3 posts tagged “working from home”
Tomorrow morning the sun will come up at about 7:00am.
The alarm will go off.
We'll hit snooze.
It'll go off again.
Iain will get up. I'll hear the kettle go. The refrigerator will open, and once the milk poured, close again.
I'll hear a teaspoon dinging the inside of a teacup and then softly hit the counter top.
Footsteps down the hall.
The running of the bath, the swishing of bubbles.
And then more footsteps down the hall.
Except on this particular morning, there won't be any kisses goodbye.
Or me hollering: "Do you have your wallet? Keys? Oyster card?" down the stairs as I've done so many times since I moved here.
On this particular morning, we'll be sitting in the office together. Working on the same project...
It's going to be a little strange, and I know it's going to take us a while to truly get in a groove and figure out a good routine of doing things.
It's a new chapter. We have know idea how things are going to happen or what exactly is going to happen, but I know that it's something good.
Working from home has had its many challenges.
But none of them were the challenges I expected.
I think I assumed that I would go stir crazy and start hating the house. I think everyone else assumes that you'll forget how to form full sentences and start smearing your own poop on the walls.
The latter has only happened, and if you've seen me in person recently, you'll find that I am still capable of making (some) sense when I talk.
Not much, but just enough to give you my BitchBuzz elevator speech and throw a business card at you.
What has gotten to me? My own house.
I realized that when you're working in an office and only use your house to eat, sleep and do laundry...it's easy to just ignore the fact that you have piles of unopened mail. Or that you don't have a kitchen table. Or that your home office is a giant pile of lint and post-its.
But when you work from home, you sort of start to notice these things.
So, my advice for anyone that is going to start working from home, or running a business out of your home office?
1. Clean Your Shit Up
You are not going to want to work and devise brilliant new ways of making money when you're sitting three feet away from an ancient pile of dirty underwear. Vacuum. Dust. Invest in storage bins and caddies. ORGANIZE your paper work. Use that file cabinet in your home office for what it's meant to do - not somewhere to hide all your scary unopened mail. Do the dishes before you go to bed! You'll put yourself in a bad mood the minute you wake up and have to stare at last night's dishes while you make your morning bagel and first cup of coffee.
2. Make It Niiiiiiiice
Making the space that you live and work in NICE isn't that hard. Or expensive. Really. Hate the lighting in your office? Get a new lamp! Change the light bulb to a softer shade.
Does your workspace feel too 'blah'? Paint it. Go nuts. Paint a wall in your study the same color scheme as the logo for your new business. Did you recently go on vacation and buy a bunch of postcards for family and friends and never actually send them? Pick up a bunch of frames at your local dollar store or charity shop and decorate your desk with them.
3. Make it Comfortable
Feel your neck muscles getting twitchy from being hunched over your laptop all day long? Does your thumb start to twitch like crazy after 7 hours of working with a small mouse that's small and cheap? Does your ass hurt because you're working on a wooden stool? MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE. You can seriously injure yourself by not having an appropriately comfortable work space.
I picked up a bad habit of working at our breakfast bar. I sat on a wooden stool, hunched over my laptop with my mouse-side elbow dangling in the air for 10 hours a day. Needless to say - I started to really hurt.
Fed up with my ridiculous and uncomfortable work habits, Iain bought me a cordless laptop stand from Logitech, and it's pretty much the best thing ever. It has a full-size, cordless keyboard as well as stand for your laptop which keeps your laptop screen at the same level as a proper montior, so it feels like you're working on an actual PC.
We rearranged my desk so that I could rest my elbow while I used my mouse. We adjusted the height and degree that my chair reclined so that I'm not hunched over...and it's made all the difference.
We also cleaned up our office. We spent all weekend cleaning and organizing and even spent a little money trying to make our home office a place we actually wanted to be in. We made it nice. We made it comfortable. And we cleaned...
We invested a bit of time and energey in to our space - which really, is investing time and effort into our new business.
I got back from California about a week ago.
Last week was hard.
It's hard to go to a place where, despite the face that your life isn't necessarily there anymore, you're comfortable.
You have a dishwasher and a tumble dryer. You know where everything is and could quite happily give directions to someone if they asked you where the closest bank is.
You go into a grocery store and you know where and what everything is.
You have a power shower and a bathroom with an actual counter top instead of just a free-standing sink.
You can get in the car and drive to you favorite Starbucks at 9:30 at night just because you can.
You can drive alone in a car with the windows down and your favorite radio station playing, and actually recognize every song that comes on.
I'm comfortable in California.
But it's not my home.
So, coming back to London, the place that has become my home - despite the fact that it's lacking the comfort and familiarity of my former home - is a bit hard to adjust to.
Aside from all my family and friends, California is not where I want and need to be.
I belong in England. I just do.
But that doesn't make it any easier to come back to a cold, damp flat when you've just been basking in the sun with your family and friends for 10 days.
I guess it's a catch 22.
I can have my career and my husband and a world of endless possibilities in a country that consists of a history and a culture that I love and am excited by...and be ever-so-slightly uncomfortable.
Whether it be because I still don't understand half of the pop culture references that people throw at me, or because because the bank system and mobile phone system is still a bit mind boggling to me, or because it's fucking cold and cloudy and rainy half the time...as soon as I feel like a Londoner or like I have fully adapted to living here, something else knocks me on my ass and I realize that while I have lived here for 2 and a half years and I lived in California for 20.
Last week, I had to deal with that The Great Adjustment.
Perhaps if I had to head into an office first thing the next day and throw myself right back into work this wouldn't be as much of an issue...but, there's that whole, "I'm freelance and run my own website and work from home" thing.
I've now been working from home for over 4 months.
For one of those, I was working my ass off trying to get another job.
For the past three of those, I've been working on my own project. Something that is completely self motivated.
I get up every morning to work on this project because I want to, and because I need to. Not because I have to. Technically, I don't have to do anything.
I could wake up at noon every day, throw out a post or two - if that - and then call it a day, if I wanted to.
If I wanted to, I could give up.
If I wanted to, I could take people up on the full time jobs they've offered me.
If I wanted to.
But I don't want to.
For as unstable as my financial situation has been, for as unstable as my emotions have been...this is what I want to be doing.
It's harder that I imagined.
The thing about being self motivated and working for yourself, is that you are self motivated. Working when you're feeling like absolute shit and are doubting everything your doing is impossible.
So, you have to pull yourself out of that, rise above it, and do whatever you can.
Otherwise, nothing would ever get done.
If I laid around having pity on myself and felt down about the fact that sometimes, I barely have enough money to buy a train ticket into London to attend a business meeting - nothing would ever get done.
I'm currently reading Russell Brand's book, My Booky Wook, and despite it's fucking ridiculous name, it's a brilliant read.
The past few weeks (months) have been pretty rough, and when I read this, it really opened up my eyes:
When it comes to your career, you must always try and allow the positive aspects of your character to dictate what happens to you. Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.
I suppose that's what I'm going to have to try to do.
Lead with my talent.
Lead with the good things about myself, and not my fear.
Not my self loathing. Not my doubt.
And not my bank account.
