I’m on month 10 of a work from home contract. I wasn’t sure working from home was going to work but so far it’s been fine.
I live in a small apartment but it has a little dressing alcove and the first thing I did was get a small desk. I share a monitor, keyboard and mouse between my work laptop and my home PC using the multiple monitor inputs and a KVM switch. Some people work from home with just their little laptop screen but I could never do that. The standard keyboard/mouse/big monitor is a must for me. I have dock for my work iphone which isn’t really necessary but it keeps it in front of my face.
One of the things I always wanted while working in an office was a nice set of speakers on my desk, so I got a nice set of desktop speakers (Emotiva 4S) and a little mixer to run my phone/music player, work laptop, and home PC through the speakers. A real pleasure. Music, internet radio, teleconferences, etc. go through them. Sometimes loudly. The nice thing is you can do anything with your office you damn well please!
The team I work with is in the US and France, so I generally keep 8:30-5:00 hours so I can be online with France for most of the morning. I can’t be a night owl or keep weird hours anyway because I have daughters in school and I’m the family alarm clock.
One of the advantages to working at home is that I can finish a task and sleep a little better at night, if it comes to that. I don’t have to break off to catch a train or start a commute back into the city (yuck). It also prevents in-a-hurry stupid last minute mistakes that drive me crazy.
I keep myself planted in my chair all day except I take a lunch break at home and maybe a 15-20 minute break in the afternoon. I don’t want to drag my work day out any longer than necessary. Even though I live in a city I refrain from going out for breaks or lunch or whatever else.
One of my former bosses was a telecommuter and had four days of no electricity. He spent four days working from the library.
The library can be an awesome place to spend some time if you want other people around because you are feeling isolated. Generally they have quiet spaces, laptop power. Obviously, not the place to spend days when you have nothing but phone meetings.
I’ve only ever worked from home since I graduated college in 2001. I will go over what works for me, which is pretty much what everyone else has said.
Don’t consider your days “flexible time”. You can make your office hours different that 9-5 if you want but don’t get in the mindset that you can just randomly up and leave during the day.
you absolutely need a space, preferably one with a door, that is just for work. Go to that place in the morning, leave it during lunch time, work there after lunch and leave it at the end of the day. You can visit it to use the computer or printer after work hours but you need to be there during the day.
let your family and friends know that you are at work during your work hours even if you are in the next room over from them. The worst part of my work life was when I was working from my parents house before I got my own place, and my dad retired. He wanted to talk to me all day long. I moved out in a short while. It was awful.
go out every day. After work. You’ll be walking a lot less now (no matter what your previous situation was, you still won’t be walking across any parking lots or down any hallways anymore ) so you should go for a walk, go to the gym, go to dinner, anything to get that change of scenery.
spend money on the best toilet paper and hand soap for your bathroom. Seriously, this is the only bathroom in your life now. Pimp it.
use IM to talk to co-workers or friends.
-consider joining a club or a volunteer organization. Cuz you gonna be lonely. And you might get socially awkward. Athena’s company is not everyone’s company. Boo!
I personally do not get up and take a shower or get dressed. But that is never a bad plan!
surf the SDMB all day. It’s like visiting a water cooler. You can just read tho you don’t have to participate all day just cuz you’re lonely
Hmm…we should start a SDMB home workers IM group. But it may be TOO much fun…
I hardly ever use video chat, but I use screen sharing all the time. Get an account with some service so you can easily start a session any time. There are a lot of options (GoToMeeting, Skype, Join.Me, Google Hangouts, etc.). If you work with a variety of people, pick something that’s easy for others to use, i.e., doesn’t require big downloads or registration on some site.
Omg can we please start a WFH IMers group? My project switched to working from home four days a week, and I hate it so I still come into the office most days, but since most of the group works from home it still leaves me a bit starved for social interaction. (So to the OP: sorry, no advice here, because I’m not coping with the transition well enough to be in any position to offer advice!)
Both hubby and I work from home; I’ve been doing it for 7 years, he’s been doing it for 2. Set schedule is a must, at least for me. 9-5 work day with timers for on/off times and lunch breaks.
