Working From Home- Some Thoughts

The world has today by compulsion has moved to a work from home situation, which frankly is not easy.

In Fish People Consulting we have been practicing it from day 1 of our being which gives us a 12-year experience in doing this, and mind you, by no means were we the pioneers, when we conceived the idea of a 100% virtual company with no commute and no borders on our team, there was already plenty of experiences we could borrow from in how to manage such a paradigm shift.

The first thing about working from home is about discipline and following a routine, in absence of that it just won’t work, you have to still fix a time to wake up and finish your chores which includes taking care of your dependents, if you need to cook breakfast / lunch etc finish it before your office work starts,  and you need to have a fixed time when you step in the office. 

I use the word office here very consciously; you need designate a place in your house called office and it can’t be changing from day to day.  You will need some privacy preferably a door that can closed between the family and you while you are working. You walk into the office formally dressed to tell yourself you are in office. Don’t start work in your shorts or pajamas.

Make a schedule and keep to it as much as possible, you have a start time and break times. At your break times is when you will be available for your family, this is akin to the coffee / smoke breaks in your office.

Your being formally dressed will also tell your family that you are taking work seriously, and you are not available for chores or dispute resolution while at work. If they need you, they can call you on the mobile which you will answer if you are able to or call back later. If you allow your working rhythm to get broken your ability to get work done will be affected drastically.

I will also touch on infrastructure briefly, you need to be comfortable in the place you have chosen, I am vehemently against working sitting on the settee or lying on the bed. A proper chair and a table are required, if you don’t have one borrow your child’s study table for the period. I will also add that the hall / dining / living room is a very bad place for your work from home office, especially since your family is also at home and most houses have their TV etc in this area. 

Once you have the handle on this, working from home can be very liberating. I enjoy the fact that my daily commute is reduced to seconds from the 1 hour+ each way I used to do. The time freed up such also gives me that more “me time” or family time as you wish.

The flip side however of working from home is that the office never closes, this also requires a discipline to switch off your laptop at a certain time and then switch it on only in emergencies or the next day in office. By all means do that, a mail being responded to at 10 PM may not get any extra action taken than when the response happens at 930 AM the next day.