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Surviving the Dangers of Working from Home

July 19, 2017 | 5 min read

The advertisement reads:

Day job got you down?

Why not branch out on your own and make your mark?

This is what I call ‘the fantasy.'

If you want to branch out on your own, you have to be realistic.

Yes, you get to work from home. You get to decide what projects you’ll work on. You get to monetize your chosen skill. There’s a lot more freedom of choice. But there are also a lot of dangersthat you must be aware of.

The Dangers of Going Freelance

So you get to work from home. Great! But what does this mean?

Option 1) You get up, have a shower, and sit in your office at home. You may have a hundred different projects to get to work on. You eat a quick snack at home in your kitchen when you’re hungry. You take a break at home in your living room. You decide you’re too tired for work, so you have dinner at home. What to do this evening? You could watch a film at home on your own. Now it’s bedtime.

Noticing a pattern? Everythingyou do is at home.

Option 2)You wake up at midday and lounge in bed till 1 pm. You finally drag yourself into the shower. You spend two hours choosing your outfit and making breakfast. You sit on your sofa with your laptop and stare at the screen. Okay, just one episode and then you’ll work, right? It’s now 4 pm, and you haven’t done any work. Not hungry - why bother making lunch? Feeling guilty, you do something that makes you feel like you’ve done a lot. 6 pm, time to cook dinner. You could watch a film while eating dinner, why not? 10pm...well now it’s too late to do any work.

Working from home is a lot harder than it sounds and the day-to-day routine can be worse than the humdrum office commute unless you combat it early.

With a lack of routine comes boredom, loneliness, procrastination, low levels of motivation, bad health, and, as a result, low self-esteem. You cannot build a good business when you’re unhappy.

But it’s not all doom and gloom if you do it right!

Combating the Dangers

1. Scheduling

This sounds like the death of fun, but without a schedule, you’ll have no will to work. Make a schedule and stick to it. (I’ll elaborate on scheduling in a minute.)

2. Go out

In the evenings, it starts to hurt when you realize you haven’t even left the house to go to the corner shop. Try to organize evening activities: societies and clubs, gigs, drinks out with friends…

It is very important to have a social life. Not only will evening activities give you something to look forward to and steer away the boredom, but it will also stimulate the mind.

Try to split up your days, as well. Join a morning yoga class, a creative writing course, an evening book club. Get yourself out of the house!

3. Do your work in a cafe

I considered this at first and frequently talked myself out of it, thinking I’d feel incredibly lonely sitting in a busy cafe alone.

A month into my new freelance business, I was waiting in a cafe for a friend. I took out my notebook and found myself, one hour later, knee-deep into my third article. There’s something about the hustle and bustle of a cafe that makes you feel busy and keeps the mind buzzing. Despite the noisy backdrop, there’s far less available to distract you. Most importantly, working in a cafe gets you out of the house.

4. Avoid distractions.

A lot of your time and concentration will be taken up by the buzzing of your phone. Ignore those notifications.

Put your phone on silent and close everything on your laptop that you don’t need for the task at hand; get your head in the game. You’ll find you may enjoy throwing yourself wholeheartedly into a project.

Concentration Tactics

Getting yourself to start working is half the battle, but then you need to keep working.

1. Write a To Do List

Before doing any work, write out a to do listand get every little nagging task out of your brain. The washing, the grocery shopping, paying that bill, writing that article, contacting that client… Keep the to do list on hand because you will remember something else you have to do in that thirty-second break you take to get a glass of water.

2. Zone Out

I find it easier to work when there’s some background noise.When you’re working at home put some music on in the background. (Tip: I find orchestral music is best for this because there aren’t any lyrics to sing along to!)

3. Be Real

Be realistic about the time it takes to do things. Pessimists say it always takes thirty times longer than you expect. It’s okay to take your time to do things.

4. Ease Up

You need to remember to give yourself a break (though don’t overuse this excuse!). Give yourself a break every few hours, rather than just one break a day. The mind always works better when it isn’t tired. You don’t have to reach the end of your day feeling blasted.

Scheduling

It’s a very different thing, organizing your time around a deadline you’ve been given and sticking to deadlines you’ve given to yourself. There’s no one to penalize you except yourself. There are many different ways of scheduling your life. Try each of them and find the one that suits you best.

1. Lists

List everything you need to do and make your way through it. The list will grow as you get things done because, a lot of the time, getting one job done creates another three jobs. It is very important to finish what you are doing before starting something new.

2. Planner

Draw out a table with days and times of day and rigidly decide what you’re going to do hour by hour (keeping in mind the time it takes to do things).

3. Reminders

Get a reminders app on your phone. It’s like a to do list, but you can set alarms for each task.

4. Move location

Start the day at a desk, move to your sofa, to the floor, to another desk, to the bed, outside. Stale surroundings can spark boredom and boredom is dangerous.