You’ve got to make an effort to get out of the house after work, and your dog will love you. (Ours gets an hour of dog park in the morning, plus 30 minute walks at lunch and dinner.) I presume, your kid would love you too, but we’ve no experience with that, as of yet.
In my case, usually when I WFH I can’t even set up a separate physical space: I’ve often been in studios or hotel rooms. But there has always been an enforced separation of work and play: either the work computer and the play computer are different ones, or if they’re the same there are two different accounts.
I’m currently working from an office but completely isolated except for the noisy environment… it’s the worst of both worlds.
I’m in a similar situation, and I’ve really come to appreciate coworking spaces. These are large, open areas with desks and Internet connections.
They generally cater to small business owners who don’t want to pay for separate offices, but they’re ideal for solitary authors like me. I like being around hardworking people, but I don’t like being bothered.
My husband uses video chat all the time - its one of the issues of us office sharing because that means when he is video chatting, I need to be out of the office and if I go into the office, I should be presentable - which I’m not always.
I never use it when working from home. My home is my home, and my office in my home is still part of my home.
I work from home and I make no distinction between work/other stuff time. I like to take breaks and do home chores in between working, and find it refreshes my brain to go run a run a load of laundry or start dinner. It’s nice to not actually have set working hours and just decide to cut out sometimes for a few hours when you don’t feel like working. You do have to have other social outlets, though; I have hobbies that fill that void.
I work from home nearly 100% (“nearly” because I spent the past 2 weeks at my company’s office, and have to go to the client tomorrow).
What works for me is to try to keep a reasonably set schedule as much as possible. My job requires some interaction with colleagues through teleconference (workdays only, usually) and online chat (almost anytime I’m caught online).
It’s been tremendous for me. I’m relatively good at tuning out household “noise”. The lack of commuting expenses meant I effectively got a several thousand dollar raise - and it’s allowed us to remain a 2-car family much longer than we might have otherwise (with two late-teen kids a third car would have been a necessity much sooner).
It can be hard to focus. I’m better at ignoring the sinkful of dishes than my husband is when he works from home.
The interaction is a problem sometimes. Even with all the tools we have, there are times where it’s good to be in the same room as your colleagues to toss ideas back and forth. By contrast though, there are times when I have to work fairly insane hours and there is NO way I’d be working until 4 AM at the office.
My wife has trouble ignoring the messy sink. Me, I’m pretty good at it.
To be sure, it’s near impossible to replace live, in-person interactions and communications. At my last company, where I was for nearly 20 years, we got to know each other so well that when any of us worked remotely, we still communicated very effectively.
I forgot about the crazy work hours. Regularly, there were a few times each year that I had to work very late into the night, and sometimes all-nighters. I don’t miss those, that’s for sure.
I get to work form home occasionally, I wish I could do it more. I love it every opportunity I get because not only do I get to cut out on a long and frustrating commute (any chance to dodge DC traffic is one worth taking) but not having drive-bys and impromptu meetings and all, or even the distraction of random chatter is great for my focus and productivity. And if I need to take an extended break, whether it’s just because I’ve worked straight for too long and need to decompress or I have some personal matters to attend to I can. In fact, I’ve several times found I can get as much work done in half the time at home just from all of these various factors
Look at it on the bright side. How much do you save in time and money not commuting, not eating out (unless you brought your lunch) and various other inconveniences and costs. Consider, if you have a 30-minute commute each way, even ignoring gas, wear and tear on the car, and stress from driving, that essentially turns a typical 8-hour day into a 9-hour day. So even if your fee is lower than it maybe should be, consider all of these costs in there as well. You still deserve what you deserve, of course, but I think that’s something really worth considering. Personally, I’d gladly take a comparable pay-cut to get the time I spend commuting back.
This one can be difficult, as everyone needs some people time. Even for me, and I’m a fairly strong introvert who doesn’t need much interaction, I still need some. That is one advantage of going to the office is it forces me to interact with my coworkers. Fortunately, I like most of them and we can have some fun conversations. Lacking that, I find when I’ve had too much alone time, whether it’s being at home too much, the office is empty for some reason, or whatever, that I need to make a point of finding a way to get some. That means maybe making some time with friends I might have otherwise been content to spend alone. Maybe you can meet up with people for lunch, or go out with friends an extra night a week, or even just spend more time with your wife.
