The 20 Yard Commute

You may have noticed I didn't post a blog last Sunday. For those three or four of you who actually read this blog, I apologize for that, but I was out of town and really didn't want to use the computer I had access to to write my blog since it wasn't mine. My reason for being out of town is actually more or less what I want to write about today. I spent, along with my beloved fiancée, house and dog sitting for my aunt and her husband (who is also my employer) the entire week from July 5 through July 11. It's sad that that was the closest thing to a vacation that Roxanne and I will likely have this year, but we got paid for it and it was nice to be out of Fayetteville for an entire week. But I digress.

House sitting for my boss did allow me to experience, albeit for only four days, what it is like to work from home. Since the shop is in the backyard of the house, I only had to walk out of the side door of the house, through the gate into the backyard and voila! I was at work. I whopping twenty yards or so. Compared to my normal 65ish miles that takes around an hour from Fayetteville to Garner¹, it was a nice change of pace. The only bad thing, and it really wasn't all that bad of a thing, is that I found myself still waking up when I normally would have when at home. Considering that I was also watching two pit bull-terriers, it was helpful to have that extra time, but I still ended up getting tired of watching the same news stories loop on 'Morning Express with Robin Meade' and would end up getting dressed and heading out the shop at 9:30 instead of 10:00. Like I said, not really a bad thing, just a slightly annoying thing I guess.

So, this is what that experience showed me. Working from home is pretty awesome, but it can also be distracting. You would think I would have worked more hours since I was just right there and was not as anxious about having to drive home on I-40 and I-95. Interesting thing is, it's much easier to end up taking an hour for lunch instead of only thirty minutes when all you have to do is walk from the shop to the kitchen in the house and sit with your fiancee. You also end up realizing, hey, the TV, computer, whatever-book-I'm-reading, et cetera is just right there in the house and not an hour away and I'd much rather watch TV, read a book or play on the computer than make belts or dye, finish and wax holsters. So, in that respect, working from home can be a bit of a distraction too. Having pets and working from home is also a distraction because you find yourself thinking more about if they need to go outside or if they're tearing up stuff inside more when you're right there where you can take care of it.

Sure, it saved on gas and I really didn't have to get up as early (I did manage to sleep in a whole thirty minutes extra a couple of mornings), but I'm not sure I could pull off working from home everyday. I think I'd be to likely to constantly think of things that needed to be done like laundry or painting all of those pesky Warhammer models to be very productive with my work if I did work from home; out of sight, out of mind so they say. At any rate, while I certainly would not mind having a job that allowed me to work from home (aka, telecommute), I cannot guarantee I'd be as productive doing so as I would in a shop or office away from all the hobbies and things at home that could distract me from working.²

~ JC

1. That would be Fayetteville, NC USA to Garner, NC USA in case anyone was wondering or confused. Sometimes I do actually get the random reader who doesn't know me grin.

2. Now that I think about it, the fact that I wasn't actually working from home, but someone else's home is probably why I still got my work done that week. I didn't have all my stuff with me to distract me as much. LOL