My personal experience of home working

I consider myself to be very lucky to work from home.  Because my medical condition makes it difficult for me to travel at least a couple of times a week and I feel too ill to work for at least a few hours most days only a decade ago I would have probably had to give up work. 

However having reached the point in my career where I am now happy to use my skills and experience to support others around the world on their projects home working suits me very well for the following reasons:

• I have a 12 hour window within which to fit in 4 hours of desk work and a couple of hours of research,  this is possible on most days even if I am really tired or in a lot of pain
• I work with teams in the UK, Northern Europe, US and Australia so the extended working day is very valuable
• Not only do I spread out my work over a 12 hour period but in between work sessions I do a lot of gentle exercise which would be difficult to do in an office environment
• I often need to rest, read, nap, meditate etc again this would be difficult in an office environment
• The global nature of my work means there really is no office full of people that I work with anyway
• Although my wife also works from home because two of my daughters need to go to hospital regularly there are often times (every week) when I need to pick kids up from school or take them to after school activities
• Work life balance is much improved
• I have a trampoline at home!

Although home working is very convenient, there are definitely some down-sides:

• I miss the casual social interactions, for example the chats that don’t take place when you only ever talk to people on conference calls
• Most people I want to chat with seem to be busy on conference calls all day,  somehow when you work from home just chilling out for 10 minutes with a couple of team mates is more difficult than it used to be
• I observe much less the way that other people work, and therefore it’s more difficult to pick up new skills and broaden my experience
• There is some social isolation,  even though I get out a lot and meet people a lot,  it’s a smaller circle of people
• My work life and my home life are fully integrated,  it’s more difficult to switch off, but I am nice and relaxed so there is less need to switch off

I mitigate some of this using tools and processes:

• Blogs and blog comments provide access to a diversity of opinion and discussions
• Podcasts provide a way to connect to a broader set of views in a more social way than just reading, and I can listen to them while walking, swimming, ironing, gardening etc
• Presence and IM provide a relatively un-disruptive way to keep in contact with people
• Lunch time meetings provide a good social connection with the few people who live locally
• I am not addicted to always on email
• I keep my Tablet largely free of all work related activities except reading, and a small amount of reviewing

I have an extended version of this post here