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Jody Gilbert's 10 Signs That You Aren’t Cut Out to be a Telecommuter
I thought I’d call your attention to this good article written by Jody Gilbert, a 12-year telecommuting “hermit” (her words), documenting 10 points that can help you evaluate your own suitability for telecommuting.
Less Obvious Perks of Working From Home
The immediately obvious benefits of telecommuting are the flexible hours, absence of a commute, and pajamas attire, but I just looked across the room and someone inspired me to write of a few other perks that come along with the WFH lifestyle:
Having a dog for a pet
This was a big one for my wife and I. Were I not working from home, we would never have added Lizzie, our Portuguese Water Dog, to the family. You can have fish, cats, gerbils, snakes, etc. and still have office jobs, but for me I would only commit us to have a dog if we didn’t have to leave it alone all day. I knew one neighbor who locked his dog in it’s tiny crate alone for 8 hours until they returned home from work. That is a life that I would never want my dog to endure.
Food: Flexibility, Health and Savings
Most people who work office jobs don’t have a full kitchen to avail themselves to when working in the office. Sure they may have a “kitchen”, but I challenge you to whip up a beef stir-fry for lunch on a whim without careful planning and schlepping ingredients and pots and pans to work. At home you can just do it.
It’s also much more economical to raid your fridge every day. Yes, you can take a bag lunch in to an office each day and have comparable meal costs to eating from home, but I challenge the office workers to tell me they don’t succumb to a $4 Mocha Frappuchino Latte on the way to work or raid the vending machine. I also know that the office-bound are likely get dragged to the local Quizno’s, Subway, or other local lunch spot numerous times a month regardless of best intentions.
Timing Your Workout
Working from Home has one particular hazard to it – a reduction in exercise that you normally would get dragging yourself and your stuff to work every day and bounding up and down stairs and walking to and from conference rooms, etc. If you work from home, aside from hitting the fridge and bio breaks, you’re probably not moving much. This makes it necessary to work out on a regular basis. The nice thing about working from home is that you have huge flexibility in timing when it occurs. I still do the workout in the evenings, but if I wanted to I could slip one in a 10am one day and 3pm the next.
So those are a few less obvious benefits of the work at home lifestyle. However, realize that the concept of working from home is flexibility in your schedule and not a reduction in your schedule to regularly fit in all the things that I listed above during the day. You owe it to the boss to try to make up the time lost later, if there is any.
Telecommuting From Key West
If you’ve read my blog in the past, you know that I often speak of the benefits of living wherever you wish (within reason) as a Telecommuter. I spent the Christmas Holiday in Key West, Florida and not a day went by where my wife and I didn’t think about “what if we moved”. Going from 32 degrees to 80 is enough to make anyone start thinking.
There are many reasons why it would be a good move for us. As an avid fisherman, the though of being able to fish year round is very compelling. Most of my wife’s family and my family live in Florida and we are the sole holdouts still living in the Northeast. My job could easily be done from a home in Florida, though my wife would need to start over fresh. That is not a problem, however, as I make enough money to cover us both and it would enable us to start a business of our own with my wife putting in the initial effort full time.
So why don’t we pick up an move? Three things stand in our way: inertia, Pennyscroft, and the Chesapeake Bay
- Inertia – as explained by Wikipedia, inertia “is a non-quantifiable property of matter by which it remains at rest or in uniform motion in the same straight line unless acted upon by some external force”. That external force would need to be a lost job, financial hardship, health issues or something else drastic.
- Pennyscroft – this is the name given to my current home in Pennsylvania by it’s original owner, Spencer Trotter. The home was built in 1886/1887 and having moved here 2.5 years ago, the house has become a part of our family. It is hard to leave it before we finish what our vision is for the house.
- Chesapeake Bay – I’ve recreated on the Chesapeake for 35 years or so and I believe it to be one of the most amazing and beautiful bodies of water in the world. The wildlife and scenery are unsurpassed and I find it hard to leave it behind. Given the repeated dreary reports on the state of the Bay’s health, I sometimes think all is lost and that I should move away in disgust.
My wife would probably also add her job of 15 years with the same company as a hindrance to moving. Dupont is a great company to work for and it is not likely that she could continue to work for them if we were to relocate.
So there you have it. Although the telecommuting arrangement allows flexibility in one’s life, we often have many reason why not to take advantage of all that it allows us to do. Someday …
