Working from home…A day in the life

A day in the life of a working from home professional.

Working from home has (as you would imagine) a number of benefits; working in your comfy slippers and not having to think too hard about what you’re going to wear every day are certainly at the fore, but it’s not all rainbows and candyfloss!!

Many working-from-home professionals often struggle with a feeling of isolation, and although you are free to do as you please, it does take an awful lot of self-discipline to stick to a professional routine. Motivation is also a constant challenge. You can wake up motivated, but without the camaraderie or work-based ‘face time’ with colleagues, it can be hard to keep motivated.

Your home is your office is your home is your office! You can never escape the office, because you are already there! This can result in your work invading your personal home space; definitely a bone of contention if space is already limited!

Try as you might, you will work more hours than if you worked from an external office. This is just a natural bi-product, because it’s all-too-easy to pop into your office space and catch up on a few niggling tasks that would have had to have waited if you worked from an external site.

“So why”, I hear you ask, “do more and more people choose working from home?”

You never have to worry about if your bus or train is going to be on time, or how long your commute is going to take. Imagine you used to spend 2 hours every day commuting; this is now 2 hours that you can spend elsewhere (being more productive on work-related matters, spending time with family, more personal time for exercise or relaxation etc.) That’s 10 hours a week that was previously spent just travelling!!

Traditionally, home workers spend less time off sick. As you can appreciate, when one person gets ill working in an office, pretty much everyone gets ill due to the proximity of working conditions; this is completely negated when working from home.

Although your work will be assessed (either by a manager or your client/s), you won’t have anyone ‘looking over your shoulder’ every hour of the day.

You can eat whenever you like, and when you want to make a cup of tea, you don’t have to go around the office asking if anyone else wants one!

If you are married or have young children, working from home can be especially convenient.

Many of our students in practice now find that they are earning as much as they were when in employment, but by working less hours!

There are many more pros and cons besides the above, but with the ever increasing amount of people choosing a home based working environment, this could be something that becomes more the norm than the exception.

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