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Easing the solo strains
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June 22, 1998: 3:04 p.m. ET
Working at home or in a one-person office has a downside -- loneliness
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - There are days when Michael Wyland would be grateful for an interruption at work.
"The quiet is good for work, but sometimes you want the interruptions," he said of the grant-writing business he and his wife, Margaret Sumption, run in Sioux Falls, S.D. "It does get a little tedious when I'm in the office alone, Margaret's traveling and I've got some gut work that needs to get done."
Working alone presents its own set of challenges -- especially to the mind.
"Some people do very well working by themselves," said therapist and counselor Ginny Campbell, of Scotia, N.Y. "But I think you have to make sure you have some balance in your life."
Wyland works alone a lot because Sumption travels several times a year. The routine that works for him is one that includes a combination of intensive research and writing as well as social networking.
"A typical day for me would be getting up at about 7:30 a.m.," Wyland said. "I have breakfast, get my son off to child care and I'm in the office by 8:45 a.m."
Morning duties involve computer work, "both Internet-based and document preparation," he said.
Come lunchtime, though, Wyland is gone.
"I almost always leave the office for lunch," he said. "Margaret and I are both active in volunteer organizations and a lot of them have lunch meetings. It's important to maintain contact with friends and clients, so getting out for lunch benefits us both personally and professionally."
Home office pajama party?
People who work from home have potential pitfalls that office workers don't in terms of maintaining good mental and emotional health, experts say.
One sign that you're beginning to lose touch with the world is a reluctance to change into even minimally presentable clothes.
Do you wear your bathrobe or pajamas when working at home? All day?
People who start home-based businesses sometimes anticipate that as being the ultimate convenience, said Tom Koontz, director of Entrepreneurial Development for the Charleston (S.C.) County Employment and Training Administration.
"But some of them never get out of their pajamas," Koontz said. "It's 11:30 a.m. and they're still in their pajamas. Still not shaved or showered. They don't ever really get their day started."
If basic morning preparation skills start to slide, Koontz said, the business can slide with it.
"You begin to not make calls on people, because doing that would require you to get out of your pajamas," he said. "Then you start fooling yourself with the attitude of 'I can do it tomorrow.' Once you begin laboring under the weight of all those tomorrows, you start getting a little depressed about it. That's when the neuroses start to creep in. It goes downhill from there."
Koontz advises treating a work-at-home day like a day at an outside office. Dress in clothes you can go out in. Start the day with a shower and getting dressed.
"Once you start to not do those things, that's when you're prone to letting things slide," he said.
Daily variety
Campbell makes an effort to ward off feelings of isolation herself in her daily practice. Although she sees people each day, it's in a therapist-client setting rather than a social one.
"It is lonely in a sense that you are (primarily) interacting with people who are having problems," she said of her job. "If you only see people who are having problems, it shades your outlook on life."
Campbell busies herself socially with church and family activities, and visits with other counselors at business seminars.
She also stays grounded by not scheduling too many clients in one day. Several back-to-back appointments "gets me a little batty," she said.
Dividing your time among several different tasks is one way to keep mental idleness in check.
William Maggs keeps himself alert by juggling different repair jobs in his Scotia, N.Y. shop. He divides his time primarily between fixing sewing machines and a variety of vacuum cleaners.
"If something's getting a little heavy or a little too puzzling, I just go work on a different job," he said. "If I were limited to repairing just one type of item, it would get old."
Having a steady stream of customers also keeps things lively, Maggs said. Loneliness and isolation don't enter the picture as long as business stays brisk.
"If there's business, you always have people coming in and things to be done," he said.
Take a break
Even with things to be done, Wyland knows he needs to take a break when his concentration fades.
"I start looking at the pages, and they aren't making as much sense as they did an hour or two ago," he said.
When this happens, Wyland takes a stroll outside or surfs the Web for news.
"A few minutes of being outdoors will get me energized again," he said. "It also gets very quiet in here, so sometimes I'll turn on a radio to listen to some background noise."
Sumption copes with mental slumps by taking 15-minute breaks for various activities.
"I'll sit and play solitaire for 15 minutes," she said. "I might watch 15 minutes of Headline News. I might do some exercises if my hands and arms are bothering me. If the weather's good, I'll go outside and read a magazine."
But Sumption can never assume a household duty -- at least, not during the day.
"If I go home, I can't reconnect with work," she said. When she attempted this in the past, she found herself trying to sneak in some domestic chores among her work duties, without success.
"I don't get a good cake out of the oven or a good piece of work out of the computer," she said. "I'm just done for the day." 
-- by Margaret Nowak for CNNfn Interactive
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