This is just going to be a very quick post whereby I briefly outline my 2 step process for escaping the 9-to5 with minimal financial risk and uncertainty.

I’ve mentioned before that the thing that used to be a great big hang up for me when I was attempting to freelance or work on my online business was that i’d always be worrying about money and couldn’t focus my attention fully on working on developing either one without feeling worried or stressed out.

Because of this, I decided that I would get a full-time job and work on freelancing and online business in my free time instead.

This didn’t pan out so well either because I soon found that with my full-time 9-to-5 job, I no longer had any time left in my day.

Eventually I realized that the only way I was going to be able to make this work was if I was able to earn a stable income and also have enough time during the week to work on my personal projects, namely developing my online business/ service.

Step 1: Base Income – Telecommuting or Part-Time Work

I decided that I needed a base income, an income that was going to be enough to support me (to pay all my bills and necessities) without taking up my entire week.

This meant taking on a job that would only take up no more than 30 hours or 4 days of my work week.

I also had another criteria that I wanted the job to be related to the degree that I had studied in university.

The reason for this is because I wanted to cover all my bases and didn’t want to have “Worked as a cashier in McDonalds for a year” on my resume if I found that a year later for some reason I needed or wanted to get into a professional job relating to my field.

Alright, so now I had my criteria for a base income job:

1. A job that took less than 4 days or 30 hours a week to perform
2. A job that was related to my degree so that it would help supplement my resume ( i worry about such things, so sue me)

The job that I ultimately got was a job as a Technical Writer in an Engineering Design Company. They didn’t let me work part time, so after a few months of working for them in the office, I got myself (with some luck) a full-time telecommuting agreement with them.

If you want to learn more about the process on how I did that, read my posts relating to the 6 Steps To Negotiating a Flexible Work Arrangement.

Step 2: Future Primary Income – Freelancing or Online Business

Once I got out of the office, I streamlined my work so that I had at least Friday off every week to focus on developing my future primary income.

The first thing I decided to do was to get some decent coaching and advice from people who I knew had already achieved the success that I was aiming for.

Ultimately I decided that I would focus the full efforts of my free time on developing an online business as I was still earning a full-time salary and didn’t need to supplement my income with freelance work.

The Reason I Do Things This Way

I cannot emphasize how important it has been for me to have this extra time to work on developing my future primary income.

Being able to focus an entire work day (minimum) and not attempting to squeeze time from personal time after work does wonders for reducing the stress levels and ensuring I don’t sacrifice time with my friends and partner.

I do believe it is possible to work on developing your online business or service income while having a 9-to-5 job, though I really dislike the idea of multi-tasking and avoid it whenever possible.

The reason for this because I find that multi-tasking not only slows me down, it degrades the quality of my work (due to having to constantly split my attention) and causes me to be less productive overall, which in itself defeats the purpose of multi-tasking in the first place.

Also, the ability to spend an extended amount of time focusing on solving a single problem shouldn’t be undermined.

Being able to do this has helped me bust through learning curves and focus all my energy on finding solutions for frustrating problems.

I outline in greater detail the entire process above in my free mini-course “the office escape blueprint”, so if you want to learn more about it feel free to check it out.

I don’t believe this process is for everyone, but if you don’t have an existing office escape plan and feel like this is a path that would fit well with your needs well, then go for it.

Related posts:

1. OEB 6 | The Benefits of Part-Time Work
2. OEB 7 | Things To Remember
3. OEB 2 | The Purpose Of Your Base Income

“Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test, which is not fanciful; save by trial”

~Sophocles

If you’ve ever had to work from home before, you know the problems. You get lazy and think you’re on holiday so you think you can slack until the end of the week since nobody is watching you. Here is a possible scenario depicting how doing this can have a potentially negative effect:

The alarm clock rings, its 8am Monday morning and you’re suppose to start work at 8:30am. In panic thinking that you’re going to be late, you jump out of bed and rush to the bathroom to shave (or put on makeup if you’re a lady) and brush your teeth only to realize that you’re working from home today. You decide that work can wait and you jump back into bed to get a few extra hours of sleep. Its midday now and you decide to check your email to see if anyone has sent you anything from work. Quite surprisingly, no one has tried to contact you and you turn off your computer.

After cooking yourself lunch, you plop down in front of the television to prepare for 5 hours of movie madness. The clock goes past 5 o’clock and you rest easy knowing that nobody is going to contact you as office hours are over. The next day you repeat the cycle and by Thursday you still have not gotten any work done. You think with all your effectiveness strategies and streamlining of communication, you can get your work done in half a day. It’s Friday and you finally decide to get down to business. You turn on your computer at 9:00am and suddenly your phone rings. You pick it up and it is your boss on the other line telling you that the deadline has been pushed forward from Monday and that he needs your work right now.

