I genuinely love working from home. It affords me the freedom to bugger off to the gym first thing, or stop mid afternoon to go to J’s school to have a look at what his class are upto. If I want to skip work for a day so I can go to Thorpe Park and film – I can. I have the flexibility to catch up at weekends and evenings, and all is good. Heck, I love that I can go make a tea, quickly run around the hoover, or stick the washing on in-between jobs.
I honestly don’t think I could ever go back to a normal job. I just don’t have the mindset any more. There is one pitfall of working from home, something that I struggle with.
It’s a really lonely existence.
When I had an office job, there were some utter dicks in the office, people who would annoy and frustrate me every single day. However the rest of them were generally decent humans. We’d talk about family, TV, music – just general office chit chat. I really miss that sort of interaction. Generally a working day just means sitting, not saying a word for hours on end, the silence broken by rubbish on TV or a podcast. Due to the electronic nature of what I do, most of my interactions are over email, I’ll go for hours without even speaking.
The situation has improved slightly by going to the gym. I’m not standing around chatting to folk – but it’s nice to have a camaraderie – all of us working towards a self improvement goal. It’s nice to be out and about.
You’re probably wondering why I can’t just pick up a laptop and go and loiter and work in public spaces. That’s fine when I’m writing a blog post. However when it comes to doing a CAD Drawing, or making a brochure in InDesign, your average laptop just can’t cope. It takes ages for the software to load, and when it has, it’s just slow and frustrating. So, I have to do the bulk of work at home on my dual monitored beast.
To make things worse, when you’re stuck indoors for long enough, going out and facing the world can be that much harder. I find my desire to socialise depletes quickly if I’ve spent several days inside. I’m happy, yet lonely wrapped in the safety blanket of the flat, waiting for Miss A to return like an excitable puppy.
I can be loud, boisterous and sociable – honestly, to the point where I’m a bit of a knob. However my sociable side is a beast that needs feeding with interaction (and occasionally alcohol), without the sustenance – it’s just a shrivelled husk. I’ve got two blogging events coming up this week that I’m excited about, but also terrified of. The world feels big and scary when you’ve hidden from it! Thinking about it, over the next few weeks and months there are a few things coming up, so hopefully my beast will be sufficiently ‘fed’ to get me out of this lull.
I’m also seriously looking at a bit more of a beefy laptop, so I can theoretically work anywhere. It won’t turn me into a social pariah and make me talk to people I don’t know. It will mean that I don’t have an excuse to stay inside. I can go out, do my thing and not surround myself with a stream of Judge Judy. I’m also enjoying doing my random Instagram stories – I like that people watch them, and even respond to them. It’s not always shouting out into the ether.
Working from home is great and I wouldn’t choose to work any other way. However, I think my methods and practices of working need some tweaking before I turn into a full on recluse.
When I graduated from university back in 1996 I did the worlds most bizarre year out in as much as I stayed up at uni and lived the life of a student for a year without actually going to lectures or anything.
I still had my computer credentials, so had access to the labs and everything, I just hung out with my mates and stuff.
What this did mean though was that I spent the first 4 months post graduation living on my own in a 3 bed student house because all the students had left for the summer. I was matey with a few locals, and a lot of the lads on the bulletin board system were affiliated staff or Phd students so I had communication with people but none of my friends were there and I often went days without talking to anyone. This was all pre mobile phone too, so if I wondered if someone was about for a pint and they weren’t in when I knocked for them, I usually went down the bar to see if they appeared. Living on £37.50 a week unemployment benefit meant that my one treat of the week was chips and a saveloy and a chat with the bloke in the chippie on a Thursday night. Once or twice that was the only conversation I had with a real person that week.
I think I went through the stages of feeling lonely, detached from society and everything but the one bonus that came out of it was being happy in my own company.
Maybe that’s a bad thing now as I generally would rather not bother with most other people but it was a valuable life lesson.
Now, buy yourself an i7 based Surface Pro 4, with a shit load of RAM and you can do CAD’y stuff down the coffee shop or pub 🙂