So you’ve decided to work from home. As a rookie-veteran of working without a traditional office for one year I’m here to tell you that it is the greatest and worst thing that can happen to your work life – much like being transferred to a glitter-packing facility. What follows is a quick two minute guide of what you need to know before you take your pants off and turn up those old Hootie and the Blowfish albums.
Interruptions
Working from home completely changes your interrupt cycle. At a typical desk job you are interrupted constantly due to meetings, cake feasts, fire drills, people coming over to tell you about what the lake was like on Saturday, daydreaming about tripping said individuals, etc.
When you work at a location of your choice you can control what distracts you. If you want to work for 4 hours and not use the bathroom you can do it; if you want to work with 2 lbs of nachos taped to your face like a beard while wearing a sombrero filled with nacho cheese for snacking you can do this. Most people think they will be far more productive due to being able to control large blocks of time, but I found that the experience was quite jarring.
What you will realize is that outside of your normal distractions your body has learned to not focus for very long on anything. In my case after years of working in an environment where I was constantly interrupted I couldn’t focus on anything for more than 20-30 minutes (about the longest free period I had on average). I would internally interrupt myself constantly: twitter, facebook, doodling, trying to clean nachos that fell onto the keyboard from my nacho beard, calling the manufacturer of said keyboard after the ‘s’ key stopped...