Working From Home
May 25th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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Yesterday I was working in my home office, and my son Kyle was playing on the floor next to me, mostly trying to reorganize my bookshelf. Kyle stood up and pointed to an apple I was eating and said, “thash an apple.” Then he took about 5 steps towards me without holding on to anything — his very first steps. I quickly grabbed my wife, and with some encouragement we got him to do it again for her.
Later that evening I gave a speech for Project Outreach, a 12-week business incubator program intended to help people start their own businesses and increase their financial success. I ended the speech by telling everyone how my wife and I were able to be at home to see our son take his first steps because our businesses gave us that kind of flexibility. We didn’t have to stick him in daycare just so we could both work.
One reason people decide to work from home is the opportunity for greater freedom, and that perk is certainly there.
But of course working from home can also be difficult and distracting if you have kids. I’d say the biggest breakthrough my wife and I figured out was to decide which hours of the day each of us is primarily responsible for the kids. So certain hours I’m in charge of the kids, and my wife has that responsibility the opposite hours. This means we each get a block of uninterrupted work time. This allows us to schedule complex tasks during those periods and less challenging tasks for when the kids might be interrupting us often. I can still get some work done with the kids playing in or near my office, but I also know that while I have the kids, my wife is at least getting her top priority work done. Also, while our son is napping, we’re both able to work productively.
May 26th, 2005 at 3:48 am
Question is: how to work at home and manage kids as a lone parent?
May 26th, 2005 at 10:17 am
My only experience of single-parenting is for 4-5 day periods when my wife goes out of town. I’d work shorter hours then, but I’d still get quite a bit done. My daughter is in preschool, and my son is pretty easy to manage once he gets some toys to play with. There are a lot more interruptions though, so I do my heaviest work when my daughter is in school and my son is napping.
May 26th, 2005 at 4:18 pm
Question # 2 is: wouldn’t it be really easier to work alone if you didn’t have any kids and no wifes? Also, wouldn’t life be better if you were dating 5+ girls and not a single wife?
May 29th, 2005 at 8:28 pm
I have my own company and I have worked from home for several years. In the beginning, working from home was GREAT.
I could work whenever I felt productive, if I had a headache I could take medicine and lay in bed for 30 minutes to make it go away, I didn’t have to dress myself for work, etc. I also experienced a lot of freedom.
My productivity was very high.
But.. after a few years, I started to hate it. Why?
- Little social interaction with associates and colleagues except by phone and e-mail.
- Getting up, dressing and going to work puts me in a work mindstate. You go to work and see everybody arround working, so you get into a work-related mindstate.
- Communication problems. Turns out that phone and e-mail are really worse than face-to-face communication.
After a few years of working at home my productivity went down.
So in my opinion working from home is great in the first 1-2 years. After that you discover it’s not so great.
Or, it is great if you can work from home 2-3 days a week, and work on the company premises the other days of the week.
I am now planning to get an office and having myself, my associate and my 2 employees work at the office.
I have talked to them and asked them if they want to keep working from their homes or if they want to work at the office. They all said that they prefer to work from an office.
They also confirmed my experience: in the beginning, working from home was GREAT. After a few years, it didn’t seem so great any more.