Work vs Home

One thing that's kind of hard about working from home is that you're never really at work and you're never really at home. I can go downstairs to my "office" but I'm still home. At the same time I can be hanging out with my family or watching a movie with them but work is only a flight of stairs away. I find myself getting distracted and feeling like I should really be working and visa versa.

When I worked a real job I tended to not work from home very often most of the time. There would be periods of time where I would have something I needed to work on from home but in general most of the time I spent working was in the office. While I still had trouble leaving the stresses of work behind when I was at home it was much easier to differentiate that time as not work time.

If I tried to keep set hours that might help somewhat but I'm not really a set hours sort of person. This morning I slept in and didn't get started until late morning (10 or 11-ish) and in the past I've tended to wake up before my family and head downstairs to work until they're up. Weekends are just times when I tend to work less but I still typically put some time in (sometimes a lot of time in). I don't even really keep a mental summary of how many hours I've been working anymore.

In this case I have work I need to get done but it'd sure be nice to go sit and read stories with my wife and son (I can hear them reading Goodnight Moon) and then head to bed. The work isn't going to do itself though.

Boundaries

One aspect of working from home that has been an off-and-on issue is that of a lack of uninterrupted time. I have a much easier time focusing on work and getting things done when my wife and son are out running errands, have already gone to bed, or are upstairs where I can't really hear them. If they're up on the main level above me it's really distracting. Often I can hear that my wife is trying to get something done but our son is being a hand-full which makes me feel guilty for not going up and helping. That and our son knows I'm down here so he'll go stand at the top of the stairs and call me sometimes. While endearing it's really distracting and makes it hard to work.

I'm not sure how other people have handled this but I will probably try to make a move to working more after they've gone to bed. Last night I worked late (3am) and was able to focus better and got a lot done.

Into the 2nd Week

So I'm into the second week and thus far I've gotta say that I'm really liking this whole freelancing thing. At this point I haven't really been worried about lining up other sources of income apart from my friend's company but I should think about starting to do that at some point in the near future. Last week I finished up updating a control and thus far this week I've almost finished a resource export tool (exports from the DB Resource model my friend's company uses to Microsoft's resx model).

It feels more like I'm on a vacation than actually having a job. I'm getting things done and working a fair amount but it's completely different. I kind of dig it.

Minimizing Information Intake

A while back I read through Tim Ferris' The Four Hour Workweek and really got a lot out of it. I'd highly recommend reading through it as it is an easy read. I'll talk more about that later but I want to touch on something that Tim stressed in his book: The Low Information Diet.
In his book he (spoiler alert) challenges the reader to go on a one week media fast from news (websites, papers, magazines, television, etc...), television, and web surfing that's not required for work. Upon reading the challenge I immediately stopped my excess web surfing (reading various blogs that I kept track of just because, LiveJournal, etc...) for a week. I don't really watch television apart from movies with the family but that isn't a huge time sink for me. I found that it wasn't really that hard for me to give up reading the blogs (I've been using Bloglines along with their download-able notifier to keep track on when blogs I watch/read had been posted to) and random surfing that really didn't accomplish a whole lot. LiveJournal also wasn't terribly hard to give up however a side effect of that is that I started feeling out of touch with friends who I only really keep track of via that medium.

After the week was up I started allowing myself to keep up on the blogs and whatnot; however, I found that I didn't really care to keep up on a lot of them that are random tidbits of information with some current happenings online and in real life. I also didn't pick LiveJournal back up which is kind of a mixed blessing. As mentioned above I feel rather out of touch with the folks that I kept up on via LiveJournal however I've been able to free up a lot of time by not going back and checking my friends page frequently.

Today I went through and removed some of the most posted to blogs from the blogs I'm watching in Bloglines in order to limit the amount of time that I spend reading blog posts. I'm going to try to only check blog updates in the evening once I've finished working. I don't have a solution yet for LiveJournal and for the time being I'll just check in on specific friends' journals to catch up on them when they come to mind, or I may create a filter for friends that I'm most interested in keeping up on to limit the amount of extra stuff I'm reading through.

Fun times, back to work.

Day 1

Today is Day 1 of working from home. Thus far I haven't gotten a whole lot accomplished; however, I've done a fair amount of work setting the stage for getting things done. I haven't had a desktop computer at home for about 5 years. Currently my wife and I have one mostly functional Windows laptop (the back light died and I haven't gotten around to getting that fixed), one Apple laptop that sits at it's desktop for about 10 minutes upon booting up before it will let you do anything and is really painfully slow when it decides to let you work on it, and another Windows laptop that my son managed to kill by picking it up and dropping it a few inches. I've done my due diligence trying to fix the laptop my son killed, however as my overall troubleshooting knowledge of Mac's is little to none I haven't even tried to fix it.

In order for me to be working from home I'm setting up on the bottom floor of our townhouse (we have three floors: garage and a rather large entry room, kitchen and living rooms, and 2 bedrooms on top) as my office and needed a computer. Before leaving for the beach I purchased a barebones kit and some other odds and ends from TigerDirect which was waiting at the UPS center for me when we got back from vacation. I spent a few hours over the weekend getting it mostly assembled and today I finished it up, got most of the software I'm going to need immediately installed, and started reading up on the first project I'll be working on and reviewing the code that has already been written.

That and I took a long break when my wife and son got back from the park to go out back and grill up some hamburgers and hang out with them for a little bit. What a luxury that was, being able to just stop what I was working on and take around an hour to make burgers and hang out with my family without having to think about the pointless emails in my inbox and trying to ensure I make it back in time for a meeting.

I'm off to make dinner now and then spend some time with the family and possibly squeeze in some more time getting up to speed on that project. I have no doubt tomorrow will be more productive. And I think I'll grill up some sausages.