Tips for Working at Home from a Writer Who Has Always Worked at Home

Make your bed. First thing. You need order. Then get dressed. Sweats or whatever is fine but the pajama thing makes you feel like you are at home. Have breakfast. At least coffee. I prefer a big breakfast. Then have a work space. If it is your kitchen table so be it but it has to be your space. Routine Routine Routine. It has allowed me to write seventeen books. This is not a vacation. If you turn it into that then nothing will get done.

Work nine to five. Or longer but don't stretch it into the night or you will quickly burn out. Take  a lunch. This gives you a break and you get hungry. Thirty minutes is about right. Go any longer and you lose all your momentum. The thing is to treat working at home like working at work. If you treat it like being at home you will lose your productivity. Dont go off into the side-tasks. Put in some laundry fine but keep away from all those things nagging at you like cleaning the kitchen or fixing that faucet. That is for the weekend.

Work five days a week and take the weekends off like everyone else. You will need it to recharge. Fit a workout into your routine. One of the perks of working at home. In the morning or at lunch or in the evening. An office in your home is optimal. One that no one will bother you and by the way let everyone know you are working like when you are in the office and not to be disturbed. If you start to burn out then move your office around. Work outside if it is nice. Very good for energy. Play the radio if silence bothers you. Classical or jazz no words to listen too.

But when the day is over turn off the light and leave the work at your desk, it will be there tomorrow. Just like when you worked in an office.

William Hazelgrove

Ebola and those little tombstones

Out by me way out in the cornfields is a cemetery. It is one of those country cemeteries you drive by and think what is that doing out here in the middle of nowhere? But of course there used to be farm towns and this where they went with their dead. And if you go to the cemetery you will see many old tombstones from the nineteenth century and many from the early part of the twentieth century. And then  you will see very small tombstones.

And the dates on these stones are 1915, 1916, 1917. And they were all children. Many dying before they were ten and you realize in that silent cemetery that these are from the last epidemic. The Spanish Flu or Influenza epidemic that killed millions in the early years of the last century. And of course many of the victims were children. And like Ebola the Spanish Flu inspired terror and people were quarantined and the army was brought in.

And there was a point where the Surgeon General said he didn't know what to do. He said he thought society might unravel because people would not congregate and cities were beginning to cease to function. Then the epidemic receded. Not because of anything we did but it had killed all the people it  could and those left had immunity. We have lived in the shadow of Influenza returning ever since.

And with Ebola it is the long shadow of those tiny headstones that strikes fear in the human soul. The question was always not if the Spanish Flu would return, but when. Ebola hits all the chords.

www.williamhazelgrove.com