Working at Home

Julian Robichaux wrote up some common-sense advice for people who work at home, which he had found in an article in his local newspaper. Having worked from home for many years now, I have a few things to say about this myself. Julian talked about the "cabin fever" problem, and boy do I know about this! My wife and kids go off ot camp every summer (my wife is a nurse in the camp infirmary), which leaves me home alone. For most of the year, a day of peace and quiet is so elusive that I'd do just about anything to get it, but it only takes a few days of working at home in an utterly empty house each summer before I start to actually miss being interrupted every fifteen minutes by one kid or the other, or by a "honey do" page from my wife. (Well, it's not really utterly empty, because we do have a dog, but as much of an attention-seeker as he is at times, he'd really rather sleep most of the time.) As a life-long "night person"/insomniac, I find that the hardest thing for me to do is stay "in phase" with the solar day. On my own and with no external time cues, I would undoubtedly settle into something like a 28 to 30 hour day instead, and during the summer I have to work very hard to keep myself on something close to a normal sleep cycle. I'm not always successful at that, but the truth is that while working I sometimes find myself in "a groove" that I don't want to break. It's really easy to lose track of time (and sometimes even meals) and just keep working. I don't have a solution for this, but I do have one tip that I want to add to Julian's list: Work on multiple projects to give yourself the opportunity for a change of pace and an excuse to find stopping points. I could talk about this much more, and I'll probably come back to it later. It's an interesting -- and increasingly relevant topic.