He says it doesn’t matter if it is incomplete but he needs 90% of it sent through to him immediately. Not in an hour, not later, right NOW. Starting to get a little squeamish, you reluctantly tell your boss that you haven’t done anything. Monday morning comes and you’re back in the office with no future hopes of ever teleworking in any degree for at least another 5 years.

It is important to realize that teleworking does come with responsibilities. You will be responsible for your time and your effort since nobody will be actively watching you. Independence comes at a price, and you have to make sure you are willing to pay it if you want to telework.

To ensure you do not mess up teleworking in the long run, it is best to take trial runs for two reasons:

1. To get used to being independent and identifying all the potential problems of teleworking
2. To prove that you work more productively when you are outside of the office

Trial runs are easy to achieve and can be done with the following methods:

1. Take sick leave and work
2. Take annual leave and work
3. Request to telework temporarily to handle something at home eg. Baby, sick wife, renovation, plumbing, etc.

The first two methods are my preferred method as they do not give you pressure and you can take the chance to see how productive you can be while working from home and not worry about looking like a slacker should you be unable to handle the independence of working from home in the early stages.

Also, if you happen to do any work whatsoever (making sure your boss knows about it through emails and CC’s), your boss will be impressed and this will reinforce the idea in his mind that you are a hardworking and proactive employee.

After several trial runs and you are confident that you are able to handle teleworking, with sufficient proof to back up your claims of increased productivity, it is time to push for a part time teleworking agreement of 1 to 2 days per week. Attempt to do this for about a month before moving on to the next exercise.

Related posts:

1. Exercise 3.2: Testing your Full Time Teleworking ability
2. Step 3: Testing Your Teleworking Ability
3. Exercise 5.2: Closing the deal : Making it risk free

“The weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire”

~ Mark Twain

The following exercises will explain a process on how you can systematically test to see for yourself whether you are capable of teleworking from your job.

This is an important step because if you attempt to telework before you are sure you can handle all the potential issues and problems that arise, you could end up back in the office before you can say,”Holy teleworking failure Batman!”

Exercise 3.1: Testing your Part-Time Teleworking ability

Exercise 3.2: Testing your Full Time Teleworking ability

Related posts:

1. Exercise 3.1: Testing your Part-Time Teleworking ability
2. Exercise 3.2: Testing your Full Time Teleworking ability
3. Step 6: Post-Office and potential problems

Sometimes you can’t really appreciate something until it’s gone, and this applies to companies as well. I can relate an incident when the network engineer of a friend’s company decided to take 2 weeks off in the middle of the work season. Two days into his holiday the server crashed and they had absolutely no internet access.

This was particularly bad because their phone system was built into the network so that went down as well. Having no way to communicate, people had to resort to getting up and actually walking around to talk to people. Also, with no server access to speak of, nobody could access files and documentation that they needed in order to complete their work. Plunged into a communication blackout, the only way they could contact their international head office was through our cell phones.

A lot of companies are stingy in the sense that they would rather set up a single point of failure for an event that has a low likely hood of happening (though can have devastating results if it does happen) rather than hire another person to ensure that it never happens.

Can you relate a similar situation in your company? If you can, then the person you want to aim to be is the person who represents the single point of failure. In essence, you want to put yourself in a position that if they fired you, all hell would break loose.

If putting yourself in such a position is not currently available, it is always possible to create such a position by introducing a piece of software or creating something for your company that overtime becomes necessary for them to function effectively.

By introducing this new product or feature that brings all this benefit to the company (when in actual fact you’re trying to place yourself in a position of more bargaining power) you will achieve two goals:

1. 1. You will increase your perceived value by being seen as someone who is proactive and cares about the welfare and success of the company
2. 2. You will have more bargaining leverage as you will be the only person who knows how to operate the said software or feature.

You may be thinking that your company could easily hire someone and train the person to replace you in that position if you became too much of a nuisance.

The truth of the matter though is that companies would rather put up with some of the requests of an employee (when the requests have no perceived negative outcome) who they consider valuable and is already familiar with the company than spend the time to hire someone new and train them from scratch.

Related posts:

1. Exercise 1.5: Eliminating all unnecessary people
2. Exercise 1.6: Eliminating all unnecessary communication
3. Finding out where you stand in your company

“Without trust, words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.”

