Working at home...what do you do/how do you do it?

Parent Cafe
1

<p>I’ve noticed that a lot of CC parents seem to work out of their home. My job is pretty flexible, and while I “go” to work daily to an office, I can and do do occasional work from home - especially emails etc.</p>

<p>So, just curious…for those of you who work from home…what type of work do you do? Full-time? Part-time?</p>

<p>How do you stay disciplined? That would be a struggle for me - to stay focused and not wander away to clean the house or do an errand. </p>

<p>Do you have a designated work space? A corner? An office? While I love to “surf” the internet for fun with my laptop on my lap and my feet up on an ottoman, if I’m doing real work, I like to have a designated work area.</p>

<p>Forgive me if I’m sounding nosey, but I like hearing alternative work situations that people have worked out!</p>

2

<p>I’m an architect. My work load varies, but it’s somewhat less than full time. I am easily distracted and don’t really like not having company, but I do like the flexibility. If I had my druthers I’d share office space with someone. I have a small office off the living room with a drafting table, computer, files and bookshelves and use the dining room table if I need to meet clients. Mostly though I meet clients at their places because if there are any questions about the space we’re working on - and I do mostly additions and renovations - it’s better to be right there at the site. I’ve got a lot of storage in the attic for old projects. I do some work lying on my couch with my laptop, but more serious computer work gets done on the desktop.</p>

3

<p>I am a consultant now but I have worked at home for over 25 years, even when I worked for 3 other companies and had small children. I have varied between part time and full time depending on how old the kids were and what else I wanted to do, etc. I just took on more or fewer clients. </p>

<p>A long time ago I took over the den and remodeled it to an efficient office space with adequate desktop, lighting, storage and electrical support. I have 2 phone lines and the office one only rings in the office. It does make me be there more than if I could answer it on any phone, but also no one else can accidentally pick up a business call. </p>

<p>The kids knew that when Mom was in office, they needed to come in quietly for what they wanted. Older ones helped younger ones, etc. I have taken the time off to go to school events, help out and do shopping. I just treated them like meetings for scheduling. </p>

<p>I also go to client sites when needed and do not meet people in the house. Staying focused can vary, but I also do some writing and reading at night. I like to take breaks and throw the laundry in or run and error to clear my mind. But I also do not have any commuting time so all that time is freed up. I know some clients will call early, some late.</p>

<p>To combat isolation, I attend professional association meetings and stay up on things professionally.</p>

4

<p>I’m a software engineer. I have a setup at home, our son’s apartment and my office. Each has a keyboard/mouse setup with at least on external (large) monitor. I hook up my MacBook Pro, connect to the office via VPN and I’m good to go. Many of my coworkers live quite far away and come into the office 3 days per week and for meetings. I work with people around the world too so stuff can come in at any time. I can be at work at any time of the day or night from just about anywhere with an internet connection.</p>

<p>Sometimes it’s nicer to work at our son’s apartment as it is very, very quiet and I can control the environment. At home, my wife feeds me but I’m in the basement which is usually cold in the winter. The apartment is very close to food too so grabbing a drink or food is easy - only thing is that I have to pay for it myself. Drinks (coffee, spritzer, tea, soft drinks) are free in the office.</p>

<p>I have a cell phone that people in the office can call if they need me but most communications is by local email. The multiple monitors helps considerably as it makes it easier to juggle multiple tasks. Sometimes I bring in an extra laptop from home so that I can keep an eye on stocks or play music without having to use headphones.</p>

5

<p>I’m an attorney, but I don’t practice law. I work for a legal publishing company and I do legal analytical work reading recent caselaw.</p>

<p>I have a dedicated office that is “my” space at home. I work in a very peaceful and quiet environment most of the time, as I can’t really concentrate with music or television on. I take breaks every couple of hours to play with my pug puppies and let them stretch their legs.</p>

<p>For socialization, I have buddies online that I e-mail back and forth (we can be quite the rowdy lot) and I go to the YMCA for exercise classes some days late in the afternoon. I never feel isolated, even though this is the first year that I have the house all to myself during the day since our youngest left for college.</p>

