Reinforce The Castle Walls
Protecting your time and space when you work at home.
I've worked from home for twenty five years. For the first fifteen I was home alone. It was lonely , but the isolation was glorious too. Wall to wall mental space to think, design and listen to Radio Four. My knowledge of the world was greater in those years than it was before or has been since , thanks to the relentless output of the BBC.
For the last ten years my husband has worked from home too, and we've learnt a lot about running two businesses and two lives in one home. This doesn't make me an expert on how you work when you are at home, but there are some ideas I can share that may help you protect your time and space.
Escaping From The Battlements
Knowing when you can get away from home and your desk helps you stay put when there is work to be done.
Everyone needs time off to recharge.If you think you are invincible and don’t need time away from work its possible you have already worked too long without a break. If you can finding ways to turn of your phone and computer and leave the world of work for periods of time you will be stronger and sharper when you return.
Every Christmas we get out the year planner and decide which weeks of the following year we are going to take as holiday. We don’t plan where we are going to go or how we are going to use these weeks, but we know in advance that there are times when we are going to stop work and give ourselves a break.
Planning your time off a year in advance gives you a structure to work within. It helps you plan business projects into the year and allows you to give clients plenty of warning about when you won’t be available. In my experience clients will cope with you being on holiday/unavailable if you disappear at conventional times — the times when they would expect to be on holiday too.
Retreating Into The Dungeon
Having somewhere specific where you can concentrate is vital. Living with an architect meant that we were able to design and build our own office in the garden and move our work out of our very small house.
Only you know how much space you have available to turn into your office or workspace. I know someone who works happily under the stairs. Another friend worked for years in a cold concrete garage.
Everyone needs a personal work space.Arijit Dasgupta writes profoundly about his work space here on medium.com.
Working as far away from the bedroom as possible is good because when you wake up in the night you don’t want to find yourself wandering towards your desk trying to solve that problem that you didn't quite manage to solve the day before.
Before we moved our office into the garden I worked in the spare bedroom and would often find myself staring at my drawing board in the middle of the night, wondering if I should change that bit of the design a little….
Letting Down The Drawbridge
When you work on your own, the best way to become uncreative and unhealthy is to sit at your desk in your dungeon hour after hour, day after day without a break.
Taking a break doesn't have to be as physically demanding as going to the gym. Your break doesn't have to cost anything, but it probably needs to involve making contact with living breathing beings. You can make contact with people as an extension of your daily routine or you can go out of your way to meet someone new who challenges your assumptions.
I have work-at-home friends who take time to walk their children to school, others that cycle or do a bit of digging on their allotment (communal vegetable patch) to give themselves a break.
Medium contributor Bas van der Veen seeks out new experiences and his article about meeting new people is worth reading.
We invested in a mobile gymnasium - we bought a dog. You can’t avoid going to ‘the gym’ every day if you have a thirty five kilogramme dog to exercise. Even when it rains. Walking in the wind and rain in the north of England in February clears the mind. Though you don’t meet many people on days like that.
So, how are you going to make contact with the world everyday?
Beware Of Marauders
As we discussed above,you need company when you work at home. But you are also vulnerable to interruptions.It’s up to you to decide what’s an interruption and what’s a distraction that improves your day.
Your time costs you money.
You may feel that receiving parcels for neighbours with a serious internet shopping habit is a useful and neighbourly thing to do, or it may irritate you wildly.You may be glad that your mother phones you when you are working,or you may not.
Decide how and when and by who you want to be interrupted and then be kind but clear about the interruptions that irritate you.
Don’t Swim In The Moat
You’ll find yourself going round and round in circles.
One of the problems of working from home is being realistic about how much you can do in a day. If you are living with your family, have children, pets, relatives, friends and hobbies you can soon loose yourself in the hustle and bustle of it all. Even the most energetic can find themselves trapped and going round in circles, which takes us back to the beginning…. you need to know how and when to escape from the battlements.
