 Working from home is an incredible blessing but it's not always roses and cups of tea. There's a lot of pitfalls to avoid when you're working from home and we're going to talk about those today. Where we talk about productivity tips for work from home sales professionals and hotel sales professionals. I've spent a lot of time talking about all the benefits of working from home but keep in mind there's a lot of pitfalls to avoid as well. There are things that will work from home environment enable that aren't the healthiest of habits and we're going to talk about some of those habits today. One pitfall to avoid when you're working from home gaining weight. With the refrigerator just steps away it's really easy to just adopt this eat all day philosophy where food is always available you don't have to go far to get it and you quickly start to put on those pounds. Now I've probably gained pounds over the last 10 years I can't tell if it's from working from home or if it's because I'm getting older but certainly I weigh a lot more now than I did 10 years ago and working from home is probably a result of that. So there's a few things you can do to mitigate gaining a ton of weight when you start working from home. Strategy number one is healthier grocery shopping so if you're going to go to the fridge let's make sure the fridge is stocked with healthy options making sure that your pantry has some high protein options and not just potato chips and crackers. Strategy number two exercise now that you're working from home and you have some more flexible time to devote to your exercise program now we need to put it in motion so no more excuses let's build in some time to exercise and curb some of those calories that we've consumed. Another pitfall to avoid when you're working from home is doing your household chores. It's so easy to just throw a load of laundry in or run the dishwasher and do a set of dishes and those are all great things about working from home is the flexibility to incorporate those into your break time and your lunch break time but if those things become consuming they do take time and now all of a sudden some of your most productive time and your most alert time is spent tending to chores instead of spent on strategic projects and things that are moving projects forward. So if you're going to do chores from home make sure that it does coincide with some times of the day where you are feeling a little bit down and you don't have as much energy to devote to some strategic items and maybe work it into your break time as well or save it for when the work day has ended and into the evening hours. Pitfall number three is the corporate ladder. Now this won't apply for all of you out there in fact working from home doesn't impede you from climbing the corporate ladder at all but some organizations like to have that face-to-face time with employees and if that's important in your organization we don't want working from home to impede you from reaching your goals. So take a look at your own organization's culture and see if working from home is actually holding you back from achieving the next step in your career. Pitfall number four isolation. Now I did a blog post on how to network with people when you work from home and you can find that above here. The reason I did that post is because isolation is a real thing when you're working from home. You can quite easily fall into the trap of being by yourself and alone for days on end with literally no human interaction unless you have kids running in and out of the house. So we want to make sure that you're still connecting with adults and having intelligent conversations. So when you're finding that you have been at home for a while and you're not getting out and having those intelligent conversations find some different ways to network with people and connect with people and decrease that feeling of isolation that might be creeping up. Pitfall number five is lack of support from a support system. When you're working in an organization chances are you have a technology support team even a human resources department an accounting department. When you're working from home especially if you're an entrepreneur some of those resources have now disappeared. You cannot go down the hall and just tap on Joe's door when your printer breaks down. It's all on you because you're in your home office. So there's a few things that you can incorporate as strategies when you do need support from people outside of your skill set. For tech support places like Geek Squad out of Best Buy they're a great resource to tap into when you're working from home. You might even have a skilled neighbor or friend or spouse that can help you out. But the Geek Squad is a great place to fall back on if you don't have that support system in your neighborhood. For admin support nowadays there are tons of virtual assistants out there that you can pay to do some of that administrative work. You'll likely find these best through LinkedIn or even through Google and they don't actually have to be in your neighborhood unless you want someone to meet with face to face. You can find virtual assistants virtually anywhere around the world be it your city, your country or somewhere else. So take a look into virtual assistants as an option to kind of offload some of those more administrative tasks so you can focus on the more strategic things at hand. Pitfall number six, flexibility leading to unproductivity. This tends to happen a lot to people who just start working from home and they love this flexible lifestyle that they're able to do whatever they want whenever they want. That's all good and great but you still have some work to do. So don't let flexibility get in the way of you completing your strategic work. You can still go to the gym and fit in that workout. You can still do that load of laundry but try to go back to the reasons you wanted to work from home to begin with and make sure that all of that flexibility doesn't lead you down a path of being unproductive all the time. Pitfall number eight, loss of boundaries. Boundaries can look one of two different ways. It can be a physical boundary where perhaps your workspace is now intermingled in the home and you can't separate the two spaces and so now your home has just become an office space and it no longer feels like a home. I can speak to that one. The last house that we lived in as a family, my home office was kind of sort of in the middle of the house and it actually wasn't until we moved to this house that I realized what was actually going on and this feeling of stress was permeating throughout the home and I felt constantly on edge and constantly stressed out from my job. Well it wasn't my job that was stressing me out. It was actually the location of my office and again I didn't realize it until I had moved into this home here where my office is now above the garage kind of away from the main living area, definitely away from the bedroom area and I'm still working just as hard if not harder in this new home but I have so much less stress because I've created a separation between my office space and my living space. So that's one way that you might be losing boundaries in your home is if your office space or your desk space is almost too integrated with your home space and there isn't enough boundary there. Now the second way you can lose boundaries is with the people in your life themselves. So that's when family members and friends catch wind that you're working from home and now you have all of this time to spend with them and all of this time to pick up their kids from school because hey you work from home you're flexible but without setting boundaries with those people those things are going to happen and again you're going to lose strategic time spent on your projects. So you need to set physical boundaries at home with your office space but you also need to set boundaries with your friends and family so that they are aware of what your goals are and then you are actually working when you're working from home. These are some of the pitfalls to avoid when you're working from home but remember there's so many great reasons to work from home as well that it's really a balance of the two and finding the right balance for you is what you're going to do probably in the first six months to a year of working from home. If you have any questions on how to work from home successfully please comment below this video I'd love to reach out to you and let you know what I do to create a productive environment in my home and please go to productivitypantry.com to get more productivity tips as well as sales tips if you're in a sales profession. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. Bye for now.