<p>The biggest challenge is staying out of the refridgerator!!!</p>

6

<p>Before I work at home full-time, I’ve worked at home part-time with the same position. I consistently outperformed in the first 2 years, working odd hours to meet deadline and such. Everybody in my line of command knows I’m a hard worker. So now that I do work at home almost whenever I want, there is no doubt that I will get my job done.
I have my own area at home to work, there is no distraction. I can just easily goof off at work too, so the physical location is not as important.
In fact, even if I were to commute to work all the time, I wouldn’t see that many people at work. Almost everybody in my office works at home most of the time. I think it reduces stress and increase productivity.
To combat isolation, I go on CC.</p>

<p>BTW, I’m an engineer.</p>

7

<p>It can kind of be mind boggling to think of how many occupations CAN be done at home just as effectively and save mega-$$$$ in office space.</p>

8

<p>I’m a budget analyst for the Dept of Defense. I work from home 3 days a week even though I only live 3 miles from the office. I can do everything from my house that I can do in the office. My reasons for working from home are simple. I can’t deal with the commotion and noise of my office which is 99% caused by people who are NOT working, and doing so loudly. I got a note from a mental health professional that said it was better for me to work in a quiet environment and since my office can’t provide that, I work from home. The govt does NOT pay for my internet connection and I am forbidden from claiming a home office deduction. But none of that matters, because the silence is priceless.</p>

9

<p>I am a hardware/software technical architect, working primarily at home while also visiting customers on site.</p>

<p>I have a home office, but prefer the dining or kitchen tables. Most of my work can be done via laptop, email and cell, interacting with folks throughout the country.</p>

<p>Have been doing it for three years, like it for the most part but do miss some of the social comeraderie of an office.</p>

10

<p>My H has worked out of our home for 16 years. I work at home sometimes. I would prefer not to identify either job. There are a limited number of people in his line of work. Throw in mine, and it would be fairly easy to id us. </p>

<p>He has always used an extra bedroom as his dedicated office space. He has his own phone lines, faxes, etc. When the chiildren were younger it was tricky at times, but they, and their friends, learned early that when the door was closed it meant Dad was working and indoor voices had to be used or the fun had to move to the basement. His closed door means one has to knock before going in. He’s always talked to collegues on a regular basis and got over missing the office friends quickly. </p>

<p>I also have my own space to work. Curiously enough the closed door thing hasn’t transferred over though.</p>

11

<p>That made me chuckle rrah! :)</p>

12

<p>Consultant/Researcher here. I can do writing and Web research at home, but I travel to libraries and hospitals and universities and client sites. So I’m not sure if I “count” as work-at-home or not. Discipline was a huge issue for my family, if you catch my drift. But you can get a lot done without office politics and office interruptions.</p>

<p>PS, My observation has been that NO-ONE believes you are actually working hard when you’re “working from home.” This completely false perception may impact your career some.</p>

13

<p>For several years, both H and I worked full time from home (he was in-house counsel for an insurance company and I was a bond analyst). We each had our own office–his on the first floor and mine on the second floor–which were very separate spaces from the rest of the house, complete with their own bathrooms and dedicated phone/cable/fax lines. If H had a question, he sent me an email, just as he does now. We rarely saw each other during the day, even for lunch (I ate at my desk) and one of us was always on the phone, so calling didn’t work. I did a lot of conference calls on speaker phone, so I liked my office area to be quiet with no interruptions. I also travelled several days a week. Working late into the night was common, but that would have been true whether at home or at an office. I loved not having the commute. Otherwise, no big difference between the two. </p>

<p>The past six years, I worked in an office and then retired a year ago. But with the market meltdown I have recently picked up some part-time contract work. (Hard to live off of investment earnings when all we have are losses.) The contract work is being done partly at home and partly at the client’s office or on the road. When working, the tasks at hand consume me, whether at home or at an office. I have never found motivation and distractions to be an issue. I love isolation and never get enough of that, so another non-issue.</p>

14

<p>DH and I both work at home and like Analyst above, we do email each other and are on different floors, though we work on primarily the same business, so there is more interaction.</p>