Is this that much different than the same old office/cube/desk at work? If anything, you should have more control over it. First, try to get a dedicated space to work in as much as possible, not only can you have it organized and decorated to fit your needs for work, which may not so much match your non-work needs, but it also makes it easier to leave it behind when you’re off the clock. So put up posters or doodads or toys or listen to music. Even more, if you want more variety, weather permitting, sit outside, or maybe go to a local coffee shop for an hour to both get a bit of variety and some random interaction with people.
This will come with time, practice, and discipline. At first, it’s cool to just roll out of bed and start working two minutes later. Then maybe someone posts a cool video and you get distracted. Then you need a break so you start doing random chores or errands. You still have to treat it like you would if you were going to work, at least to a large extent. Still make a point of trying to start and stop at roughly the same time. If you want to take some extended time during the day to do errands or chores or work out or whatever, schedule that too, don’t just do it randomly. If you find yourself getting distracted by websites that you couldn’t get away with looking at in the office, if you really really just can’t resist, there is even software and browser plug-ins that can block certain sites at certain times of day. But don’t let the freedom get you too far away from a consistent schedule, especially if you’re someone that thrives on routine.
Other than my high school job, every job I’ve had had ramp up time. The job I’m at now took over a month before I even got full administrator credentials to do all of my job functions and at my last job I recall some people’s approvals taking as long as three months because some approvers dragged their feet. Obviously there’s some things one knows pretty quick, but it still takes some time to really judge a job. It might start slow and get busier. Or it might start difficult and get easier as you learn certain things or become familiar with certain systems. Or maybe things run in cycles
I guess the two major points as a TLDR are that there are a lot more things to look at and consider about working from home, both in terms of hidden positives and negatives, and that you may need to put in some extra effort to create the right space and appropriate discipline to make things really run smooth. Good luck.
I work from home 3-4 days a week and I have done since 2011. When my last contract completed I had accustomed myself to the idea that I’d have to go back to commuting but then this opportunity came along and I’m still comfortably settled in my home office.
I don’t do a lot of the things that people insist are necessary. What I found was that if I tried everything and kept those that worked for me I had a perfectly tailored for me work environment which is really the best benefit of WFH.
I don’t get dressed each morning in work clothes. I did for a while but all it did was take time out of my super productive time to decide what to wear, shower, dry my hair etc. Now I roll out of bed, grab a drink and sit down and work for an hour or so. Break for breakfast and then back to work. I generally exercise then shower and dress around lunch time. If I need to leave the house for anything this can be adjusted, but this is the schedule that works for me.
Social contact isn’t much of an issue because I spend a lot of my day on conference calls. If you’re starting a new gig it’s worth putting some face time in to meet people so that they feel comfortable kibitzing on these calls. Especially at first I make a serious attempt to always be the first person on a call so there is some social interaction before the business starts.
We also use MS communicator and Livemeeting. When you’re working on documents together I highly recommend some kind of screen sharing as it saves you the endless, no, no, paragraph 3, page 62 conversations.
When I’m on a call that doesn’t require me to look up stuff on my computer I walk. Back and forth, around the house etc. My biggest issue is that on WFH days I don’t move enough so this helps with that. I also break the work/home line here and if I can (no PC required, call can be muted) I do dishes, sort laundry etc. during these times.
I have a home office that I love but on mornings like today it’s amazing to be able to take my laptop to the deck and work there. I try and avoid calls when outside since I can’t control the noise level but I have the wireless extender set up to ensure signal out there and a power point right next to the table so it’s a great option for a couple hours on a nice day.
When I first started this I worked 12 hours days. Luckily the company I was contracting for had strong work/life balance policies and thus my manager was motivated to make me stop that. Now for me it wasn’t an issue as I was transitioning from working 8-9 hrs and commuting 3-4 but I wasn’t getting all of the me benefits out of the change so I’m happy they directed me back to more reasonable working hours.
On the contracting topic - get an accountant now. Don’t wait. I waited and lost more money to lost writeoffs and bad financial decisions than the accountant would have cost me. It’s a whole new set of financial rules and a guide is a great thing.
it’s called multi-tasking 