Many people have the dream of working "in their pajamas" at home. There are those that have been able to make it work, too. And if you have ever had to make long commutes to go to a job, when you decide to give that all up, you know how good it feels to get up in the morning and know that you no longer have to make that commute. Further, you can decide at will, when you are going to work or if you want to go for a ride to get away from it all, that's up to you. Another benefit is that you don't have to deal with office politics anymore. You make your own decisions when you are a work-at-home mogul.

But there is bit of a darker side to working at home that work-at-homers start to realize a couple of months into it. Loneliness tends to set in. When you were working for another company and went to the office everyday, you were conversing with other people. Sometimes these were people you didn't like much, but at least you had the opportunity to have some conversation. Working for yourself at home, you don't usually get that opportunity. Loneliness can really set in at this point.

For some people, this lack of workplace companionship is too hard to handle and they give up the work at home dream in exchange for companionship. For others, they find alternatives to this interaction while still maintaining the ability to work at home. What's needed is a facility to interact with people while being able to continue with the tasks that you need to complete.

In this current day of social media, we have several outlets with which to socialize with people. This can be via Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and the like. But these are truly social avenus and business owners often find these to be huge distractions. Are you really going to post on Facebook that you need to know some aspect about your business and hope that you'll get a worthwhile response? Your friends on Facebook are going to get quite put off by that if you continue it consistenly.

You may have made the decision to work at home to spend more time with your kids, and that is certainly an admirable goal. But if you need to replace the income that you had from the office, you still need to put time into work. A work at home business is work just like any other. You still need to manage the balance between work and home life. And it could be even more difficult than going to an office that's a distance away from home. At least when you were going to the office, those home distractions were kept to a minumum. And as wonderful as it is to be with your kids, you still lack the social interaction you were used to from the office, as kids have a different perspective and maturity than a typical office interaction.

Based on all of this, there needs to be a way to get the social interaction you need, while still being able to get your job done. It's important to have people that have the same goals as you but not always being strictly business while conversing. The answer could very well be online communities.

An online community that meets the objectives of having the same goals as your business is going to go a long way in helping you socially interact without wasting time, as well as answer questions that you may have when you get stuck. So why would these people want to help you out? Because you may eventually help them out one day. One of the greatest aspects of an online community is the members tend to have a diverse set of skills. So if you are good at say technology, others may be good at marketing. Others still, may be good at graphic design, and so on. This is very similar in function to a chamber of commerce but this is done all online.

When looking for an online community, it's important to choose one that fits within both your business and social goals. If not, you may as well just log in to Facebook and chat it up with your high school friends. But that does nothing for your interaction about your business, unless one of your high school friends are doing what you are doing. In most cases, you should be able to easily find a community that fits within your criteria. But once you do find the right community you will find that not only do you overcome loneliness in your at home workplace but you still get to actually work at home, which is what you wanted in the first place.