- Advice
3 things to do before quitting your day job
Saying “goodbye” to your 9 to 5 office job so that you can work from home full-time is one of the most amazing feelings that any freelancer gets!
To finally leave a career behind that wasn’t quite right for you, so that you can move on to spending your days doing your dream job, is pretty fantastic.
But hold on for a moment!
Don’t go rushing into quitting your day job just yet—first, you need to make sure you are well-prepared for making the transition out of your 9 to 5 job and into working from home full-time.
Three of the most important steps you need to take include…
1. Understand WHY you want to do this type of work.
Assessing your “why” will help you to better understand your purpose behind starting your own business and your interest in offering this particular type of service within your business, which is then going to make it that much easier for you to put together your goals, vision, and business plan.
Furthermore, understanding the reasons behind why you’re doing this is also going to give you the motivational boost you need to keep going when things get tough!
2. Create a strong plan of action for your transition into working from home full-time.
The transitional plan of action will help you clearly map out what goals you want to achieve each week and each month before you quit your 9 to 5 job. From there, you’ll be able to set daily tasks for yourself every step along the way. This helps to reduce overwhelm, increase productivity, keep you focused on the task at hand, and ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
I recommend to my students that they choose a 3-month or 6-month transition period for their plan of action, but ultimately, you’ll want to go with a timeline that makes sense based on your business and skill experience and your life/business circumstances.
Note as well that your plan of action should be customized and personal to YOU and your business. No two businesses are exactly alike… which means no two plans of action will be exactly alike!
Click here to get additional tips for putting together your plan of action.
3. Put together a daily structured schedule you can follow for when you start working from home full-time.
This is about AFTER you’ve started working from home full-time. What will your daily schedule look like when you start working from home? It’s important to have a structure to your daily schedule when you first make the leap to working from home full-time, so as to have a smoother transition out of your 9 to 5 job. This will make a huge difference to keeping you organized and on-task.
Create blocks of time around your most productive times of day to make the most of your daily schedule. Are you more of a night owl than a morning person? You might want to have your structured schedule start later in the day, with a longer break for dinner and spending time with loved ones, and then continue your schedule into the evening and the night!
Having some structure will make working from home full-time less of a shock to your system—but you’ll still want to customize that structure to work for YOU.