7 Work-At-Home Strategies + End Of WordPress?

I know a lot of people are likely to be watching the events in Washington DC today, so before all of that kicks off, let’s do some business. 😇

Last week, I published two new videos. One discussing membership site navigation… in the next installment of my video series on Building A Membership Site. The other was just some personal opinions about the conflict between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine and it’s effect on the WordPress ecosystem. You’ll find those below.

I also wanted to share some things I’ve learned working from home for almost my entire career.

So, let’s get into it….

7 Strategies For Working From Home

Whatever project you may be working on with your website…. or what business you’re running online…. chances are you’re doing it from home.

But, not everybody is very good at working from home. Some really feel like they need the structure of an outside location. And, I get it. However, there’s also a lot of freedom working from home.

I’ve been working from home pretty much my entire career. I had a stint where I got an outside office. It was right on 7th Avenue in Ybor City (in Tampa). Right in the hear of everything. I thought that kind of thing was important at the time. But…

I got rid of it after about 18 months. Decided to simply work from home. And I haven’t looked back.

So, here’s some things I’ve definitely adopted for myself. Perhaps you’ll find them useful…

1 – Maintain an off-limits work space.

Ideally, you will have a work space which is just for that purpose: WORK. Ideally, you will not work in your bedroom or in a common area.

My home office is a separate room. I even decorated it differently from the rest of the house, so it even looks different in some ways. My kids know that if I have my door closed, do not come in. If the door is open, come in if you actually need me. But, otherwise, treat me as if I am at work.

I also have put definite effort into streamlining the office and making it a space I LIKE to be in. I don’t cheap out on stuff and I don’t just slap it together.

2 – Keep a schedule.

When you’re employed and working a regular job in an office, it is easy to romanticize the idea of working from home. You get to set your own schedule and set your own rules. Right?

In reality, though, if you treat it like a “free for all”, things fall apart. When you don’t have a boss setting your rules for you, it means YOU need to set some rules and impose them on yourself.

It is important to keep a work schedule and stick to it. Take the time to actually plan and schedule your day. I have found good success when I set “appointments” with myself. Even if it is time to work on the next blog post, I put it on my calendar and treat it as an appointment.

3 – Schedule your “off” time.

This is the reverse side of the prior tip. You MUST have “off” time when you purposely do not think about your business.

You don’t want to be sitting there playing with your kids while your mind is REALLY in your office. It is really easy (especially as an entrepreneur) to be sitting there thinking about business issues or coming up with ideas even when you’re not in your office. Or sit there in bed at night reading business-related stuff on your phone.

But, that isn’t fair to your family. And it isn’t fair to you, either. We all need “off” time. We need time to NOT work. It is important.

You’ve got to learn to turn it off like a switch. If you know you’ve got set work time, then make sure you also have time where you give yourself permission to simply stop and be present for other things.

4 – Invest in Noise-Cancelling Headphones

Even with the door closed in my office, it is hard not to hear what’s going on out in the house. And yes, it can be distracting.

One of the best investments I ever made in my business is a pair of Bose QuietComfort 35 Noise Cancelling Headphones. In fact, I’m wearing them as I write this very post.

I spend a lot of my time working wearing these things and listening to music. You can listen to whatever kind of music floats your boat. But, it really aids in concentration and the kids can make almost any noise they want and I won’t hear a thing.

Best things ever.

5 – Be Accountable For Your Time

It is all too easy when you’re working from home to have your time go by and nothing much happened. You sit there “working” only to be at the end of it and wonder what you actually accomplished.

Many times, this is because you were not exercising any focus on your time. You were bouncing around browser tabs, checking your email (for the 10th time), checking on Facebook, etc.

I highly recommend that you track your time. Be accountable for how you use it. And the way to do that is:

• Use a desktop timer to work in 50-min or 1-hour increments. For each increment, set the goal(s) on what you’re working on for that batch. Then, start the timer and GO! Make a game out of getting it done before the timer hits zero.
• Keep a time log. Could just use your calendar app if you want, but keep a record of what you did during the day.

Time is a resource that, once spent, you never get back. So, you might as well use it effectively. With our money, we track where it is spent. You might want to do the same with your time.

6 – Be ruthlessly clear on your outcomes.

