I’ve worked from home since 1995 when my daughter Phoebe was born, with a fairly brief sojourn in an office above an antiques centre in Mayfair and another – mercifully brief – stint over an Estate Agency in Crawley. I love working from home, saving over 2 hours a day NOT travelling, getting most of my social needs met via Skype, GoToWebinar and Facebook.
So I was very interested to find this article about the growing trend to get out of the normal office, and even to get out of the home office and use multiple locations to boost productivity. Something one of my mentors has been doing for some time, I know.
I’m finding it harder and harder to answer a simple question.
Where do you work?
There are two traditional choices: at the office or at home. And there are two newer options: at a co-working space or a coffee shop.
But what if the best answer is “it depends”?
Truth is, we know embarrassingly little about where we’re all working. The latest U.S. Census figures, from 2010, track “onsite workers,” “home workers,” and “mixed workers” — people who spend some time at work and some time at home — and that’s it.
According to that data, 6.6 percent of all workers work “exclusively from home” and everyone else is either sometimes or always at an office.
But as anyone who’s taken a laptop to Starbucks knows, there is more than one way to not work from “work.” And as much as we’d like to put the alternatives in one big not-the-office bucket, the differences matter.
In fact, working from several spots may be the biggest productivity hack of all.
The Ten Commandments of Remote Work
The 10 must know commandments of working remotely for remote workers and teleworkers.
Photo Attibution:
Working remote | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boboroshi/1131391859/