HASHTAG ReadyOrNotHereWeGo
At Ntirety, all of my work is WFH - in my four months I have been away from home for one week, when I visited Boston (the home base of Ntirety) during my first week on the job. The company line is that we will do a week at the mother-ship 2-3 times per year, always with significant notice (as opposed to my last job, where you would often find out on Thursday or Friday that you were flying out to a client on Sunday afternoon.)
When I went to the office, I ate out for breakfast and/or lunch - takeout or in restaurants - at least three or four times a week and often even more. Now I never eat out by myself, and combined with a new effort in our family to eat at home more often, we find ourselves only eating out about once a week (some weeks not at all), and more importantly, we don't find ourselves missing it much!
The other expense that has come down is our grocery bill. While that may seem counter-intuitive since we are eating at home more, I have realized that before I would stop at a store on the way home 2-3 times a week to grab something, which often resulted in picking up something extra as well. Now that I don't go out every day, those more expensive "quick trips into the store" have virtually disappeared.
Now when I take a break to go to the restroom or get a drink, I can spend a minute to talk to my wife, or to throw the clothes from the washer into the dryer (our laundry closet is upstairs near my home office).
Of course as with everything, there have been some minor downsides to the new situation as well:
Less social media and blogging presence - this is another item that may seem counter-intuitive, since most articles and blogs about Telecommuting talk about the importance of the "virtual water cooler" to stay connected to the outside world.
At Ntirety we use Skype as an instant messaging tool, and I work with two MCMs (although one of them did recently leave to from his own consultancy). I have found that the interaction I was missing at work in the past that was driving me heavily onto Twitter is more present now in my work relationships and therefore has decreased my Twitter presence.
Two other things contribute to my decreased presence, one of which relates to my new position and one of which relates to the changes in my family (read: having three kids in a little over three years).
My new WFH situation and it's benefit of spending more time with my family has decreased my time spent working on my blog. I used to spend a little time at the start and end of each day in the office compiling ideas and nibbling away at blog posts, especially at the end of the day if I knew traffic for the commute was going to be bad. Now with my 20-30 *second* commute at the end of the day (down the stairs to the first floor), usually with little traffic other than dodging a cat on the way down, I find myself in more of a hurry to get out the door and "home" to my family. While I can apply a little self-discipline and overcome this to blog more frequently (as I do hope to do), it still takes additional effort.
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All in all, the WFH experience has been a very positive one, and I greatly recommend it to anyone who meets the following criteria:
- You are self-directed, able to work without constant direction from your supervisor.
- You can handle not seeing your co-workers and boss every day.
- Most importantly, you have a door to close when needed - I don't always work with the door to my office shut, but there is definitely time every day when I close it.
The items I need to work on in the next six months:
- Re-invigorated online presence on Twitter, both for my own benefit and for that of the #sqlfamily
- Increased blogging - my blogging decreased even while I was at House of Brick, but as mentioned above has been almost non-existent in the last three months - my goal is to get to a post a week, even if it is a one page "micro-post."
