If you're an equine photographer, there's a pretty good chance at least part of your business happens from home.

Maybe you have a dedicated office. Maybe you've claimed a corner of a spare bedroom. Or maybe your “office” is the dining-room table until somebody has the nerve to want to eat dinner there.

We photograph horses at barns, farms, showgrounds, and client properties, but a whole lot of the actual business happens at home. That's where we're answering inquiries, planning sessions, editing images, ordering artwork, creating marketing, updating websites, doing bookkeeping, and tackling approximately 147 other things that apparently come with the privilege of owning a photography business.

Working from home definitely has its advantages. There's no commute, your dress code can be questionable, and you have a lot more control over when and how you work.

But here's the problem.

Your house is still your house.

The laundry is right there. So is the refrigerator. Family members know you're home. The UPS driver knows you're home. The dogs definitely know you're home.

And nobody is standing at the office door at 5 p.m. telling you it's time to leave.

The flexibility is wonderful.

Figuring out how to actually run a business inside that flexibility takes a little more work.

Working From Home Doesn't Mean You're Available All Day

One of the stranger things about working from home is that other people sometimes don't quite understand the working part.

You're home, so surely you can run an errand. Meet for lunch. Take care of something really quick. Answer a question. Handle whatever has suddenly become extremely important to someone else.

And sometimes the interruptions are considerably shorter.

Years ago, my four-year-old son woke me up at 3 a.m. to tell me his pillow had fallen off the bed.

The same pillow he walked past to come wake me up.

So apparently the belief that Mom is available to solve all problems at all times starts early.

Working from home can create the same expectation. If you're physically there, people assume you're available.

That's why you have to treat your work time like actual work time.

That doesn't mean you need rigid 9-to-5 office hours. Honestly, one of the reasons many of us work for ourselves is because we don't want somebody else deciding exactly what our day has to look like.

But you need to decide what it looks like.

Otherwise, everybody else will be happy to decide for you.

Your House Is Full of Things That Aren't Your Business

A home office doesn't magically stop being part of your home just because you opened Lightroom.

There are plenty of things competing for your attention. And some of them become remarkably compelling when you're avoiding a business task you don't particularly want to do.

A few of my favorites:

• Household chores. Suddenly the dishwasher desperately needs to be unloaded, the laundry needs attention, and that drawer you've ignored for six years simply cannot remain unorganized for another minute. Fascinating how productive we become when we're avoiding bookkeeping.

• Family interruptions. Spouses, children, roommates, neighbors, and anyone else who knows you're home may assume you're available unless you've established otherwise.

• Dogs and deliveries. If you're an in-person sales photographer selling finished artwork, packages arriving at your house may be a regular occurrence. Unfortunately, your dogs may feel every UPS delivery requires a full security announcement while you're on a client call.

• Phones and social media. You opened Instagram because you needed to post something for your business. Forty-five minutes later, you know what six other photographers had for lunch and have somehow purchased something you didn't know existed when you opened the app.

• The work itself. This one is sneaky. When the office is always accessible, it's easy to answer one more email, edit one more image, or finish one more task. There's nobody turning off the lights and telling you to go home. You are already home.

Some interruptions are unavoidable.

Others need boundaries.

The goal isn't to create some mythical distraction-free work environment. I'm fairly certain those only exist in productivity books and staged photographs of beautiful offices where nobody actually works.

Instead, pay attention to what regularly pulls you away from what you're supposed to be doing.

Then figure out what you're going to do about it.

You Need Somewhere Your Brain Recognizes as Work

You do not need a Pinterest-perfect office to run a legitimate photography business.

Would it be nice?

Sure.

But your clients don't care whether your desk matches your bookshelves. They care that you answer their emails, show up when you say you will, create beautiful photographs of their horses, and eventually deliver the things they paid you for.

Plenty of successful photographers have built businesses from spare bedrooms, dining-room tables, converted closets, basement corners, and whatever little piece of the house they could claim.

What matters is having somewhere your brain starts to recognize as work.

If you have a dedicated office, make it functional before you worry about making it pretty. You need a comfortable chair, a desk that works for you, good lighting, storage for the things you actually use, and a monitor setup that allows you to edit accurately.

