Working From Home: I'm Not A Fan Of Snow Days

I don’t know if I have ever mentioned this before but I hate working from home. It’s not that I don’t enjoy being home and not having to commute, especially when my wife is home as well, I am just not as productive as when I am sitting at my desk in the office. Even the simple asking of a question can sometimes take longer as you can’t just pop your head in someone else’s office to give them the heads up. However, the thing that suffers the greatest handicap is creativity particularly when you know that much of our day is going to be filled with writing.

Contrary to the noise that I have heard from some others, creativity is a social or group exercise. While others may not be forming the exact words that you inscribe on the page, or as in this instance punch on a keyboard, they still provide a great deal of inspiration and/or direction on projects both work related and purely creative. Whether you want to admit it or not, the work that you do is heavily influenced by the people and the world around you.

However, too much stimulation can be detrimental to the process which is another factor of why I don’t work well from home. While some I know are completely comfortable at home which promotes productivity, that same situation stymies my output. Having so many things of interest around me, o the book cases, in the closet, on the table and desk it can sometimes be difficult to keep my focus on the screen. Actually, it is more of the personal projects, mostly involving organization, that distract me more often than anything else. Most of the time the need to work and get things done, especially those with a tight deadline, force my eyes back to the word document open in front of me but there are occasions when my mind and glance wander and do so for several minutes at a time.

I don’t see this as being a permanent problem of not being able to work efficiently from home but, for now, it is an issue. Maybe once I get things a bit more organized and a few more personal projects taken care of I will be able to keep my mind from wandering in that direction. I think that should be another item to add to my resolutions posted on Wednesday. If I can get that done, hopefully sooner rather than later, I think it would help with most of the other projects and goals that have previously been listed. So, consider this another resolution added to the list with the hope that it is resolved by the time I have to work from home again.

Holiday PITA

Not that kind of pita!

The holidays this year have made my work schedule a bit of a mess. Beginning last week I have been in one day, off two, in one, off three, in one, and will be off two more days before resuming a normal work schedule. With days off in the middle of the this week and last, many people have also simply been out for a week and a half straight making it difficult to really get a lot of things done and through the entire revision process. So while there is plenty of work that has gotten done lately, much of it at this point is simply fueling a backlog that is going to have to be addressed as soon as our schedules return to sanity.

But some schedules never change, some habits remain, and routines are pretty self-explanatory. While things were both busy and slow at the office, blog posts still had to be written, and lodge work seems to never end. Actually, since things have been turned over to me, the work is now in the exponential stage. Don’t worry, it should plateau sometime this coming year or next.

OF course, this is why I take work home with me. What started simply with blogging from home has how become a pretty substantial office where I can handle just about everything from the office and a number of things from the lodge. The lodge home work is something relatively new, at least to its current extent, as I brought home a couple of binders with me to finish a few things up before our meeting on Thursday.

That’s another thing that has to be done. Both my home office and the lodge office are both a bit disheveled, disorganized, and a downright mess. Much of this work will definitely be more streamline once these two spaces are given a pretty substantial overhaul. Looks like a few exciting weekends are in my future trying to get both of these spaces up to speed. Put it this way, they’re both in such a state that they’d be good spaces for one of those foofy television design shows.  

While there is a lot of work to be done it is all fun for me most of the time. Sometimes work can be a PITA but everything has PITA potential including the things we enjoying doing most like blogging. And don’t forget that we can each be a PITA too... I know I am on several daily occasions. Sometimes at work, sometimes at home, you never know when the PITA mod will strike.