In praise of presentee-ism and the daily commute

Having twice gone freelance in my career, I still insist that working from home; if you are disciplined, is the most productive way of working; not just for paid work but for the fact that at the same time you can also be processing several loads of washing and letting in the man who services the boiler, without significantly interrupting the working day. (This far, it’s always been a man).

When you are working away from an office environment, you are not stressing about politics or office rumour, enjoying gossip or enduring pointless meetings to rake over what you raked over last time. You also have two, three or more working hours every day not sitting in traffic. And on sunny days, you can often take the best bit of the day (or week off) and catch up at 2am on a Saturday morning if you want to.

Working for yourself, you can sack the obnoxious client or do something entirely for free just cos you want to, as the only boss you have to answer to is your landlord or mortgage provider (and the occasional child who expects to be able to eat; stuff like that).

But – and there is always a but. I’ve only just discovered an area where the whole presentee-ism thing scores significantly above the alternative.

Having been forced by circumstances to put new business development on the back burner to accommodate looking after a sick parent for nearly 4 months, I returned to my new business pipeline to find it had stealthily dried to a trickle. I’d never experienced this before, even acknowledging that much of it was down to nice people going easy on me as they understood that life was more than a little fraught. 

But then you add the fact that I’ve also been going easier on myself since I had a funeral to arrange, house to clear and head to get back into the right space. Being freelance meant I could take my time over that too - but here’s the thing.

I’d got used to checking social media in the mornings and recently noticed it was taking me two hours to make it out of the bedroom. I’d also become accustomed to dealing with non-core issues and found my brain had begun to get cluttered with “stuff” which was making me less productive. Planting the petunias or sorting out the smalls was preferentially mindless and probably just what I needed at the time.

I had also slipped into doing too much unpaid work – I guess because it felt rewarding and being surrounded by grief and truly kind people for a while blind-sided me to the fact that life can’t be all nicey-nicey unless perhaps you are a Saint, and no-one has ever accused me of that.    

Had I had a firm requirement to return to work after a statutory week or two off; even if I had had compassionate leave and such understanding colleagues as I have always enjoyed, presentee-ism would have got me back to the coalface in days. The requirement to shift gear back into the daily commuting grind would have slapped me across the face like cold rain and I think I would have transitioned back more quickly.

Of course, there’s an argument that looking after the psyche and not rushing back into things too quickly undoubtedly has a value, but so does routine.

So the long and the short of it is; I LIKE what I do and I am nowhere near ready to sink back into doing PR, training and content creation as an altruistic hobby. So I have now installed wifi on the boat which means that even if I’m away, I can continue working up to 10 kms offshore. The cunning plan is to be highly organised and work hard three weeks out of every four, giving me 10 days each month (including weekends) to sail, on the understanding I can still work and/ or be wherever I’m needed within hours by train, plane or automobile.

I have also just invested in a brand new blogger engagement system and am setting my alarm for early, to re-impose my own discipline. I’m therefore available for Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and window washing if anyone has a need.

You can definitely have too much recovery time.