Homeoffice or not homeoffice ?... and some tips

I Spend the last 9 years working from home, three weeks ago I took the decision to move to an office and I wanted to post first why I took that decision and secondly a few advises about working from home before I forget about it.

But first and before you start reading my post, please go to my new company linkedin page and click in follow....https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/nextper . Also if you liked my post please click in like and share so I can reach a greater audience. I'll really appreciate it.

Ok, now I can tell you why I moved to an office by myself ?

You would be thinking this guy is crazy, he was living the dreaming of working from home and now he moved back to an office, the true is that until last November I worked for a big company, first as an application development and later as a manager, with a solid team that worked together for more than 12 years, so we knew each other perfectly. Also we had defined task and a fixed working time. Under that scenario working from home was easy, but now that I'm working on building my own company the thinks were not so clear and I needed to be more focused than never, also I'm building a new team and it would be impossible to do it from home.

Let detail the reasons:

1) Not having fixed work time, you can find yourself at 4 am at your computer until 11 pm... the next day you will be a zombie, having an office will help you to differentiate working time to family time... you still could stay at the office or weak up at 4:00 am with an idea, now I write down the idea in my cell phone and worked it later at the office.

2) Not having a solid team, homeworking is more than nothing about trust, you don't know if your team members are struggling with an work issue or if they are cleaning the house, washing the car or seeing the last chapter of game of thrones. So until you do not have a good knowledge of the team it's hard to do homeworking.

3) At the beginning I was alone giving the first steps of my new enterprise, for your family members that was an opportunity  to overcome all the limit it took me years to build, so I found my self putting the clothes in the washing machine, making the dishes, picking the kid from the school, etc, etc and many etc. Working in  a big company with a good position was easy for me to set the limits, but now that I'm my own boss the thing get tricky. 

I can think in other reasons but let leave them for next posts. Now let focus in a few advises in working from home:

1) Set the limit to your family and friend, that is not an easy thing to build. It will help you if you have your own office room, you can not work in the kitchen. Also it will help if you print a poster and put in the office room making clear that that is your office. Keep the office room door closed while you are working and open it when you are available for your family.

2) Set working times, that will help your family and even your self about what time you spent doing working stuff and which one doing your stuff. One issue is that nowadays you do a lot of thing with the computer so you need to differentiate working stuff with arranging you vacations pictures. Indeed I've two laptops, one for work and the other for myself, I do not have any personal material in the working one.

3) Have an UPS system, you can not imagine how many times I had power failures while I was in important meeting and no one noticed anything, I worked with a laptop with their own battery system and a small UPS for the router, just that, the router did not consume much, so having a small UPS is enough

4) Have a good monitor and a good mouse/keyboard, you can not imagine how many people works the entire day directly from the laptop.... that is insane, if your company does not provide it, please, invest in your health and buy one, you can plug all to your laptop... it will change your life.

5) Have a backup internet connection, at home I had two internet connection, one from the phone company and the other from the cable company, the faster is the cable and the cheaper and slower from the phone, is not much from month and you will be available always.

6) Have a good chair and a good desktop, again, invest in yourself, you spend at least 8 hours at day seated in front of the computer, ensure the chair is a good one, nowadays the companies provide it to the homeworkers but if it is not you case buy one.

7) Dress up for office, shave.. it's famous between my friend cycle, at the begging of my homeworking, it was winter, my male friends get together on a Friday night to have some beers in one of my single friend house and I went in pijamas with an overcoat over it.... the same one I used all day... even today they remember that event ! 

Surely I can think in more tips, If I do I'll update this post so if you need them review this again.

Also will appreciate your comments and experiences as home worker, please include them in this post

BTW... please forgive my English... I do my best ;-)

BTW2... this is just my experience this article is not intended to be a guide, for that you can read: https://www.acas.org.uk/media/pdf/o/3/Homeworking-a-guide-for-employers-and-employees.pdf among other guides that you can found in google

In order to graphic this homeworking article I found a few pictures, enjoy them

Regards !