ALT-1 Why Working from Home can be Harder than an Office Job
Working from home is a dream come true for many people. No more commutes, no more co-workers, no more leaving the family. One can work in their pajamas, and decorate their office as they want, and be free and happy.
But not going into an office also means no one else is ensuring work gets done. There is no delegation of tasks, no shifting of blame, no assistance through tough times. There is only oneself to rely on.
Discipline is the number one thing needed to work from home, and most people are unaware of that. It’s easy to get up and go to a place of employment, because not going means unemployment. When the commute is only twenty feet from bed to desk, it’s a lot harder to justify moving. Staying on task is easier with a boss to remind you of the deadline, but harder when you can step outside to enjoy a beautiful day.
It’s not even laziness that does a person in. It’s just the comfort of not having to conform to office policies, to being one’s own boss, that traps many an otherwise hardworking people. Coffee breaks don’t have to be only fifteen minutes long, so why not enjoy another cup? There won’t be an corrective actions taken for checking personal email, so why not read through them before getting started?
Carrying the full burden of work also makes being at home difficult. In an office, someone else is responsible for keeping the printer paper stocked, and someone else handles the technical support, and someone else calls clients and takes care of deadlines. At home, one person does all those tasks, and still has to perform the core of the work. There is no time clock, where one can just hang up their badge and be done.
Other people, family included, may not always see working from home as the job that it really is. They don’t understand why picking up the kids is interrupting a schedule. Surely they can just pop by to hang out, because they’re not interrupting anything important. Some might even consider a stay-at-home worker to be a slacker, and not really contributing anything to their family.
Loneliness and lack of camaraderie can also make the home job difficult. There isn’t a water cooler to gossip around, or a secretary to smile and say hello. Lack of co-workers means lack of someone to joke with, or to vent to, or to just be friends with. It would be possible to spend the entire day not speaking to another person, and very few people thrive under such a condition.
The grass may seem greener at the home job, but it takes just as much care to maintain.
