Working From Home – Pros and Cons

What is good and what is bad about working from home.

Pros

1) You can set your own schedule

This is great if you are somewhat nocturnal like me, or if you just hate rushing in the morning.

2) You do not have a dress code

I do not enjoy wearing shoes all day. Thankfully when I visited Ansca HQ this wasn’t unique to me, so that panned out well – but most work places tend to frown on a lack of shoes. Or pants, in the summer. (It gets to over 40c (104f) here, with humidity reaching 90% – plus my house, which is really kind of a shack, has a tin roof.)

3) You aren’t limited to home

As most of you know I’m a total hermit, although I’ll venture out if there’s somewhere I want to be. I have family in Adelaide (that’s interstate and a two or three day drive, or a flight away) and if I plan on visiting them I can do so without taking time off work.

Cons

1) It can slow you down

There are far more distractions at home than in an office where everyone is working towards the same goal. There’s TV, personal phone calls, various websites devoted to memes, humor, news – whatever you’re interested in. There’s also people who stop by without giving you any notice and do so with such frequency they have actually become accustom to your lack of pants. (This should not happen.)

2) You work too much or not enough

This can go either way – some people who work from home end up slacking off and not doing their job properly because they need supervision. (Which is fair enough, many people function better in an environment with clear expectations and struggle when entirely left to their own devices.)

The flip side of this is working too much, which can be just as bad. In an office you come in, you work, you leave. At home if you are passionate about what you are doing you can end up working far more than is sensible. This is something I often find myself doing and am trying to work on. (Unsuccessfully so far.)

3) It can be lonely

The biggest con for me about working from home is that it can be lonely. Working in a team is the best thing about working at an office and something you miss out on at home. I guess that isn’t always true, though – I hear plenty of people complain about their colleagues or their boss(es) – so maybe it shouldn’t be a pro or a con because it can vary so much place to place, job to job.

At the end of the day the pros of working at home outweigh the cons if you’re happy where you are; and in summer if you don’t want to wear pants