Beat The Isolation Blues: 5 Tips
 By Lee S. Shaffer

Many home-based business owners battle the nemesis of all social creatures: isolation.

You probably know the feeling. Cabin fever. Solitary confinement. The veritable life of a hermit.

Home office isolation can become addicting. Loneliness can begat more loneliness. The more we are alone, the more difficult it is to break the routine.

The good news is that you don’t have to suffer isolation blues. However, it takes a willingness to break the cycle, and then discipline not to revert to the old ways.

Here are five tips for re-joining the world of the living and preventing your home office from becoming your home tomb.

1. Pick up the phone
Humans are made for human contact. Use the built-in tools you already have: your mouth and your mind. If you sell a product or service, then you also have a built-in excuse.

Make a list of potential buyers. Then each day at a designated hour when you are likely to catch those folks by their phones, call some of them. It needn’t be an overt sales call. You can simply be touching base. But as long as you’ve got them on the line, you might as well check on their satisfaction with their last order or inquire whether they have run out of widgets yet.

2. Escape
Free yourself from the office swivel chair by regularly scheduling out-of-office chores and reconnaissance outings. Resist the temptation to computerize and automate your entire workday.

For example, drive to the post office to mail bills, rather than putting them in your mailbox. Instead of ordering from the online office super store, drive 15 minutes and stroll through its aisles. Schedule mid-week grocery runs to restock your lunch cabinet. Make a point to visit competitors’ shops and associates’ offices to see how people in the real world behave.

The key to this remedy is once you’re in the world, take the opportunity to talk it up with sales people, shop clerks and merchants. Recapture those person-to-person relationships so easily lost when cloistered behind the home office door.

3. Insist on lunch
The question isn’t whether you can afford to take someone to lunch once every week or two. The question is whether you can afford not to. For the price of a sandwich and ice tea, you can interject into the drudgery of your routine the equivalent of a celebration.

Try one of two (or both) of these approaches. To solidify or renew a personal relationship, schedule a regularly recurring lunch with a close confidante (or someone you wish to become a close confidante). Or, to add variety to your life, rotate through a list of friends and business associates to dine with periodically. Commit to recurring lunches, and follow through.

4. Join groups
If you’re not already a participating member of some group, your business life is too narrow. Ideally, this kind of camaraderie can advance business interests while simultaneously defeating isolation blues.

Your community probably has a chamber of commerce or similar group that meets weekly or monthly. You’ll find regular meetings and occasional mixers are not subtle events. They are purposely designed to force interaction.

For the home office confined, this is the solution to a growing shyness often brought on by lack of contact. Many social groups serve this purpose, but business groups have the added benefit of bringing you into contact with people who spend money. And if they spend money on what you sell, you not only banish the isolation blues, but ring the cash register as well.

5. Don’t vacation at the office
When home is where the office is, it is easy for rest and recuperation to be where the office is too. The problem is that when you work, rest and play in the same place, it doesn’t take long for work, rest and play to all feel like the same thing.

The best way to break the cycle of always being at the office is obvious: Get away, even if only for a weekend or an evening. Time away from the home office physically breaks the bond that the desk, computer and phone hold on you.

Many home office veterans trace their feelings of imprisonment back to the first time they gave in to the temptation to answer the office phone after hours. Remove the temptation. Get out of the house.


(Posted June 2005)

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