Working from home - BRILLIANT!

**Oakie** · 1st July 2009, 22:10

I'll be able to work from home soon. We've done a bit of an emergency preparedness exercise at work and something that has come out is the ability to do the payroll in the event of a 'critical event'. The outcome is that they're buying me a laptop to live at my house with which I can dial into our server and work away quite merrily. Apart from emergencies though, I'll be able to stay at home and work on normal work or projects when I can justify it. (I'm sure Ii can find a way to justify it when there's bike racing on Sky in the mornings.)

**MaxB** · 1st July 2009, 22:52

There are some great plusses to working at home but also some downsides. I have a home office for my company but found you have to have self-discipline. If you are a daydreamer then forget it.

I love going to different work sites but I find I am way more productive at home. It took me a long time to learn to ease off. I was working crazy hours and earning 3 times what I was on in my last job. I took on way too much work, I couldn't refuse a thing and it was slowly crushing me.

Taking advice I now have a good workflow, trustworthy contractors and more manageable work hours.

For example I worked until midnight last night, did some banking and business this morning and this arvo did the Coro Loop on EMPTY roads. Bliss.

**Gremlin** · 2nd July 2009, 02:10

Yeah, pros and cons...

Mobile is on 24/7 for problems, advantage is that I often don't need to go anywhere to sort a problem (being the IT, remote access isn't a problem

) meaning the fix is faster than the travel time etc. PC at home has 3 screens (like work) and can dial into pretty much anything I need, plus I always have my laptop handy as backup.

The downside... you can work evenings (and into mornings), weekends, etc. Handy for maintenance, as users don't usually appreciate taking things offline during business hours, but that work-life balance thing becomes rather mythical.

Still, normally at least an hour saved every day (so I can work more

), the mileage, etc. Keep thinking that hey, if things get quiet, I can shoot off for a couple of hours, clear my head, enjoy the flipside of working on weekends. Well, in 3 years, I have done it once, on one Friday afternoon...