If your office has to disappear every evening because the dining table needs to become a dining table again, that's okay too. Create a system that makes setting up and putting away your workspace easy.

Your workspace might include:

• A consistent place to work, even if you can't dedicate an entire room to it.

• Comfortable, practical equipment, particularly your chair, desk, monitor, and lighting. Editing for hours in a chair that makes your back hate you is not a productivity strategy.

• Organized storage for hard drives, card readers, paperwork, packaging supplies, client materials, and the mysterious collection of cables every photographer eventually acquires.

• Some way to control distractions, whether that's a door you can close, headphones, a signal for family members, or simply putting your phone somewhere other than directly beside your mouse.

• A way to put work away when you're done, especially if your workspace shares a room with the rest of your life.

Pinterest does not need to approve your office.

It just needs to work.

Build Your Workday Around the Way You Actually Work

There are approximately eight million productivity experts on the internet who would be delighted to tell you exactly what time you should wake up, when you should answer email, how long you should work, and possibly what you should eat for breakfast.

Good for them.

Your brain may have other plans.

Some people do their best thinking first thing in the morning. Others would prefer nobody ask them to form a complete sentence before 11.

Some photographers can sit down and edit for three hours without looking up. Others are much more productive in shorter blocks.

Pay attention to how you actually work.

You may discover that writing, planning, or making important business decisions is easier during one part of the day, while editing, packaging orders, answering routine emails, or administrative work fits better somewhere else.

Once you know that, stop wasting your best brain hours on tasks that don't need your best brain.

If you're sharpest at 8 a.m., maybe that's not when you should be reorganizing folders or answering emails that could have waited until noon. Use that time for the work that requires you to think.

And if your best ideas happen at 9 p.m.?

Fine.

One of the benefits of working for yourself is that your schedule doesn't have to look like everyone else's.

It needs to work for you.

Getting More Done Isn't Always the Goal

Photography business owners have an impressive ability to turn absolutely everything into another item on a to-do list.

Website update. Blog post. Newsletter. Social media. Client follow-up. New promotion. Vendor research. Education. Accounting. Gallery editing. Product ordering.

Oh, and maybe photograph a horse occasionally.

There will always be something else you could be doing.

That's why productivity isn't just about figuring out how to cram more work into your day. Sometimes it's about deciding what deserves your attention in the first place.

A few things can make that easier:

• Give important work an actual place on your schedule. If you keep saying you'll work on your website “when you have time,” I'd like to introduce you to the unfortunate truth that you're probably never going to have time.

• Batch similar tasks when it makes sense. Answering emails together, editing together, scheduling content together, or handling client orders together can reduce how often your brain has to switch gears.

• Match the task to your energy. Save thinking-heavy work for the times when you think best. Use lower-energy periods for tasks that don't require quite as much creativity or decision-making.

• Protect focused work. Close unnecessary tabs, silence notifications, move your phone, and give yourself permission not to be immediately available to everyone.

• Leave room for things to go sideways. Horses, clients, weather, technology, deliveries, and life in general are all extremely good at ignoring the schedule you so carefully created.

The point of a productivity system is to make running your photography business easier.

If maintaining the system becomes another full-time job, we may have gotten a little carried away.

Your Horse Photography Business Has Seasons

Here's something you already know if you've been photographing horses for any length of time: our schedules can get weird.

Really weird.

What your business looks like in October may have absolutely nothing to do with what it looks like in February.

And those seasons aren't the same for every horse photographer.

Someone photographing horses in Florida may stay busy throughout the winter and intentionally slow down during the hottest part of summer.

Here in southeast Tennessee, January and February generally bring fuzzy horses, gray skies, dead trees, and mud.

So. Much. Mud.

We don't get months of magical snow-covered barns. We get brown.

That doesn't mean those slower photography months aren't valuable. They're just valuable in a different way.

When I'm not photographing as much, I can work on the parts of the business that are harder to tackle when sessions are stacked on top of each other. Website updates, blog posts, pricing, marketing campaigns, education, workflows, client materials, bookkeeping, and all those projects I've been telling myself I'll get to “when things slow down.”

Then things slow down and somehow I'm reorganizing a closet.

Funny how that happens.

Your personal life creates seasons too.

