Most people take up work at home to ensure that their children are not neglected. In the majority of cases where people chose to leave their 9 to 5 jobs for self-employment spending more time with the family is the number one reason. If you are considering the same step, be assured that this is indeed a great way to improve the quality of life in your family. However, you also need to know that often self-employment can be very tough if you are not prepared for it.

Making work at home successful requires hard work. Often, the effort involved is more than what you applied in your 9 to 5 job. This is because when you were at your job, there were norms, systems, rules and regulations that you were required to follow as a part of the job. When you are at home, however, there are no such rules which demarcates where your house roles are over and where your working role starts. In most cases your family will not understand that you need a certain amount of time when you should solely concentrate of your work. This can result in continuous interruptions, which would hamper or slow down your effectiveness.

In order to be successful with your work at home therefore, you need to lay down some ground rules before you take the plunge. First of all this decision should be taken in collaboration with your whole family. Every member of your family should understand and agree to cooperate with you when you decide to take leave your regular job for self-employment. You should then set aside a particular location in your home as office or work place where you could do your work. Your family members should be sensitized to the fact that when you are working there should ideally be no interruptions or "emergency" calls unless there were real emergencies.

You also need to deal with the change with utmost honesty when analyzing your requirements both in terms of time and your involvement. If you think that you can adjust your time when the baby sleeps, or when the children do their homework, you are in for a big shock. Children are very unpredictable and they will demand your attention and care at all times during the day. If you want to be successful with your work at home you need to be realistic about how much time you need to devote to this work every day and when.

Ensure that the time you need is earmarked in such a manner that it would suffer the least interruptions. For example, you could wake up two hours before or sleep two hours after everybody else and use that time for your work. Or you could ask your spouse or your older children to take care of the little ones for a few hours while you work. Whatever system you put into place, it should be consistent and reliable. Unless you are serious and very particular about your work-time, you would end up sacrificing it to the needs of your family and this would mean the end of your work at home venture. Success demands discipline, commitment, dedication and the most important, self-drive since here you are the boss and you are the employee at the same time.