Working from home has many advantages. You can sleep until whatever time you want, you save cost in traveling to work, you can have cheaper and healthier food at home, you skip the rush hour jam, you can shop at anytime especially at the none peak hour where you can enjoy the spacious shopping mall, and most of all you can save the time in being jammed in the road. (Traffic jam is real annoying! According to statistic, people spend 2 full days in traffic jam every month, it’s almost 7% of your life there!) Isn’t it being a SOHO looks attractive? For sure!

But…there are damn a lot of traps in being a SOHO. First thing first, it’s discipline issue. You truly know that you are able to do all the above mentioned things but you will not do it. Why? Because you are working. You work for your pay check even though you are a SOHO. It doesn’t mean that you do not need to work anymore. You need to be self disciplined to work on your things. If you fail to be self disciplined. That’s it. You will end up spending the whole year wandering here and there doing nothing but yet claim yourself to be a SOHO. SOHO means you are on your own and nobody will monitor you. If you want to be successful, you better stick your ass on your chair and start working.

In fact being a SOHO you need to work even harder compared to your 9-5 job. This is because you have no sense of security at all. You don’t work, you don’t get paid. To worsen the situation, sometime you will not get paid even you have worked. You need to go the extra miles to earn what you are suppose to be earning. Contrary to the normal job, you get your pay check no matter you do your job well or not. Pretty simple to understand right? This is actually something that I am dealing everyday for the past 1 month. Trust me. That is horrible! That is very scary! You will not know when are you going to be rewarded for your so called hard work (sometimes you do not even know whether the work you are doing is a hard work or a stupid work which give no results at all to yourself). Everytime I feel doubt on the thing I am doing, I will try to recall the advice from those guru (I bet you know who I am talking about) to put the security thingy to the least important factor in my needs table. But I am still a newbie here definitely it is a skill that I need to master.

Besides these 2 traps, a SOHO needs to plan properly their own daily, weekly,annually task. Nobody will guide you and you need to get whatever resources to back you up. You plan your task and be sure that the task will lead you to your goals. If you think the task you work on doesn’t help, find another way. If it still doesn’t help, find another one. You need to keep searching for solutions until your goals are achieved. Even after that you still need to keep searching and planning. It needs a lot of creativity and business sense in searching the working way. “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. SOHO plan it and embed it into their life and work. This is something I really not good in. I admitted that I am not good in planning. I do planning but still it seldom leads to the goal I wanted. I better put extra effort in this or else I am going to fail here.

So what other traps? I am still figuring out. These are so far the 3 most important things to become a successful SOHO that I have came across. Hey if you are a SOHO and is reading this. Why not share with me? I believe they are many more things I need to learn to be a professional SOHO.

Bottom line. I enjoy being a SOHO. Indeed SOHO-ing gives me freedom. I get control in whatever I do. But sometime I am thinking will this make me even more lazy or not. I do doubt whether will I achieve my goals or not. It is confusing and not secured. Besides doing my parts, I guess I can only keep praying. Wish me luck!