Are you homeing from work?
Thinking about working from home? As long as you’re in for the gas man and your co-habitees respect your workspace, everything will be fine, right? Not necessarily - working from home can throw up some unexpected issues.
If you share your space with someone else, there are a few things you might want to consider between you before you don your pyjamas full-time and replace the television with your filing cabinet. Of course, you’ll probably iron the issues out along the way (and more on household chores later!) but forewarned is forearmed.
Homeing form work
Freelance advice always tells you about how important it is to prepare your co-habitees for your working from home. They have to know when your ‘office hours’ are, respect your space and treat you as if you were ‘at work’. What about them, though?
I’ve come to realise and remind myself that, just as importantly, my workspace is also someone else’s home and er…my home too!
Sprawling your work equipment all over the dining table and demanding silence while you catch up with work on a Saturday afternoon is just as unreasonable as someone demanding your time in office hours or ‘dropping in to say hi’ just before a deadline.
Also, do you really want your work to take over your home life? If you’re not careful you’ll be homeing from work rather than the other way around. As you expect certain boundaries to be respected by other people, you have to remember them too.
Chores
The division of household tasks can be a dull yet volatile topic of discussion at the best of times. Glamorous as it isn’t, though, it could be one worth discussing before you set up office at home.
Worst case scenario, this could go one of two ways – you end up doing all the housework because “you’re there” or you end up hardly doing any because “I’m working”. Both of these scenarios are often not intentional on either person’s part, but that doesn’t mean nobody will get annoyed.
Oh and I’ll be honest with you – from what other homeworkers tell me, it’s more likely to go the way of the former unless you set some ground rules. It’s not necessarily because the other person is a lazy git either. You can end up procrastinating by washing up and dusting, then still be moaning about the unfair division of labour later. Best approach? Just talk about it. These days I ‘save’ some household fun for the person I share with and I am sure he’d be really narked if I snaffled up all the cleaning joy myself. Ahem.
If you happen to live in a household where everyone is intuitive, considerate and fastidious about housework, then lucky you and as you were.
Bad feng shui
I have been guilty of working all over the place in my house but I still think it’s really important to have some ‘no work’ zones for your own sake and anybody’s that you share with.
It’s obviously bad feng shui to have work clutter in your bedroom, but having the laptop on in the living room, for example, can also stress you out and make others feel like you’re not really ‘there’. If I tried it in my dad’s presence, he would simply tell me it was “bloody rude”.
At the end of each day I make an effort to put my work things away and close the door on them, although it doesn’t always work. While working at home is convenient and enjoyable, I would rather my house felt “homely” than like hard work.
Do you work from home? Have you come up against any interesting or unexpected issues? Do you live alone and how do you handle these issues? Please do share on the forums.
Jun 10, 2009
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