<p>We have worked outside the home and had home offices over the past 20 years. When the kids were younger and we moved our office to a professional centre it was great to not have the work ‘talking to me’ all the time. That was also pre-internet era</p>

<p>We are in the insurance and finance industry and have been on the cutting edge of the use of internet in our business. Now I can work from anywhere with a laptop and cell- I can think better in my office with the door closed, but if we are traveling I can pull into a hotel parking lot and hit up the high speed to check status on clients and call or email them. We have not always worked in the same field, but in general one of us has had a home office over the past 20 years. They have to be separate rooms or I could not talk on the phone when he is on the phone.</p>

<p>I like the freedom to work from anywhere and do try to take advantage of that ability, we probably have more time away from the office than people with normal jobs would be allowed.</p>

<p>I do miss seeing people, but not necessarily office people; we moved a few times and do not know very many people in the new place- not like the area where the kids grew up and where we knew every one and were so involved in so many kid related activities.</p>

<p>I love that I can stop midday and take the dog for a walk and work more in the evening. I probably work more hours than when I had an outside office, but they are my selected hours, on the other hand, I am never ‘off’ as my clients can email any time, they are not around the world, but they often contact me in their off work times.</p>

<p>The most difficult thing is when you have visitors stay at your home, they ‘know’ you are working, but there is a subtle pressure to spend more time with them, even people who also work at home :confused: It may be that they cannot believe you cannot take a little extra time with them, but by the time both sets of parents visit, two siblings, and then a friend or two, I just cannot take off that many weeks and still stay in business. Even if my FIL thinks we should be at that point in life where we can take time off from work to visit with him. </p>

<p>If I were leaving to work at an office no one would act that way, or at least I would not be here to see it!</p>

<p>It is not any one day it is the accumulation of days or hours that can never be made up. It takes some discipline to stay on top of this and not be guilted into taking time off for visitors, for community volunteering, for church, for anything any one thinks they can ask you to do because they don’t think you really work.</p>

<p>I have a friend who worked for customs & the border patrol and after she retired she went back as a consultant doing background checks. It took more than a year to get set up and approved though.</p>

15

<p>I don’t work from home anymore, but I did for 22 years.</p>

<p>I worked as a medical and scientific writer and editor. I was a freelancer, meaning that I was always juggling multiple clients at the same time and often looking for new ones. The greatest challenge was trying to obtain the right amount of work – enough to earn a decent amount of money but not enough to interfere with my family responsibilities (which was the reason I was a freelancer to begin with) or make me pull all-nighters to meet my deadlines. (And if you’re a freelancer, you MUST meet your deadlines; the way you earn a steady living is by developing long-term relationships with regular clients who call you when they have work available. Nobody calls people who can’t make their deadlines.)</p>

<p>The self-discipline part was hard. I had an office, but it was by no means quiet. And the Internet was a constant temptation. Another issue, in my line of work, was loneliness. I mostly worked for people I had never met, often in places I had never been (one of my best clients, for example, was in Japan). And one other disadvantage is that I didn’t have the chance to climb a career ladder; when I returned to full-time work, I was no more qualified than I had been a couple of decades earlier. </p>

<p>But this type of work situation worked very well for me during all the years when I was raising a family. My husband didn’t have a flexible job, and there were no nearby family members to help out. Most of the family responsibilities were mine, but I wanted to work, too. It was a good arrangement.</p>

16

<p>I work in an office for an insurance company, however we have the option to work from home if we choose. So far, I haven’t chosen to do this because I have a lot of friends in the office and I just think it would be really boring being at home alone all day. I think right now about 25% of our staff is working from home, and they are looking to increase that this year. It’s really nice for the company because as we grow, they just let more people work from home, so we don’t have to migrate to a bigger office or anything like that. Actually, right now they have all of our night shift people working from home and our office now closes at an earlier time (saving us on lighting and whatnot expenses). Basically the company pays for your phone lines (which they somehow route from the office) and your internet services for you… and you have a blade (a computer/server) in the office, which you VPN to from home to access the network. You conference call in on meetings, trainings and things like that. Some people still elect to come into the office for certain things. I know some people come in to actually conduct trainings and things of that nature. One of my co-workers actually just moved to Florida and took her job with her, which I think is pretty cool.</p>

