Benefits to working from home?

January 8, 2007 :: Ramblings :: 2 Comments

I have been based at home for over 2 years now. Often people comment on how good it must be or how easy it might be to get distracted. Like everything else there are advantages and disadantages to it. Anyone thinking about setting up from home and going it alone needs to weigh these up and make a decision based on their own circumstances.

I think I am now more than qualified to have opinions on the subject, but obviously my experiences might be very different to someone else who works at home.

Advantages

The advantages of working fron home are all the obvious ones you’d expect. Even as I write this I am sat in my dressing gown - there are not many people who are fortunate enough to be sat in their dressing gown and can claim to be making money!

You can, in most cases, work the hours you like and suit you best. You have to make no time or financial allowances for travelling to work.

You dont have to work with colleagues you do not like, nor worry about a boss looking over your shoulder and checking up on you.

There are (atleast in the UK) tax advantages to working from home. Ways of paying yourself more efficiently and giving the tax man less of your hard earned (or sat-on-your-ass-in-your-own-home earned) money.

You can listen to music, take long lunch breaks and pretty much do what you want. All in all its quite a good arrangement!

Disadvantages

Here comes the bad news….

Firstly, if you are going to be running your own home business it needs to be viable and profitable enough to pay you. An obvious one but unless its going to be paying the bills for you to have the luxury of working from home pretty soon you wont even have a home to live in

Motivation: I think lots of people could be easily distracted by TV, chores or just get used to lie-ins. I am lucky in that I know exactly what I want (if not how to get it) which drives me to work as hard as I can. For me the fact I work from home gives me the opportunity to do even more hours than I would at an office.

Being on your own for all this time might also be an issue for some people. Working with other people does atleast give you some social interaction you cannot get home alone. I’ve not really worked with many people I liked so this has not really be an issue for me!

Something I am currently suffering from is having noone to throw ideas around with. The past few days I have been working on a spreadsheet and a couple of other bits. I have ended up going round in circles. If there had been someone else here for me to work with on these I think I’d have been much quicker.
2 heads are definitely better than 1. Someone else is always going to look at things differently from you which could lead to you having ideas you would never have had on your own.

And thus I Conclude…

Advances in technology, primarily computers and broadband has made it easier and cheaper than ever to work from home. According to a Personal Computer World article 10% of the UK workforce is working from home.

Working from home has been great for me, financially it allowed me to continue to be my own boss at a time when bankrupcy was a real possibilty. Since then it has given me the flexibilty to juggle my own work with looking after a daughter while my partner continues to work full time.

In an ideal world if I had enough space (and money) I would have a larger office at home and a few employess using it. This would give me the best of both worlds. Something else for me to aim for in the future! If I were to employ someone tomorrow I would even consider setting them up to work from their home too.

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