Working from the home may be a trend these days, but in fact it is something that has been around for a long time. This most recent move to work at home was likely sparked by everyone’s attempts to resolve the contamination of life by COVID. No one can doubt the influence of the pandemic but my guess is that desires to work from home actually started long before that nasty virus disrupted our lives.
COVID added a spark to something that was already beginning to happen. A number of people were looking to transfer their work to their homes even before the disease hit us.
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In many ways, this trend that sees more people working from home is but a revitalization of what was at one time famously known as the cottage industry. The apex of the cottage industry was long before your time and mine too, but it was nonetheless a significant entrepreneurial development at one time in our economic history.
The cottage industry was institutionalized working from the home. Our ancestors, in between prepping nightly meals and feeding their babies, were busy making sausages, spinning wool, and weaving marvelous carpets from their home-based looms. They were nothing but practical in those days and what they did not need and were able to sell brought in egg money for sending their kids to college and buying a new set of work boots for Papa.
In today’s market, working from home does not have the romantic aura of the cottage industry but it is an exciting proposition for many people.
From home, they can connect to just about anywhere in the world. Accountants can do their accounting from home, investors consult their clients from home, managers track productivity levels for their factories from home and some of those who are more adventuresome initiate romantic trysts.
Successful work from home, be it on the farm or in the office, is often dependent on tightly structured work schedules. Your inner self needs to know when and where the workday formally starts and ends, perhaps through a ritual turning on and off the computer. It needs to have built-in time-out moments, when everything stops for scheduled breaks. And it needs to honour those time outs.
One of the most successful farmers I know would always take Sundays off. He at times was in the middle of harvest, looking at what was the only rain-free day for too long, and he still shut it down and took the day off. I like to think of him as exemplary.
The great thing about working at home is that you can schedule times off to your own personal timetable. The difficulty, as I have suggested, is recognizing that the schedule needs to be honoured.
Working at home also needs a designated area, or place, from which to work. The kitchen table that my grandfather used to add up his daily accounts ledger won’t cut it. The work station needs computers, telephones and filing cabinets and where all of those fundamental devices sit should be sacrosanct, hands off to anyone other than the person to whom the work area is assigned. Life is too complicated these days for anything less.
Working at home is always suspect to a bit of social isolation. We need people contact; even the most introverted person needs to say “hi” to someone else every now and then.
When building your life around the work-at-home model, make sure that you include in that structure moments for interpersonal contact with real lively and interesting friends, family and neighbours.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
