"Oh I could never work at home. I need the structure of the office. I would never get any work done. And what about my Kids? How could I get enough space from them? One of the good things about going to the office is that I get to be a grown up for a while. I would miss my co workers. Part of why I go to work is that I have lots of social interaction. I would be so lonely. And talking about interaction, what about my wife/husband? Whenever I work at home now she/he is always interrupting me. They don't seem to know that I AM WORKING!"
When I talk about working at home, these are only some of the many reasons I hear from people about why they cannot make the break from the office.
So let's look at these three areas and see why they are so hard to deal with. Then I am going to try and show you why coping with solving these problems is worth the struggle.
So let's start with time. Yes for many, managing your time is very hard because we have never done it before.
If from the age of 6 when you went to school, or worse if from the age of 3 when your parents scheduled every hour, you never controlled your own schedule, managing your own time will be a revolution. Many people have never had control of their time.
Think of that for minute. Many people, maybe you, have never had control of their time. When those fleeting moments like weekends and vacations appear, you tend to fill the time with more activity, your habit, or collapse into lethargy.
Taking back control of your schedule will mean changing the habits of a lifetime. But the secret is that you will have so much time that this is not too hard.
For not only have we never had control over our schedule, but the huge block of time that has been organized for us for work, has meant that there is not enough time to lead our full lives. We are always out of time. We are used to being hectic and having to manage every minute so that we can fit into the time that has been scheduled for us by our commitment to going to work.
We have no time now.
We have to be at work for 8 -10 hours a day. It can take 2 -4 hours to get there and back to home. We have to sleep. Most people get less than 6 hours sleep a night. With what is left, we are pulled this way and that. Our kids have needs. Boys break their arms in the middle of the day. Our spouse has needs. She too goes on trips leaving us as single parents. Our parents have needs. They have doctor's appointments, they need help at home. We have needs. Now and then a hair cut or a new pair of shoes would be nice. We go to the doctor. Our home has needs. The plumber never comes on time. Lawns have to be cut when it is not raining. We have to buy and cook food. All of these calls on our time compete with the time that we have to put into work.
We have no time now.
The work/life balance thing is a crock. So long as up to 12- 14 hours a day is devoted to work that is separate from home, we are always failing. Usually we fail on the life side. So we fail our families and we fail our own needs. We feel guilty. Especially women feel guilty. More than 50% of women working in large organizations are on some kind of medication for stress. No surprise here for me.
The stress that most of us feel today is bound up in this unsolvable paradox. So long as we obey "office" time, we fail and feel guilty about our time.
So the first thing you notice about working from home is that the available amount of time that you have is much much much greater.
You get time and your life back.
For, in reality, if you are a white collar worker, when you are at the office you don't work 8 hours flat out. Most I know have to work at home if they have a paper to write. The office is full of distractions. Huge amounts of time are spent in meetings, doing email, hanging out, and people bugging you. How many hours do you really work at work?
In reality most people work in an office for maybe 4-6 hours tops. You cannot do much more anyway. Your brain turns to mush after 5 hours of concentrated mental effort. So if you work at home, you find maybe 8 hours of "free time". You find a day! At worst you may find 2-4 hours. At best, you find 5 days in a week. You find 200 days in a working year.
Now let's say that you are really busy and a very hard worker and you only find 25% of that. That is still 50 days in the year that you have got back. OK, you are a total workaholic and you only can get 10%. That is still 20 days or 3 weeks vacation!
You get a lot of time back. So the first thing you feel is guilt.
You discover that you can get your work done in much less time than the typical 8 hour work day. You also have no rush to get to work or to get home.
That first time you take the dog for a walk at 9am feels like having an affair. Feeding your kids in your PJ's feels like a sin. Greeting them at the door when they return from school feels wrong. Having lunch with your mother - the horror! Catching a quickie with your husband after lunch - you must be going to hell. Shopping mid morning - impossible. Mowing the lawn at 3pm - can't be done.
It took me years to stop feeling guilty. Even though I was getting my work done better and way ahead of deadline, I had been encultured to think that doing anything other than work in the day was immoral.
But I promise you, that in time, having all this time starts to feel normal and it will be impossible for me to give up now.
I have also developed a routine. Yours may be different but a routine really helps. I get up early. Between 5.30 and 6.30 every morning including weekends. I get all my routine work done by 10am. Others I know, like to do all their routine work at night. It just depends on your metabolism.
I mention that because having a routine for routine work is the foundation of coping well with the kids/spouse issues and for ensuring that you do meet your obligations for work.
In reality I use what would have been commute time to do most of my routine work. Of course there are busy times as well when I may put in very long hours but they are not the day to day. I also tend to work 7 days a week. But if you finish by 10 on most days, you have done a lot but you have a lot of time left.
By having a routine, the rest of the family can fit in to your need to be not part of them. These are the inviolate times when you are not available.
But what about small kids? I can't have my kids running around when I am working? Now you can have your child care arrangements located close to home. No longer do you have to panic at the end of the day that you will not be able to get to the daycare on time. Now when they have a doctor's appointment, you have not lost a day. Working at home does not mean that you have the kids at your ankles. It does mean that they are close enough that you don't have to stress out all the time.
What about missing your co workers? Well social media is a huge boon. I have twitter going in background all the time. I make time to visit my friends face to face. I also co work at the Queen Street Commons where I can get out of the house for a while.
When I visit my clients it is very intense. We often spend 2-3 days with each other. When we are not in the office talking about things that are meaningful, we are having fun together. Much of the facetime is now deliberately social. The opposite of conventional facetime that pretends to be about work.
The new reality is the old reality. Work was always centred on the home. It was only an industrial need that took us out of the home. For many technology will enable us to return there.
Once again children will see what their parents do for a living. Once again, local infrastructure will fill in the meet the needs of people who don't have to go to work. Life and work can be melded if the home if the centre of both.
Oh and the money! Going to work not only costs us most of our time but much of our money. Second cars, transport, clothes, eating out etc. We save all of that too.
We get our lives back.
