Working From Home Sucks….
After quitting the job I was commuting to back in early 2000’s, I began working from home full-time. I loved spending more time with our young kids, it allowed me to spend more time in my community and less time in a car commuting.
Back when I made this shift, it involved significant personal and professional risk. At that point in my career, I had developed enough of a professional network and competency to risk walking away from a secure, full-time job and wandering into the unknown.
It was a huge decision I didn’t take lightly. My family and I discussed it for months before I acted. The truth is, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, in hindsight.
Ok, let’s cut to the chase. Shifting from commuting to an office five days a week to working from home full-time is a monstrous change.
At first, I loved working from home. Instead of spending my days avoiding that person in the office who would reenact the latest Simpson’s episode to me, I saw my young children more.
Working from home, however, introduces an entirely new set of tasks on top of your regular work deliverables. You're adding a whole new layer of jobs to what you're already doing. Understanding how to avoid dirty dishes, what a break or ‘water cooler’ looks and feels like, how to not feel guilty about recharging during the day, how to really gauge your productivity. You need to figure all this out and you’re mostly alone in doing that.
My kids were young enough, I’m not sure they understood that parents left the house for work. I recall watching one of my kids talking with a friend who was complaining how their dad was gone all day at work. I could see the wheels turning in my kids brain. Of course I assumed they were appreciating the sacrifices we’d made to be home with them more. My son looked at his friend and said…
“Your parents leave your house to go to work?”
Ok, so maybe the kids would prefer we left the house more? Hey, this whole ‘hybrid’ deal wasn’t even a thing back then!
If you’re new to working from home, it’ll take you a few years to get over the initial rush of freedom which comes with it. If you’re early in your working career, working from home can be a big professional risk. The personal freedoms are great. Being more present in your community is great. Not having to spend hours in a car is awesome.
On the other side, the loneliness sucks. The potential for added strain on your family is real. The lack of professional community and comradery is hard. The career impact is almost exclusively negative, even more so if you aren’t working for yourself. The easiest person to blame is the one NOT in the meeting.
For me, after 3+ successful years of working from home full-time, I was done with it. I had to get out. Yes, the freedom was cool but there’s a dark side to it. I made my next shift and swore to myself that I would never work from home full-time ever again.
I completely shutdown my home office and……..well that’s another story….
I'm looking forward to the sequel. I'm about where you are. After nearly 5 years of WFH and 3 years of homeschooling (to be fair, my wife does the brunt of it, which is a whole other topic that touches on guilt and missed opportunity) I'm done with WFH.
At this point the model that would work for me (I believe) is a hot-desking model in a shared space where you are flexibly allowed a certain number of units (hours, days, whatever works) of time to come in with no, or little, advanced reservation required. You wake up, look at your meeting schedule, look at the weather and decide "I'm gonna bike into the 'office' today", check that there's an available desk and in you go.
Unfortunately Guelph's current offerings are limited and much more geared toward folks needing a full-time office. Up in the Junction the minimum rate is $800 a month which isn't all that much when you think of it, but still a bit hard to justify if you're going to only go in a couple of days a week.
I wonder what a cooperative shared office lease might look like - how many folks would need to pool their resources in order to bring the cost closer to $100/wk? I'd totally be up for finding such a space, fixing it up, appointing it with some basic furnishings and digital services and setting up some basic booking software. What's the average cost per square foot in downtown (ish) Guelph these days?