On Working at Home

I am a slacker who hasn't blogged lately. Oops!

As you may recall, a little over a month ago I announced that I'd finally gotten a job. I guess now that I've been employed a month I can write a little bit about my impressions of the job.

I know, I know, I preach very vehemently about the dangers of blogging about work but I think I can get away with some non-specific details.

I work for a company that specializes in the development of websites for non-profit agencies and political candidates as a PHP / Drupal developer. (You're all familiar with Drupal, it's what powers blogsNH. and PHP is the language that Drupal's written in) and I get to telecommute.... That is, commuting to work in the morning involves rolling out of bed, plopping down in front of the computer and logging into AIM and IRC. I don't even have to get dressed if I don't want to.

Working from home is.... interesting. It's an entirely different experience from going to an office with different frustrations and challenges. You've got to be a terribly motivated person to work from home. Some days, especially days when a deadline is coming up, it's not so hard.... but other days, everything is distracting.... You find yourself having strange impulses to do things like scrub the tub just to avoid doing work.

Working from home can be particularly isolating as well... I know there are many many days in the past month where five or six o'clock rolled around and I was begging my husband to go out to eat or finding some excuse as to why I needed to go to Target or Shaw's for no reason more than the fact that I wanted to get out of the house for awhile.

One of the disadvantages to living in New Hampshire and telecommuting is the distinct lack of options in the co-working department. Co-working being a movement defined as a “cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.” It's a neat concept, but the nearest participants are in Boston.

Working from home also means that a large percentage of people you know forget that you actually do work and will be shocked when you burst their bubble and tell them that you can't up and decide to just not work on some random Tuesday and go to the beach. It doesn't work that way.

Work is never nine to five. As long as I'm on AIM and on the computer, I can be bothered to talk about work stuff. It doesn't matter if it's two in the morning on Thursday. If there's work to be done, work might not be done at five. The only way to really “leave the office” is to shut off your computer and walk away.... but as one of my coworkers said, “Who really does that?”

(And for those of you who have begun to think I've forgotten to write more about social networking... It's coming... It's just that work has kept me busy!)