Work From Home Couple

As a work-from-couple, my wife and I have no choice but to bring our work home with us. The trick is making sure that you don’t spend all your time working. It is tempting to rush back to the computer to check e-mails or write an extra paragraph or two.

And sometimes, bringing work home with you means a killer stomach ache.

I recently got a new assignment: reviewing candy for a blog called CandyAddict.com. It’s a fun job. Who wouldn’t want to get paid for eating candy?

Yesterday, I spread several new kinds of candy across my counter. Most were pieces I hadn’t eaten before, things like a gum called Glob (which, by the way, squirts gooey cheery juice soon as you bit into it. Not very pleasant), a Big Hunk bar and the Idaho Spud. Some were delicious. Others, quite frankly, made your head spin they were so nauseating.

The problem is, though, they were all candy. And if there’s one thing I suffer from, it’s a sweet tooth. It was awfully tempting to sneak back to my bag of candies and pull one out — for research purposes, surely — and pop it into my mouth. Let’s just say, my willpower took a severe beating yesterday.

So my new challenge is this, and it’s the same one any work-from-homer experiences: How can you work from home without letting that work take over your personal life?

I do it by sticking, as much as possible, to a strict schedule. When I do run into problems, it generally happens on weekends, like yesterday. Or it may happen when I take on a new assignment that I’m particularly excited about, as also happened yesterday.

In these cases, you just have to rely on good old-fashioned willpower, which, unfortunately, is sometimes lacking in many of us. At least in my case, most of that candy from yesterday is gone. The problem, of course, is what do I do when it’s time to review another batch of sweets? Maybe I’ll just remember that stomach ache I went to bed with.

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