I'm freelancing from home a lot at the moment. I rather like it. Today I found myself working in 3 different rooms of my house, and out in the garden. The change of scenery is good for creativity, as it keeps things fresh. I find I enjoy my house more, when I use it more.
Wage slaves - and I count salaried professionals in that category - tend to only enjoy their homes briefly. Most of the time, we spend more time maintaining it (it gets dirty when unused too) than enjoying it. For many, the weekend is when we do a week's worth of laundry, a mountain of dishes (especially if we've had a rush of blood to the head and invited people for a meal) and a vacuum, dust and general tidy up.
Working from home, I do a bit of housework every day, rather than a lot at once. So no day is the dreaded 'housework' day. It's great to do something physical while you consider a tricky piece of writing. It's good to get up and more around after you've been text editing at a computer screen for the past two hours.
As for productivity, yes, there are some days when not a lot of 'billable hours' occur. There are other days when I'm still working at 9pm - or when I start at 6am. Over the course of a week, I'm not sure it makes much difference. I don't waste any time on 'make work': at home, you're either working or you're not. There isn't any benefit to sitting around pretending to be busy the way there can be in an office environment.
Working from home is a good way to kill two birds with one stone. Or maybe I'm just learning to appreciate the positives of whatever circumstance I find myself in. It feels a bit like work-life balance to me, if there is such a thing for more than a few days!
No comments:
Post a Comment