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There are many different reasons why you may be primarily home-based – ranging from the fact that you might be dealing with a long-term injury or illness, to the fact that you may be a stay-at-home parent whose primary responsibility and concern is dealing with the kids on a day-to-day basis.
Of course, being home-based doesn’t necessarily mean that you have a lot of free time at your disposal – especially if you happen to be a stay at home parent. But, it’s likely that you will have at least some free time to utilise, and that being the case, it’s always better to use that time thoughtfully and productively.
This is especially important when you consider the fact that many people who are primarily home-based can fall subject to frustration, cabin fever, and a sense of “stagnation” across various dimensions of their lives, if they’re not actively doing things to keep themselves balanced and engaged in a broad variety of ways.
If any of that sounds relatable to you, here are a few productive and positive ways to use your free time when you’re home-based.
Start a web-based business
The Internet confers all sorts of benefits that would have been unthinkable without it – and one of the primary benefits it offers is the ability for everyone to create a web-based business, with little if any fuss.
In addition to the fact that many businesses can be run entirely online, without any need for stock or overheads to speak of, there’s also a suite of increasingly elegant and sophisticated tools out there to help streamline the process and ensure that it goes as smoothly as possible.
Jumio Screening offers a seamless user experience for authenticating and verifying customer and client identities, for example, in order to help to mitigate the ever-present risk of fraud that you will face as a home-based professional.
Other tools exist to address other dimensions of the web-based business formula, including tools such as Quickbooks for managing your accounting, to tools such as Todoist and Trello for getting a handle on your various projects, tasks, goals, and obligations.
The great thing about many of the different types of web-based business you can run, is that they are the kinds of things you can develop incrementally, on your own schedule, as and when you have the opportunity to do so. And it can be very fulfilling to watch your business grow and develop – especially if it reaches the point where it ends up becoming a significant revenue stream for you.
Study free courses via the web, from companies such as Coursera
Modern higher education increasingly has a bad reputation, largely because of the fact that university tuition typically comes along with such crushing debt that many people can expect to be saddled with it for the rest of their lives, following the attainment of their degrees.
But, it is absolutely not the case that your only option for increasing your education and skill set as an adult is to study a degree at a university. To the contrary, many high-quality free courses exist via the web to give you a taster and an insight into different fields, subjects, and topics.
Coursera and FutureLearn are two leading examples of these sorts of services – and have their courses compiled specifically by university professors. In fact, you can even pay a bit to get higher-level diplomas from these sites, without having to invest the full price that you would in a university degree.
If you’ve got an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and you like the idea of constantly expanding your skill set and understanding of the world, using your free time to study courses via the web can be an excellent way of pursuing self-development in a rewarding, accessible, and straightforward manner.
Develop a creative hobby, and spend your time on that, rather than killing time online
While the Internet does indeed come with all sorts of extraordinary benefits, it also makes it extremely easy to procrastinate ad nauseam, and to spend most – if not virtually all – of your time absentmindedly clicking between different photos, entertaining videos, and clickbait articles.
The thing is, this form of casual “entertainment” may help to distract and amuse you for short while, but it’s unlikely to do anything good for you over the long term. Instead, it can absolutely rob you of your time to an almost criminal degree.
Instead of spending your free time “killing time,” develop a creative hobby instead, switch off your digital devices at a certain time of day, and do some painting, writing, or crafting, when you get the chance.
Among other things, these sorts of activities can be highly therapeutic and help you to relax, while also allowing you to express and explore your creative side, and leaving you with something tangible, rewarding, and significant to show afterwards.
More than that – by engaging in these sorts of hobbies, you develop various meaningful skills, over time.
Organise your immediate environment, plan out your goals and dreams, and work on your overall “self-mastery”
If you’ve never been especially good with managing your immediate environment, schedule, goals, and dreams – and especially if you envision returning to the world of conventional work in the near future – spending some of your free time from home practising your overall “self-mastery,” can be an extremely good idea.
In essence, this comes down to practising the art of adding structure to your life, and getting a clear sense of the various things you want to achieve with your time.
Many of us consider such things as maintaining a tidy and organised home environment, and keeping a tight and productive schedule, to be more or less innate personality traits or skills that we are born with.
In fact, they are the type of skills that you can develop at work, and the better you get at refining and applying those skills, the likelier it is that all sorts of possibilities and avenues will present themselves to you down the line.
When you get a clear sense of what it is you want to achieve in the various domains of your life, the world already opens up to you in a pretty dramatic way. But when you master the art of pursuing those goals in a focused manner, that the true magic happens.
This is a collaborative post.
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