5. Keep it simple

Underestimate yourself; set one big task for the day and feel great when you do more than just that task.

6. Split it up

Scared of the giant task ahead? Split it into lots of smaller tasks, so it feels more conquerable.

It is very important to be realistic about the amount you can get done each day - don't think about quantity completed, but time and effort spent. Things do take time.

Don’t get yourself down. You’re doing something awesome. You’re creating your own business from scratch! Don’t forget to give yourself a pat on the back once in a while!

Maddy Glenn has been writing fiction from age seven. Maddy recently designed and released a free creative writing course on her website. She developed a freelance editing and writing platform, focusing on editing fantasy fiction and writing articles to help new writers develop their skills.

The Set Up

The 2024 study recruited 293 writers to write an eight-sentence “micro” story. The participants were split into three groups:

Writing by human brainpower only
The opportunity to get one AI-generated idea to inspire their writing
The opportunity to get up to five AI-generated ideas to inspire their writing

Then, 600 evaluators judged how creative these short stories were. The results confirmed a widely accepted idea but also offered a few surprising findings.

Prompts from AI Can Jumpstart the Creative Process

Right off the bat, the reviewers rated the AI-guided stories as being more original, better written, and more enjoyable to read. (Interesting to note that they did not find them funnier than the fully human-inspired stories.)

This actually isn’t that surprising. Most writers know the “blank page dread” at the beginning of a project. Even as I write this, I can’t help but wonder, “If I had been tasked with writing an eight-sentence story, what the heck would I have written about?”

Many writers share this sense of needing to pick the “right” story to tell. And that uniquely human concept of perfectionism can end up actually inhibiting our creative process.

A prompt, then, can help us quickly clear this mental hurdle. To test this, I’ll give you one, courtesy of ChatGPT: “Write a story about a teenager who discovers a mysterious journal that reveals hidden secrets about their town, leading them on an unexpected adventure to uncover the truth.”

Can you feel your creative juices flowing already?

Since its release, AI has been celebrated for its ability to assist in idea generation; and this study confirms how effective using artificial intelligence in this way can be for writers — some, it seems, more than others.

AI-Generated Ideas Helped Less Creative Writers More

It doesn’t feel great to judge a writer’s creative prowess, but for this study, researchers needed to do just that. Prior to writing their short stories, the writers took a test to measure their creativity.

Researchers found that those considered less creative did substantially better when given AI-generated ideas — to the point where getting the full five ideas from AI “effectively equalizes the creativity scores across less and more creative writers.”

This isn’t the case just for writing. Another study by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship WZ also found that AI tools most benefit employees with weaker skills.

So is AI leveling the playing field between okay and great writers? It seems it may be. But before we lament, there’s one more finding that proves using AI isn’t all perks.

AI-Aided Stories Were More Similar — And Needed to Be Credited

The researchers took a step back to look at all the AI-supported stories collectively. And what did they find?

The AI-assisted stories were more similar as a whole, compared to the fully human-written stories.

Additionally, when reviewers were told that a story was enhanced by an AI idea, they “imposed an ownership penalty of at least 25%,” even indicating that “the content creators, on which the models were based, should be compensated.”

This leads us to that all-important question about AI-assisted work: who owns the content?

According to Originality.AI, an AI and plagiarism detector, “When there’s a combination of AI and human-generated elements, the human elements may receive copyright protection if they meet the requirements.”

So right now, if a writer uses AI to generate ideas — but writes the content themselves — they retain rights to the work.

However, Originality.AI even admits that “the legal system is having a hard time keeping up” with the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. Time will only tell what AI regulations will look like in a few years.

What Does an AI-Assisted Literary Future Look Like?

The researchers from the University of Exeter Business School study raise an interesting point about what the future landscape for writers may look like. If droves of authors begin using AI to come up with ideas, we may end up with a lot of well-written yet dime-a-dozen stories.

So will human beings choose the easier, but less diverse, path? Or will we stick to fighting through writer’s block armed with nothing but our own brain?

Or, a third option: can we somehow learn to harness AI to supercharge our writing process without sacrificing the wholly unique creativity that infuses human creation?

That’s one question that even ChatGPT can’t answer.

Editor's Note: Artificial intelligence may have already transformed writing, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be in control of your own words. Read Astrohaus Founder Adam Leeb's statement on AI and privacy.

Learn more

August 22, 2024 • 8 min read

Reimagining the Future of Storytelling in a World with AI

While AI has capabilities that range from coding to image generation, the model that excites — and terrifies — writers is the LLM. It won’t be long before we see the world’s first blockbuster novel, written entirely by an LLM. What does this mean for art, and writers in particular? Is it all doom and gloom? The answer is, of course, more complicated than yes or no.