Working from home has to be the dream lifestyle right? There is no commute, there is no uniform standards and you set your own breaks. What a life this would be.
In recent times there has been a need to shift the workplace into the home environment. This of course is not by their own choice. Different industries needed this to happen to ensure that not only people were able to be safe whilst doing their jobs, but also to ensure that business was continuing as normal as possible.
Working from home can be a lonely affair at the best of times. Traditionally, people who worked from home were generally small business owners and freelancers. The recent shift has dramatically changed this working landscape.
With the digital technologies now available, the Australian Government had already flagged this potential shift in how people would work in the future with recent studies highlighting this trend. Teleworking occurs when employees are able to perform their duties within the confines of their home environment. An agreement is reached where this occurs.
I will cover this topic more in another post, however this article will be more on my experience as a small business owner where I had a home office setup.
A lifetime ago, I was a Franchisee Bookkeeper with a well known brand. Yes, there will be more to this story also on another post. I will also explain the reasons why and how as well.
Okay, so I had this home office decked out with 3 workstations, a decent printer and whiteboards. The office furniture was also not the cheap ones you get from Officeworks or Kmart, but they were bought from a business which sold ex-corporate office furniture. We had just moved into a new house that we had just built so we had in mind that the space which was normally earmarked for a formal living room at the front of the house, was always going to be an office. We just put some double doors on it and it was virtually ready made., It was also right at the entrance of the house as you walked in.
It was perfect. I didn’t have to go anywhere if I chose not to right! I could not be more wrong. The best part of working from home was that I would save money on fuel and time. I am not sure whether timing was an issue but, I had started a new business and started this new adventure with a brood of 3 young kids. At the time, my boys were roughly about 2, 4 and 6 years old. In some ways it was perfect as I was available if needed with the kids at any time. Thank goodness I didn’t have a pet as well as I know that would be just as big a distraction.
In other ways, it made my life difficult. My time working in the home was one of the most difficult times in my life. I spiralled into a situation that I could not control. There was no separation between work and home life. It became a major issue in my relationship with my family.
Here are my 10 reasons why Working from home may not be for you:
- It is a lonely life
- Being a small business owner is not easy
- You need to be disciplined with your work day
- If you don’t have structure, you can get distracted with other things
- It is strangely a very tiring experience
- You still need to dress up for work
- Clients come to visit at your home
- There is no one to make you accountable
- You need a good Internet Provider
- Work doesn’t stop at 5pm every day
Here is my experience in a nutshell. I found it difficult to separate the home and life balance. I wanted to work from home because I was close to the family and wanted to be available for my young kids and my wife. What I didn’t realise was that no matter how structured and disciplined I was, I was always drawn to the guilt of not being able to be switched off totally from my work.
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
Life became a rolling ball of momentum that I was not able to stop. When you take into consideration of the mechanics of starting up a new business, plus the fact that I was learning this bookkeeping caper on the go. Say what?! Yep you got it. I had never been a bookkeeper in my life. I mean, I flunked out of University the first time because I hated Accounting so much. I did the relevant courses of course, but I was new to the industry and I had the steepest learning curve you could ever have in starting a new business.
Oh yes, I had never used MYOB or any real accounting platform before in my life and I didn’t really know too much about GST and BAS. What was I thinking?
Looking back at the whole experience, it was a pretty stupid thing to do, leaving a perfectly good job to get into something I didn’t like and to something I had no experience in doing. This is a bigger story than I can cover in this particular blog post, but I am hoping you get my drift.
Working from home needs to have a certain amount of driven responsibility and adaptability. Unless you have both, you will find it difficult to be productive on a day to day basis. Who is going to push you to and who is there to guide you when you have a business question. Do you have an office space big and airy enough to work in? Do you have a window? Depending on the window, this even maybe a distraction for you.
If you are not careful, the boundaries of home and work life become blurred and you end up alone and working away until all hours of the night.
One major piece of learning I got from this experience was to ensure that no matter what I did, I would never do something again where my heart wasn’t in it, This didn’t meant I was never going to try different options again, but it meant that I needed to be more measured in what it is I was doing in the future. If I was a painter or an artist and I loved doing it, working from home would be perfect.
10 years later, I am able to give you some reasons why working from home is not for you!
Find what you love!
Cheers,
Luki
Live Work Digital 