I was chatting to a friend today about the best way to structure your working life when you are working from home. Back in 2006, I wrote Teleworking - a personal perspective. I think that the comments I made then are still relevant today, although my own world has changed.
Central to successful home working is the need to recreate formal separations between different aspects of life and work. That is why so many writers write in the morning. Lacking externally imposed disciplines and separations, faced always with the perils of procrastination, they create their own structure, forcing themselves to write (or sometimes not) within specific hours.
Today those working in organisations face a different but remarkably similar problem. How to create barriers that will protect personal and family life from the encroaching curse of modern communications technologies!
Really, there is absolutely no need to do certain things after hours just because someone (or you) thinks that you should. You just have to learn to say no. What’s the point of going to work tired in the morning and then struggling just because you got that email out!
2 comments:
What about when you have a deadline to deliver to the client next morning?
DG
That's an issue in all working modes, DG. If you are properly set up to work from home, its actually easier since you can write after the family has gone to bed.
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