May :: 2009 :: Thinking Home Business | Practical Tips For People Who Work From Home

As promised last week, the series Working From Home and Loving It continues. Today’s post is about some of the pleasures I experience in working from home.

Thinking about that reminds me immediately of my experience the other week when I went to the city for a seminar. As it was a breakfast event and on the previous trip I had been very stressed out from driving there – I was scheduled to speak so the peak hour traffic was especially bothersome – I decided this time to drive to the nearest railway station and catch the train.

It was very comfortable and a very modest contribution to reducing my carbon footprint for the day. As I boarded at the beginning of the line I had my choice of seats. There were no traffic jams and I arrived on time.

But one thing troubled me. No smiling faces.

office worker

I’m used to starting my day with a walk on the beach and a swim most days except in winter, greeting regular fellow walkers and swimmers, who are invariably cheery or at least smiling, then heading home, having breakfast and hopping into work in the best of spirits.

But there were no smiles on the faces of the workers on the train or making their way through the city once I had left the train. In fact, most of them looked about as cheerful as someone who’d won the lottery and lost the ticket.

I told myself I needed to do this more often, not to make myself feel miserable, but to remind myself how fortunate I am in being able to work from home, make my own hours, spend not an hour or more communing commuting but more like 30 seconds and have a healthy, fresh salad for lunch not some four hour old sandwiches or fast food from a local outlet.

Yes, like a lot of people who work from home I work on weekends as well as on weekdays, I am sometimes at my desk at ten at night or later and there are benefits I don’t have that a lot of those people I saw dejectedly making their way to their cubicles do have.

There are trade-offs.

For what it’s worth, here is a list of 12 things that give me pleasure about working from home:

30 second commute
wear what I like
do what I love not what I’m told has to be done
have chats on Skype or Twitter or the phone with friends and colleagues around the world, when and as often as I choose
do my coaching without having to leave home
eat healthily
have a good cup of coffee and not pay three or four dollars for the privilege
able to have a walk and swim in the morning to set up the day
associate with business colleagues I like and choose to associate and collaborate with
free of intra-office politics
the company of my partner Suzie, who also works from home (and also blogs!)
the absence of the more common disjunction between “work” and “life” – I prefer a harmonious flow

What gives you pleasure working from home?

Image credit: Sydney Office Worker, by Tilly Dog Fauxtografix via Flicker CC

Is there a practical difference, as well as a semantic one, between working from home and working at home? The authors of a book I’m reading, with a view to posting a review here, believe there is.

With the eye-catching title of Undress for Success, the just-published book by Kate Lister and Tom Harnish promises to reveal “The Naked Truth About Making Money at Home”. I’m up to Chapter 8, which is part of Section 2 – “Pajama Paychecks: Jobs You Can Do in Your Jammies”. The breezy style of the book title and section and chapter headings is reflected in a lightness of style in the book, without sacrificing the fundamental seriousness of the topic. Which means it is not a light read, but a good one.

The authors emphasize that the book is about working at home, not working from home. They give the example of plumbers, who work from home but can’t actually fix your drains if they stay at home. The focus of the book is on “work the offers a full-time income and can be done at home”.

The scope of this blog is different, in that it looks at business from the point of view of professionals working from home – many of whom will work for most or all of the time at home.

But given those distinctions, I have nevertheless already picked up enough information and ideas from the book to be looking forward to some more reading this coming weekend.

Reading the book has also prompted me to revisit some posts here about working from home, under the title of Working From Home and Loving It. I was surprised to see that the last post I had done in the series, one of three I did on “myths” about home based business, was late last year!

Posts so far in the series, commencing with the general post introducing the series, are:

Working From Home and Loving It: a Series

Working From Home and Loving It: The “Not a Real Business” Myth

Working From Home and Loving It: The Isolation Myth

Working From Home and Loving It: The Myth of Financial Insecurity

But the series was actually meant to go further. In the original concept, back in October, I Working From Home and Loving It: a Seriesa,had stated my aim of covering:

Myths demolished (e.g. the myth of not having a “real” business)
Pleasures of working from home
Challenges for the serious business builder
Secret weapons for the home based business owner

Not sure what happened to the plan!

Anyhow, right now, with so much gloom and doom talk around and so many people not having currently a choice to work in “away-from-home” locations, seems like a good time to pick up the ball and move on from the myths and onto the next segment, pleasures of working from home.

Next week. Promise.