When you are working at home as your own boss, you cannot simply “go to work”. In some regular office jobs, it is easy to screw around. Some say that the average worker only gets about 3 hours of actual work done in a full-time day. Yet, the salary check still comes.

If you are self-employed, that’s not very workable. Your paycheck is not guaranteed. Even if you work less than 8 hours during the day, it is important that those work hours are actually productive. You need to make it count.

The absolute most important thing I have found is to separate planning from execution. In other words, when you are figuring out WHAT to do, you do that as a separate thing. You go into “planning mode”. But then…

When it is time to work… you WORK. You don’t sit there figuring out what to do. You’ve already done that. You just…. DO IT.

This means you need to be really clear on your outcomes. You need to be able to NAME the outcome you’re shooting for as specifically as possible. Only THEN do you start your timer and get busy with it.

7 – Turn Off Your Email

I know, I know…. we all live in our email inboxes. And incoming communication is important and we have to make sure we answer it. But…

You simply cannot underestimate the massive hit on productivity you are experiencing as you shift your mental attention from one thing to another constantly.

You’re working on something… then notice you got an email so you shift over to read it. You do your thing, then… what were you working on again? Oh yeah! So, you go and try to get back into that and figure out where you left off and then…. ding! You got a text message. So, you see who it was, and….

Get the idea? It doesn’t work.

Handling our communications is important, but it has to be handled like a cycle of action. With a beginning… and an END. In other words, you schedule a time during which you catch up on all that stuff. Then, when it is done, you turn it off and go get some actual work done. Do NOT read or reply to incoming emails, texts, or anything… while working on another project

Need to reply to co-workers, clients and others throughout the day? Fine. So, just schedule check-ins 3 or 4 times per day if you must. But, be intentional about it. Not reactive. And don’t try to multi-task it. It doesn’t work.

This Week In Concierge

A taste of some of the actions done last week for clients of Concierge:

• Fixed a few sites with the pesky problems created by new version of Elementor. 🤬
• Fixed up a case where a client’s DNS settings suddenly… disappeared. Very strange. Happened in Siteground, too. But, I was able to get his site and email back online by rebuilding his DNS in Cloudflare.
• Made numerous site changes and went live with a newly designed homepage for a client over the course of an Implementation Session.
• Completely rebuilt a local tourism site for a client which was originally built with SquareSpace. Now it is safely in WordPress and super flexible.
• Shut down an ongoing spambot issue for several clients on their forms
• Set up the mechanics for a client to sell her new course, including the WooCommerce setup, adding to her FluentCRM list, and controlling newe student access

A lot of what I do is, of course, answering questions and concerns that come up. I do a lot of that. 😇

A couple of other notes…

I recently added YITH WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips Premium to the Concierge Toolkit. And just this last week, I have officially added the “Extended” version of WP Armour to the toolkit as well. I have long mentioned WP Armour as a great free tool for blocking spam bots from being able to hammer your web forms. The Extended version extends this functionality to other plugins, offers logging and additional controls. This may now be part of my standard set of plugins I use for all clients.

Also, this morning, a client site somehow got corrupted and doesn’t appear to be fully operational. Problem is, this is a site she kept on her own hosting (and not very good hosting). And this really limits my ability to not only vouch for the uptime of a client’s site, or to handle it if it happens. So, from now on, I’m going to be much pickier about client site hosting. I’m either going to insist clients host with me… or they’ll need to be on a host which I approve of. That is, if I’m going to vouch for a site’s uptime. Otherwise, even Concierge clients will need to purchase Anytime Credits to get a site back online if it fails. Having your valuable site hosted on bad hosting doesn’t do anybody any favors.

WordPress Quick Bits

WS Form Gets New Form Styler. I’m not a big user of WS Form, but I do respect it quite. bit from what I’ve seen of it. So, it was cool to see their new 1.1 release now offers a new form styler that provides nice options to take fine-tuned control of the look and feel of your forms. Most form plugins require you to use custom CSS for this. Perhaps others will do what WS Form has done here. 👍

Conversion Bridge 1.6 Release. Conversion Bridge was recently added to my Concierge Toolkit and is now available for all Concierge clients. It is also now my preferred method for integrating analytics. Version 1.6 just released and now supports Enhanced Conversions. This now passes through certain first-party data in your conversion events so you know who it was. For instance, passing the customer’s name along into your conversions when they purchase. It doesn’t support all plugins yet.

