Tips for Working at Home from a Writer Who Has Always Worked at Home

Make your bed. First thing. You need order. Then get dressed. Sweats or whatever is fine but the pajama thing makes you feel like you are at home. Have breakfast. At least coffee. I prefer a big breakfast. Then have a work space. If it is your kitchen table so be it but it has to be your space. Routine Routine Routine. It has allowed me to write seventeen books. This is not a vacation. If you turn it into that then nothing will get done.

Work nine to five. Or longer but don't stretch it into the night or you will quickly burn out. Take  a lunch. This gives you a break and you get hungry. Thirty minutes is about right. Go any longer and you lose all your momentum. The thing is to treat working at home like working at work. If you treat it like being at home you will lose your productivity. Dont go off into the side-tasks. Put in some laundry fine but keep away from all those things nagging at you like cleaning the kitchen or fixing that faucet. That is for the weekend.

Work five days a week and take the weekends off like everyone else. You will need it to recharge. Fit a workout into your routine. One of the perks of working at home. In the morning or at lunch or in the evening. An office in your home is optimal. One that no one will bother you and by the way let everyone know you are working like when you are in the office and not to be disturbed. If you start to burn out then move your office around. Work outside if it is nice. Very good for energy. Play the radio if silence bothers you. Classical or jazz no words to listen too.

But when the day is over turn off the light and leave the work at your desk, it will be there tomorrow. Just like when you worked in an office.

William Hazelgrove

The Heaven and Hell of Working at Home

You only have to go to Starbucks to understand the duality of working at home. It is packed during the day with people who work at home. They are there for hours staring at their computers and they certainly were once in cubes or offices or sitting at conference tables. Globalization and a 1099 workforce has put a lot of people back into their kitchens. We were a nation of people who charged out of the home and hit the office. Now with computers we are becoming a nation of people who roll out of bed make our coffee and hit the kitchen table or the home office or some chair, couch, that works as a place to handle emails, write reports, compose novels.

The heaven of working at home is no commute, no interference, you just get down to work. The hell is there is no commute, no interference you just get down to work. Where is that coffee clutch moment where you gab with Bob Jim Nancy Ann about your weekend about how hard it is to get going on Monday morning. Where is that meeting where you are putting your head together with other people. Where is that lunch that coffee break, that feeling of camaraderie and finally that moment of leaving and driving back home in compartmentalized bliss. It is not there for many people anymore. There is Starbucks.

You have traded all that for your cat your dog those calls that never seem to come. There is no ringing phone, no buzz of people, not even the soft whisper of the keyboard. No. You are a company of one. No wonder people run screaming out their door for a coffeehouse, the grocery store, anything to get a little interaction. Add winter to the mix and you have people who will do anything to return to the workforce. It is not for the fainthearted.

Just ask anyone who has retired.

williamhazelgrove

Working Alone

There is a service in New York and maybe other places that allows people who work alone to hang with other people. We are fast becoming a nation of people who work from home with the Internet hubbing out to our work pods like the spider it is and people interacting less and less telephonically if at all until there is only the soft pitter patter of fingers on keys and the ticking clock and the distant airplane and the dust motes falling all around. This then is the modern office environment of the twenty first century. A nation of Bob Cratchets in their cells. Please sir another lump of coal.

But at least Cratchet had Scrooge to interact with. He could ask him for coal or another candle or listen to Scrooge bitch about giving him off for Christmas. We twenty first century office workers are entirely solitary. We have no interaction except for the proton beams shooting out at us from our screens and the occasional call from a mother or father or telemarketer. Other than that we are united unto ourselves and now that the halcyon cool of working at home has worn off we are really a nation of lonely disconnected workers.

Gone is the interaction of The Office. The goofy weird guy hanging out by the copier or the anal retentive office manager who everyone rips on nonstop. Gone is Jerry the old guy who still trudges in or Suzy the loose secretary who everyone secretly leers at and talks about her husband Hank who is a Harley dude and works in a body shop. The whole low level drama of office politics does not exist and so that leaves us with just our work. What a drag. No distraction except surfing which can be as boring and depressing as watching television.

So we go to Starbucks. We go to the store. We go anywhere to break it up. We hang in the kitchen and talk to our spouse. We go for a run. A bike. Anything to break up the thin gruel of being a self motivator and sitting down to our daily drudgery. Yeah. Its cool. You can wear your pajamas. You can work in your underwear. You can sleep in. But the work is still there and it is just you  and you will have to do it eventually.

All by yourself.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the American Dream turned upside down

Corralling the Yahoos

Ok the new CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer is pulling in the troops. No more sleeping in. No more late night movies and working in your underwear. She wants them back in station to interface, cross pollinate, bond, and solve the problems of Yahoo in person. I get it in a way. You do learn more by bumping into people and yakking and passing ideas. But you also tend to goof off a lot too. Which is the inverse of her logic.

The truth is power is not static. Our CEOS are mini despots. Our companies are dictatorships. Ask anyone who works for a company if they are free. They are not. One wrong word, wrong tweet, wrong anything and it is game over. You are fired. There is no recourse in the Corporate world. The implied and stated fact is that you are replaceable and you may be replaced anyway by a robot or your job outsourced or eliminated. So you better tow the line.

And the first order of business is to get everyone back in the office where they can be watched. It galls CEOs to think that people are at home beyond their reach. They are getting paid for being at home? Yes they are. And are they really working?  Yes they are. In fact people work harder at home than at the office because the office is a prison day and part of it is spent killing time. The work is shoved into bursts between surfing and gabbing with co workers or lunch.

But at home one tends to have less of these distractions. There is the home environment but the home office generally solves the problem. So the theory that bringing the Yahoos back will solve multiple problems is probably fallacious. If only because the yahoos have tasted the good life and now they will be the slugs who are under the thumb of management. They will not be able to capitalize on their own work rhythms and will have to re orientate to the nine to five.

Like slaves before the Civil War who have been North they will not reconcile themselves to their bondage. They will have to be sold South. Or fired.

Rocket Man...the Catcher in the Rye of the Great Recession