarely mentioned in business relations. We are misled into believing that creative imagination is best left for a skilled artist. 

Once a business person or entrepreneur begins to use more imagination he will certainly expand his vision in broad ways through creating more revenue by channeling exciting marketing campaigns.