~John Harold

Why is Trust is Important

Although anyone who says this might sound like a naggy mum, the fact is: Trust is really important. In order to increase your value to the company and eventually gain the flexibility of working from home, you must first gain the trust of the company.

It makes sense doesn’t it? If the company does not trust you, it does not matter what kind of technique you apply, there is no way the manager will allow you to manage your own work and time.

Many people fall into the trap of trying too hard to convince everyone that “I am a trustworthy, productive employee!”  In reality, real trust cannot be achieved through manipulation or brilliant acting skills!

The problem with trying to pretend to be trustworthy is that you are lying 2 fold; lying to yourself and to your manager. Pretending is a really tiring game and wastes not only your time, but alot of your energy as well.

You also need to remember that your manager is a living breathing person who has instincts. If they even suspect that you are being dishonest about work, your odds of asking for their trust when wanting to work from home fall through the floor.

If you think about it, most manager’s will not mind if you take a sickie just because you feel like it IF they have 100% confidence that you will get the job done and that it will be done well.

The key to really getting your employers trust (at least the one that I have found) is simply to honest desire to bring benefit the company.  By doing this, all your actions and speech and work will reflect an employee they want to trust.

Even if your job is really boring or whether you always make mistakes, having this intention will gain you the power to improve your working life.

Action plan!

1. Sit down and actually list the reasons why the tasks you are completing day after day are important to the company and then try to feel proud of it! I used to be a waiter in my university days and I felt absolutely fantastically proud that the toilet that I clean in the restaurant is ‘fit to sleep in’ clean.
2. Find innovative ways to enjoy and improve your workflow. Every human being in this world is creative! That’s our nature. It is up to us to manifest it. I use to make up martial arts training regime while I was cleaning that toilet (with an mp3 player plugged into my ears). I loved every second of it.
3. For a week, try not to think about the pay or recognition you are getting for your job. Do it just to enjoy it. Think about the company and the customers that will benefit what you do. This kind of satisfaction will be the key of driving you to mutate into the new generation of happy employee who enjoy the flexibility of working from home.

Like most things, breaking in a new habit is going to take some discipline and effort. Try the action plan for 2 weeks and observe the difference in how you approach your work. You may find that when your heart is honestly into your work, work becomes almost effortless.

Final word

Working honestly is the easiest and most stress free way of developing trust with your company. The reason for this is because it takes no effort on your part to be honest and companies in general love employees who are transparent.

As naturally as it feels to reach for food when you are hungry, you will perform your work to best of your ability simply because that feels like the natural thing to do. Truly honest employees are rare, so when your company gets wind of how you approach work, they are going to want to hang on to you.

Related posts:

1. Learning To Trust Your Instincts
2. Finding out where you stand in your company
3. Exercise 2.2: Get your company to spend time and money on you

“The Depth of your Mythology is the Extent of your Effectiveness.”

~John Maxwell, American Author and Motivational Speaker

Why you need to do this

If your boss (good or bad) does not believe you are effective in the office, they aren’t going to think you are outside the office. You will need to convince your boss and your colleagues that you are indeed an effective person.

If you are going to go through the trouble of being an effective worker, you want to make sure everyone knows it.

Being and appearing effective serves 3 main  purposes:

1. To increases your value
2. So you never become overwhelmed no matter how much work you take on
3. To convince your boss that you are the type of person who only makes logical and effective decisions. This means that when you go to request a telecommuting agreement, they won’t be thinking that you are doing it primarily for some personal gain.

Being effective is a skill you will need to develop, not only to escape the office, but also to ensure the longevity of your work from home agreement once you exit the office.

Take Action

Now, here are 8 simple ways you can make yourself look more effective without increasing your workload.

1. Send weekly progress reports to your boss even if he does not ask for them
2. In meetings, stick to the point of what you need to say and say it as concisely as possible. Never ramble on to sound more important.
3. Everytime you see your boss, ask him or her how things are going with work
4. Everytime your boss contacts you, ask what you can do for them immediately.
5. When there are too many action items, ask your boss for the most important thing that they want done
6. In emails, stick to the point of the question asked. Use bullet points to be absolutely clear and make statements with robotic directness.
7. Never ever look miserable at work, always look like you have everything together
8. Keep your desk perfectly tidy. Label everything if you have to, look like a neat freak or someone who is super organized.

Try at least two of these items for the next month and observe the results. Leave a comment on this post if you have any of your own recommendations on how to look like an effective employee.

Related posts:

1. How to Avoid In-Office Meetings
2. Step 1: Becoming a Fast, Effective and Independent Employee
3. The 7 Habits of A Highly Effective Telecommuter