I have been working from home for most of my adult life. Lots of people joke about how you can goof off while working from home. Fortunately, I have worked in enough offices to know that the biggest goof-offs usually show up at the office every day and leave without ever accomplishing anything.
Being successful is not defined by your work environment, it is in your hands.
Even before the coronavirus, there were plenty of benefits that might accrue to you if you work from home. However, many of them are closely intertwined with having the right office, good equipment, and the temperament to work from a home office.
For over ten years, we had a cattle farm and while I had a home office for a couple of weeks out of the year during tax season, most of my time was spent on a tractor. In 1981, we dispersed our cattle, and I got my first home office job. It is good that I waited until then because it was nearly impossible to do the job without a computer and Apple II+s like I bought were just starting to land on desktops. That job only lasted six months but it led to my first go-to-the-office-every-day job, selling Apple computers and managing the salespeople in five distinct offices.
After two years of that, I landed at Apple and my career of being in the office occasionally while mostly working from home began in earnest. In the next twenty years, I rapidly moved up to the corporate ladder and eventually became director of federal sales. Even then I was rarely in the office more than half the workdays of a month. I actually credit my home office as one of the reasons that I managed to last nearly twenty years at Apple. Sometimes having some geographic separation from upper management is a good thing.
Technology evolving from email on a mainframe to email on your phone and every other imaginable device has made working from home much easier over the years. Here is a list of what has helped me be successful.
- Having a dedicated, private physical space has been an unwavering success factor for me. You cannot do great work until you are in a space where you can concentrate.
- Developing the technical skills to support yourself in your company's specific environment is really important. You are not going to thrive if you are always calling someone for help.
- Using the right equipment to match your needs and the requirements of your company is essential.
- Creating a routine that matches the needs of your company can actually help you do better than office-bound personnel.
- Communicating frequently and often with others in and outside your company is a lifeline to sanity and success.
At times the right equipment can be daunting. When I started managing an Apple higher education team in 1993, my office had three phone lines, one for talking, one for a data connection and another for someone calling in when I was on the other line. Creating a network in the early days was no picnic and there was no cloud for storage or collaboration.
Today, Slack, one phone line, and a reasonable Internet connection handle my communications needs. It would be even better if I had a fiber connection with symmetric up and down speed for better video conferencing.
I have found that having multiple computers is a benefit. Because I can get pulled in different directions, I like just being able to swing my chair around to another task. My desks have two Macs, one Windows 10 machine, and one Linux box. I have my own NAS, three printers, and a scanner. I did my own Ethernet cabling when we built this addition where my new office is but most people might be fine with wireless. My office uses wired Ethernet. I wouldn't have it any other way. My own personal computer is a Google Pixelbook which almost never comes to my office. Keeping personal and work computers separate also helps.
I keep slightly offset hours compared to our CEO. That means when he is at lunch, I can work on materials that need to be finished with a joint effort later in the day.
Being successful in a home office does not require putting on a suit every day, but it does demand sticking to what needs to be done, using the right tools, and approaching the job with the right mindset. I have been very successful with shorts and a t-shirt for many years. I don't miss the ties or the modems of the early years.
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