lifehack :: 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

Scott Allen has scored an interview with Tim Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.

You can listen to the recorded interview online or download it. And/or you can read the five page transcript which Scott has helpfully provided.

Even if you’ve read the book, I’m sure you’ll pick up a new angle or two. I did.

And if you haven’t yet read the book, this interview provides the background of how the book came to be written. It also provides a lot of insightful comment and and an outline of the strategies which are set out in greater detail in the book.

I liked particularly what Ferriss had to say about designing what you will do with the time you free up and recognizing that the actual money cost might not be as high as you might have expected:

When you actually create time, the question of what to do becomes much more interesting and much more important than what you have and it’s surprisingly less expensive than people realize. But most people never calculated it.

As he says, sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, nice as that is, “gets boring very quickly”.

The book is not about not working. It’s about designing the life each of us wants and then setting in train a systematic way to achieve that.

We may in fact finish up working harder. What I get from it is that the idea is to be able to enjoy what we do and be where we want to be, when we want to – and some strategies to achieve that.