When you’re stuck in an office all day, you dream of working remotely from home and how life would be. Since transitioning from working full-time at a desk in the city to working from home, I thought I’d list out a few pros and cons.
Flexible hours
Pro: You can work around what’s happening in your life.
Con: It can be difficult to establish a routine because there is no traffic to miss or trains to catch.
Work attire
Pro: Wear what you want!
Con: Feeling over-dressed if you wear ‘work clothes’.
Distraction
Pro: No office place distractions like open-plan offices or loud conversations.
Con: There are plenty of other distractions…
Delivering value
Pro: Less pressure to ‘look’ like you’re working
Con: Ensuring the right people see your results to ‘prove’ you are actually doing what you’re paid to do.
Family time
Pro: As soon as I close my laptop, I’m with my family. No commute, no delay.
Con: As soon as I close my laptop, I’m with my family. No time to switch contexts from work to home life.
Working remotely is both a blessing and a curse. I’m enjoying the flexibility and focus I can impose on myself, yet at the same time I struggle with the mingling of work and home life and separating priorities during the day.
If you work from home, how do you find it?
A very relevant post in today’s world of hot dealing, thanks.
Given that people have better equipment / infrastructure at home… sometimes it can increase productivity… but on the flip side… the connectivity is a critical dependency.
That dependency is definitely a single point of failure, Neil! When the Internet is out, it’s up to me to sort it out, not “the IT team”.
Great post! I’ve had similar thoughts in the past. I’ve worked from an office most of my career, but did work from home for about a year, and once I got into it I was much more productive. Since then I’ve had jobs where I have the flexibility to work from home once or twice a week. Most of the time that goes fairly well, but some days it’s hard to focus and not be distracted by all my responsibilities at home. Being in an office certainly offers a lot of benefits. In the future I don’t think I’d consider full time remote positions, but flexible work from home is important to me. Sometimes it helps to get a change of scenery.
Terrence! Awesome article! I was the same, I find a combination of working from home, client offices and sharedspace works well for me 🙂
Yep, luckily there is still a requirement for me to visit customer offices and shared workspaces with my colleagues. So overall it seems to be a good combination. 🙂
Good article Terence