Performance Plugin Upgrades. WP Rocket 3.18 was released and now gives the ability to self-host your Google fonts with one click. PerfMatters 2.3.8 was also released which offers an API exception for SureForms and a compatibility change to delay JS. Dorky stuff, I know. 🤣

WooCommerce Getting Order Fulfillments. The native interface for order fulfillment with WooCommerce has sucked for awhile. Looks like they’re now planning some big improvements and they were seeking feedback on the interface. We’ll see how it comes together as they won’t officially start developing it until Q2 2025. Also, this is likely to be most applicable to those selling physical product with WooCommerce. For those of us doing all digital and/or services, this isn’t likely to be that big a deal. We’ll see, though.

GT Metrix Was Acquired. GTmetrix has long been a popular site speed tester. I maintain a paid account with them and use it on client sites. Well, it has been purchased by group .one… putting it into the same family of products as RankMath and WP Rocket. Will be interesting to see how they marry up WP Rocket and GT Metrix. Some good cross-promo options there.

TutorLMS 3.2 Released. TutorLMS has now added native membership support, Authorize.net integration, new and redesigned ways to manage subscriptions and more. It is all part of the new 3.2 release, which you can read about here.

WordPress Developer Gets Involved In The Matt Saga. A developer has filed a motion of contempt and is getting involved in the legal fiasco between WP Engine and Automattic. He claims he has been financially ruined by the entire affair. You can read about it here. Honestly, I don’t get it. If that lawsuit managed to affect you that badly, your business skills sucked to begin with. This feels more like a guy seeking money through the legal system, but who knows. 🤷‍♂️

Block WooCommerce Tracking. It isn’t a secret that WooCommerce does have tracking built into it that reports information about your site back to Automattic. You can turn it off, but to make sure it is completely turned off, you can use other methods. Robert DeVore released a little plugin that will completely block all WooCommerce tracking data. It completely blocks the WooCommerce tracking server. It is also free, so check it out.

Most Effective Content To Create Today

When it comes to creating content, we want to spend our limited time doing things that give us the best return for our time.

And not all content types are equal.

In my business, the two most effective types of content I create are this very newsletter as well as videos on my YouTube channel.

In terms of just content that creates new leads and sales, those are the two things that work the best.

I had a discussion with a client last week where we were discussing ramping up her content marketing. And she asked whether it would be better to focus on an email newsletter or creating new blog posts. My answer… focus on the newsletter and then just publish those archives to the blog.

It is a little sad to say, but as a long-time blogger I have to admit that the usefulness of focusing on your blog articles has dwindled. Blogging cannot stand alone. It would be like having a one-legged stool. It requires you to have other content channels.

So, the way I see it, your blog probably shouldn’t be used as a traditional blog much a anymore. It should be more of an article library. And the stuff that goes in there is your best stuff and you put real time into optimizing that content, maintaining it, tweaking for conversions, etc. In the past, I’ve referred to this as The Redwood Strategy.

That’s really all the blog is best used for these days.

Your time is best focused on outbound content (published elsewhere) and an email newsletter.

Videos (on Youtube) and podcasting are perhaps the best outreach mediums today.

Social media outlets can be useful, but generally are so short-term that the ROI isn’t as high. For some markets, it can (and does) work very nicely. But, for most of us, creating YouTube videos is likely a better use of time.

Use your website as your “home base”. Whenever you publish content elsewhere, publish it on your own site, too.

And your email list is your most important asset. I see way too many stale email lists. You absolutely should develop the muscle of creating a regular email newsletter. Find a way to make it useful for your audience. Choose a frequency you can stick with and don’t let up. I do it weekly now. I used to do it daily but found that to be a little much. Personally, I think monthly is not often enough but better than nothing. I think weekly or bi-weekly is preferred.

When it comes to content, my typical week contains two main deliverables: an issue of this newsletter and a video to be published on Youtube.

Both also end up published on the Blog Marketing Academy site as well – every week.

Not a lot of traditional blog articles being generated anymore.

Things sure have changed over the years. 🤷‍♂️