Working from Home, not Working from Home and Hanging Out with my Kids

A few months ago I made the decision to stop my 1.5 hour round trip commute I’d been doing for 12 years and began working from home.

My husband and I put a lot of thought into this before making the move. From a career standpoint, I needed more privacy than the cube-farm could allow, and didn’t have an option for an office. My job also entails a very large number of conference calls and working with people in a variety of different locations, so essentially I was driving into work each day, sitting at my desk on the phone for 8-10 hours, then getting in my car and driving home. I very rarely was able to stop for lunch, had very little human interaction outside of phone calls, and although I had standing weekly appointment to go to Starbucks, it was getting more rare to have that date than not. My company is very supportive of virtual employees, and a number of co-workers, as well as my immediate manager all work from home as well. So while this isn’t always an option, as long as I stay with my current employer working from home shouldn’t have a negative impact on my career growth.

Being an Introvert by nature (I took the Myers Brigg test, so it’s all official and stuff), I’m completely comfortable being by myself for large periods of time. Which is good, because, you know…I live on a farm in the middle of nowhere and it’s more unusual than not for me to see people I’m not somehow related to.

Working from home has taken some getting used to, but luckily I have a number of co-workers who also work from home full time so they could give me some insight. Here are the top questions I get now that I work from home full time:

1. “Oh, you work at home? How do you manage that with kids?”

This is the NUMBER ONE question I get. By the way, my male co-workers with kids don’t get the same question, which absolutely infuriates me, but that may be a topic for another day. Here’s how I handle working at home when I have kids: they go to day care, same as they did before.

I work at home. This means I have an office that I go to every day, I have computer, monitors, phone…pretty much everything I had before in my “regular” office. Only now I have three walls that are whiteboard and my commute is me going from my kitchen to my office, on the other side of the kitchen. However, what this doesn’t mean is that I work at home with my kids also at home.

The only exception to working at home with kids is if one of them is sick, and then we also do exactly what we did before: juggle who watches the kids and who works, ask Nana if we need to, and supplement with lots of Sesame Street or Daniel the Tiger. I just read an article about watching Sesame Street making your kids smarter, so really I feel like I’m doing them a favor by streaming it. If we need to either my husband or I will take the day off. This is the same process we followed before I worked at home. I like to call it, “our version of parenting sick kids.” I guess the only other exception is when I have to work on weekends, then there's no getting around my kids being home with me.

What happens when my kids are sick at home: my office gets trashed and Sesame Street streams on Netflix for hours.

This is a weekend checkout. Someone woke up early and wanted to help.

2. “That must be nice, you get to drink whenever you want."

So…I mean, technically, I guess? I’ve been asked if I drink Kahlua in my coffee in the morning (No, I drink International Delight Cinnabon creamer). Or if I have a glass of wine starting at 4 (um…no. I usually wait till around 5:30. Ok, it’s really 5.)

I’ve found, and confirmed this with other work-from-home people, that when you work at home full-time you need to have a mechanism to keep work and home separate. This means I don’t drink at work, just like I didn’t when I drove into the office every day. People frown at you when you add Kahlua in your coffee every morning, bottle in hand while you go to a staff meeting. Bottom line: you just don't do it.

3. “So you get to go to work in your pajamas? That must be awesome.”

Hell yeah, it is!

4. “Don’t you miss being around people?”

I’m fortunate enough that I get to travel periodically to either conferences or brick-and-mortar sites that I still get to see the people I work with pretty frequently. I can also make that same drive into the office that I've done the previous 12 years if I need to. Plus I buy groceries and stuff, and there are usually people there.

5. “Aren’t you less productive?”

No. I actually have to stop myself from working too much, because it’s all right here, available 24/7. If I don’t watch the time I’ll find myself working from when everyone leaves in the morning until they get home, which is usually right around 11 hours later.

So far the only complaint I have working from home is that the cafeteria sucks.