A Different Perspective on Working From Home

How many of you go to an office every day to work?  Have you ever had the thought, “I wish I could just work from home like so-and-so does.” Or maybe thoughts like “They have it made being able to work from home and not having to go to an office every day.”  Well, it is always good to have a different perspective on things.  The grass is not always as green on the other side as you might think.  There are some disadvantages to working from hom as this person says in great detail.  But before we totally share the negative side of working from home it is important to say that there truly are great advantages.  The important thing to understand is that people are different.  There are people out there who would probably disagree with several of these points that are made.

One thing that most work-from-homers would probably agree on is that it can be tough to “leave” your work.  When your work place is only a few feet or a couple rooms over from where you sleep, it can be tough to “walk away” and leave it for later.  But that can be learned. 

So here's a different perspective on working from home for all you office workers out there…

Usually, I’m on the phone interviewing sources, but there are times when, if I’m on an especially pressing deadline, I can’t be on the phone at all. Sometimes I won’t even leave my house for a few days.

That’s when I welcome the ringing phone, just so I can hear the warm tones of my digital amanuensis. It sounds crazy, I know — the 21st-century version of an old lady and her cats — but I feel inexplicably less isolated just because she’s around.

“That’s really pathetic,” a friend of mine said when I told him about my invisible playmate. He’s right. But we do what we have to, those of us who work alone.

O.K., I know I have been the envy of my office-worker friends, who complain about the lack of privacy, the politics, the gossip at their workplaces. And those are certainly things that I’ve wanted to avoid over the years. But now, frankly, I’d like to poke fun at the boss with my colleagues, or to know whether Sheila in accounting is dating the messenger guy.

We home-office loners compensate for our lack of community in myriad, pathetic ways. I try to get out at night, I see friends and hit the gym and check out hip city happenings, but none of that really takes the place of being around a group of people who are working toward a similar goal.

If you want to read more, you can view the complete Kamaron Institute Job Market article by clicking the following link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03pre.html?ex=1338523200&en=ad7650f12a17b9b9&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

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