If you have kids at home during the summer, your schedule may change. If you photograph horse shows, your competition calendar may dictate when you're slammed and when you can come up for air. If equestrian seniors are part of your business, the school calendar affects you. Weather certainly affects all of us.

Instead of fighting those changes, use them.

Know when you tend to photograph heavily. Know when things usually slow down. Think about which business projects make sense during each season instead of expecting every month to look exactly the same.

It doesn't have to.

Working From Home Can Get Lonely

Photography can be a lonely business.

There. I said it.

You may spend hours alone editing, answering emails, planning marketing, doing bookkeeping, working on your website, and handling all the behind-the-scenes stuff nobody sees.

Then you leave the house for an equine photography session, spend a few hours talking to a client and her horse, come home, and start working alone again.

For some of us, that's wonderful.

Until it isn't.

If the UPS driver has become your primary source of adult conversation, we may need to expand the social circle.

Professional photography organizations, local business groups, education events, co-working sessions, online communities, and actual friendships with other photographers can make a huge difference.

And I wouldn't limit those relationships to equine photographers.

I've learned a tremendous amount from photographers working in completely different genres. They may approach marketing differently, photograph completely different subjects, sell differently, or solve business problems in ways I hadn't considered.

Community isn't just about having somebody to talk to.

It's also having people who understand why you're ridiculously excited about a new piece of equipment, why a difficult client situation is driving you crazy, or why you've spent three days trying to fix something on your website that was supposed to take twenty minutes.

Photography can be a lonely business.

It doesn't have to be.

You Need to Actually Stop Working at Some Point

This may be one of the hardest parts of running a photography business from home.

When you leave a traditional workplace, there's a transition. You shut down the computer, leave the building, drive home, and eventually your brain figures out that the workday is over.

When you work from home, your computer is still sitting there.

And it knows you haven't answered that email.

It's incredibly easy to finish dinner and think, I'll just take care of this one thing.

Then that thing leads to another thing.

Suddenly it's 10:47 p.m., you're editing photographs nobody asked you to finish tonight, and you can't quite explain how this happened.

Again.

You need some kind of shutdown routine.

It doesn't have to involve a special planner, inspirational music, three colored pens, and lighting a productivity candle.

Just decide how work ends.

Maybe you review tomorrow's priorities, close your programs, put away anything that needs to be put away, and shut down the computer.

If you need to work unusual hours because that's what fits your life, that's completely fine.

The important part is having hours when you're not working.

Owning a photography business doesn't mean the business gets to own every available minute.

Stop Trying to Remember Everything

One of the best things you can do for a home-based equine photography business is stop relying on yourself to remember absolutely everything.

Your brain should not be your project-management system.

When every inquiry, follow-up, invoice, client task, marketing idea, artwork order, deadline, and random thought lives in your head, you're never completely away from work.

You can be sitting on the couch technically not working while your brain is busy reminding you that you need to email Sarah, check the canvas order, write next week's post, follow up with the barn owner, update the website, and figure out why that one invoice still hasn't been paid.

That's exhausting.

Systems give those things somewhere else to live. Building better systems and workflows for your photography business can help you spend less time remembering what needs to happen and more time actually doing it.

That might mean having a consistent process for inquiries, improving your client communication, using templates for information you send repeatedly, creating a workflow for every client, scheduling recurring administrative tasks, or having one reliable place where you track orders and deadlines.

It doesn't need to be complicated.

Actually, I'd argue that if your system requires a 47-minute tutorial every time you use it, we should probably revisit the system.

A good system reduces the number of things you have to remember and the number of decisions you have to make over and over again.

You should be able to look at your workflow and know what happens next.

That's the whole point.

Make Working From Home Work for You

There isn't one perfect home-office setup, schedule, or productivity system for an equine photographer.

Some of us have dedicated offices. Some work from a corner of another room. Some need traditional office hours. Others build work around photography sessions, family responsibilities, horses, travel, or simply the times of day when their brains are willing to cooperate.

You get to figure out what works for you.

Give yourself a functional place to work. Protect the time you need to do important things. Pay attention to the natural seasons of your horse photography business. Build systems so you don't have to carry the entire business around in your head.

And occasionally close the laptop.

The email will still be there tomorrow.

I promise.