My first experience with really trying to work from home was in 1994, two years after I moved into my Reese house; I put out a shingle, drummed up some business, bought a fax machine and a fancy Mac Quadra 605 with an astounding 250 mg of memory, and two days later the ice storm shut off power to my house for about 12 days. I had another stint of home offic'ing in 2010 for about a year - not by choice. In 2012, my new job was excited to have me but literally had no space for me so I spent 6 months working from home.
With a little experience, I
can offer , hopefully, some helpful tips for folks that have not done
this:
1) Be thankful you are working from somewhere – a lot of people aren’t.
2) Create a workspace – whether in a spare bedroom or just a corner of the kitchen table – so that you can (a) go to work and (b) leave work. Otherwise you’re working all the time.
3) GO ahead and vacuum the house and scrub the bathroom. Otherwise every time you get writer’s block , you’ll go look for something to clean rather than work through it.
4) Have a talk with your dog. He will probably think you took vacation days especially so that you could play with him all day. This will be a difficult talk. Ask your cat to help; she gets it already and could honestly care less whether you are at home or not.
5) Keep food in the house including snacks. It might be nice to run over to a drive through, but if you are on a roll writing away at something brilliant, not having to stop your train of thought can be a good thing.
6) Do leave the house from time to time. Oh, I know there are not many places to go just now, but even the backyard is a welcome break. And you need to get out of a chair and stretch periodically.
7) Definitely spend time in the backyard and DO NOT take your phone. Blues skies, blooming flowers, and singing bird are nice therapy from the onslaught on doom on social media and traditional media.
8) Play your in the zone music as loudly as you want to – hooray, no co-workers to complain – but be able to quickly mute it if the telephone rings.
9) Shower and dress daily. Sorry but this is a much for your frame of mind as anything else. Plus the new Zoom conferencing feature includes a smell component!
10) Keep as much of a routine as you can, but it is okay if you hours are slightly different from someone else’s.
11) Talk to someone from time to time who does not wear a flea collar. It is okay to pick up the phone and have a quick chat. We do this all day long in an office setting, right? It’s a sanity check.
12) Make sure that you are working on your main focus and don’t rabbit trail too much. It is easy to veer off course.