17

<p>I had been working 6 months in an admin job for a national company when our regional office was closed - my boss and I both got permission to work from home (the company is geared up for sales reps etc so is very comfortable with home based employees). I set up a desk and file cabinet in the corner of the guest room and have been telecommuting for 9 years now. All of my work is done on the computer; no actual paper work; I work with two accounts in different states, am technically based in a regional office 800 miles away, and our national office is 400 miles another way. I work on a laptop and am provided with a fax/copier; I expense our second phone line and internet.</p>

<p>This is my second long term job; my first career was for 14 years until DS was born (now a college junior) but I didn’t want to go back to the same kind of work so studied accounting and ended up with this job after a few years of part-time work. I see my coworkers maybe once or twice a year. My workload used to be much lighter and I worked 4 days/week until about 3 years ago so had lots of free time to take care of the kid, volunteer, research on CC, etc. Then we got a second account; I changed to full-time and have 150% more work with 25% more time. So although I’m much busier, I’ve been doing the work so long that I know what has to be done when, and my boss is thrilled to just let me do my job and leave me alone.</p>

<p>The benefits include working in jammies until lunchtime if so desired, doing laundry while working, having the cat around, being independent and managing my workload the way I want, and being available for service people whenever they deign to show up. I can take all the personal calls I want! Even though I do goof off occasionally, I always know when I really need to stay focused and don’t let things get out of control.</p>

<p>The main disadvantage is lack of socialization; I have made real work friends but almost never see them and can’t attend parties etc. Although everyone claims I am a team member I really don’t feel like one; especially since I do not go to the meetings that they attend. Also no one else is admin, which does make a difference. Another disadvantage is lack of advancement; this was originally supposed to be a short-term job (in my mind) but - the pay is decent (although nowhere near the money I’d have made if I’d never quit when DS was born), the benefits are great, and it’s just too easy to keep doing it.</p>

<p>I’m in a pretty unique position as a virtual admin, but everyone who works with our accounts knows what I do so they let me keep doing it! If I worked in an office I’m sure I’d end up with some secretarial-type duties, but this way I get to do a lot of analysis which is what I really enjoy. Still can’t believe I’ve been doing it this long but at this point (and in this economy) I’m sticking with it until the last “fully vested” right kicks in at 10 years. I already have most everything but figured that was a good goal.</p>

<p>Now DH is retired and started consulting and has taken over the study as his work space, incuding peripheral use of our personal computer as needed when his laptop doesn’t do the job (like printing). He also gets business calls on our personal phone line. Amazing how much more impact he seems to have on the house than I ever did tucked away in my little corner. :rolleyes:</p>

18

<p>I have worked from home for over ten years as a lawyer for a large firm, after twenty years of commuter practice at a couple different firms. I go to the office only a couple times a month. My home office is isolated from the rest of the house and I am very comfortable working alone. I am in a transaction practice so it is all documents, e-mail and telephone. The set-up functions like a regular office. I break for lunch for an hour, then work through until 5 or so, depending on what errands or kid stuff needs to be done. After dinner I check back in. Many clients have no idea where I am, but those who know me well, know where I work and are fine with it. I am accessible. Sports events of my D are just scheduled in like conference calls or meetings.</p>

19

<p>Thank you so much for all your responses -I have loved reading them all and hearing how you all manage at-home opportunities. I’m a bit jealous!</p>

20

<p>I’ve worked from home for more almost 25 years as a graphic designer. In the early days, no one worked from home and I had an answering service to help provide an illusion of a real office. Now I’m mostly retired, but keep the office and pet clients. My best memory is of my youngest setting up “office” with an unconnected phone, crayons and paper when she was three. In retrospect, my kids learned to respect that I was working and couldn’t jump to their every whim. Both turned out to do a good job viewing the big picture of their world.</p>

<p>The practicalities: A dedicated room. Worked bizarre hours (would get up at 3 a.m. to work on a project that was on my mind and still be in 'jammies when the client showed up at 10 to take a peek). Seemed to endear me to them. The deadline provided the motivation, but I could always find other stuff to do if nothing is pressing.</p>