Ironically, the most effective telecommuters and home-based workers are those who are naturally great at connecting with people and intuitive, good communicators. This is one of the messages in Kate Lister and Tom Harnish’s new book, Undress for Success: The Naked Truth About Making Money at Home (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). Introverts tend to be less successful working from home. Another key message is that slackers need not apply — successful home-based workers tend to be self-starters, highly motivated, and dedicated.
With technology now making it possible to work from virtually anywhere, this book offers some advice on whether you should try to do so, and how.
This book covers all variety of work that can be done away from the conventional office. Besides the option of shifting one’s regular corporate or government job to home, the authors cover other possibilities such as becoming a virtual assistant, medical transcriptionist, writer, or virtual nurse or doctor – and detail what’s involved in doing this as an employee or as a freelancer (your own business), including contracts, taxes, self-marketing, and pricing your time.
Although the authors personally have thrived operating their own businesses from home, they are quick to point out the pitfalls, drawing on others’ experiences as well. Among the challenges presented:
- The tendency feel like you should always be working, especially when working flex hours around children’s schedules. Over half of freelancers work more than 48 hours per week, for example.
- The difficulty in convincing family members and friends that you are really working, and therefore cannot be disturbed at certain times.
- How difficult it is for freelancers to maintain a steady stream of work and keep up with administrative requirements: most put in one to four hours of non-paid efforts for every billable hour, the authors claim.
- Self-control if you have tendencies toward over-eating or alcoholism.
The audience for this material appears mainly to be baby boomers, the authors’ generation. Most of the suggested work-from-home options require a number of years of professional experience as well as specific education. The book also devotes considerable time to explain how Google, Facebook, MySpace, Monster.com and Craigslist works, which may be helpful for baby boomers ready to try something different, but probably information that the average gen x’er or millennial person already knows.
Indeed, the authors have been away from the office for so long – and clearly had negative personal experiences with it – that they begin their book with two chapters and a foreword basically saying how ridiculous it is that anyone would want to work in one. They assume that offices are simply places where people waste time at the water cooler and no social interaction that takes place there is productive – which is far from the case in many office environments today where engineers collaborate, researcher-writers get new ideas, video game strategy is debated, and business direction is discussed. The authors miss that workplaces today are increasingly being designed as a resource to support this productive activity, rather than being a generic destination for spending time in exchange for a paycheck.
Most of their examples of office-building-based work sound like the office of the 1970s where strict hierarchies, rote work, and a micro-management approach reigned along with a different dress code. Indeed, Ms. Lister states several times that she left office work because she hated wearing pantyhose – it’s been at least a decade since women routinely felt they needed to wear those (pant suits anyone? or just more casual attire?).
For those readers seriously interested in how to work from home, and whether they possess the aptitudes and skills to do so, this book is a valuable resource – especially if you are over the age of approximately 40 and therefore have the experience to fit yourself into their examples and options. I do suggest you start your reading at chapter three however, where the writing becomes stronger and the inaccurate assumptions about today’s office as well as the forced cliches around working in your underwear are dropped.
Would you want to work from home 100 percent of the time? If you do, what are the pitfalls and benefits?
May 4th, 2009 at 11:25 am
I work from home 100% of the time and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to work in an office ever again. You don’t have to be a homebody to work at home, but you sure do need to love your home and have created an environment for yourself that allows you to separate work from the rest of your life. That was my biggest challenge at the start – now I work in my office only and even though I have a laptop, it is not allowed to visit other parts of the house.
Working at home is a mental game. You know just how much effort you put into something, yet you can at times feel like you need to sit at that desk til the wee hours of the morning just to prove that you’re working hard (prove to whom I’m not sure, maybe it’s that never-ending Catholic guilt…). It can be a vicious cycle if you are not disciplined enough to cut yourself some slack and accept that putting in 50 hours a week is more than enough.
The biggest advantage of working from home – as a freelancer like me, at any rate – is that you don’t have to work from nine to five. You can work from one to four… or seven to noon… or not at all one day and 10 hours the next. Flexibility is a blessing and a curse, so it’s up to each individual to find the plan that works for them – whether that means they follow a schedule or leave it all up in the air. To be productive, I personally need to sit down at my desk by a certain time every day, allow myself a lunch break, and then not feel bad when I sign off at a reasonable hour.
This is the only job I have ever had where the mantra truly is: “It doesn’t matter when or how you do it, just get it done by the deadline.” That’s the kind of job I’ve always wanted and I don’t plan to give it up anytime soon if I can help it.
May 4th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Agreed, Wendy and Elizabeth. I too work 100% from home: software development and teaching online courses.
Elizabeth is correct: “It doesn’t matter when or how you do it, just get it done by the deadline” (and deliver 110% of what the client expects).
You must be self-motivated, self-paced, resistant to distractions and family pressures, and love your work. But if you yearn for power and money, working from home is not for you.
May 4th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Great comments. I was also hoping to hear more from people who have tried working from home and it didn’t work out. I know many such people, but perhaps they are not reading this blog.
Among freelances, the inability to market oneself sufficiently to keep busy (which is tough and requires a particular personality) is one recurring problem that I’ve seen among these acquaintances.
In my other workplace research, I also ran across numerous stories of people whose companies allow them to work from anywhere including home, but for a variety of reasons these people found that working from home didn’t suit them or their role other than occasionally. Some quickly felt out of touch with company direction and priorities if they were not in regularly; others missed the collaboration opportunities with others as well as the social scene.
I work flex hours, so some time at an office building and some time at home, usually after the kids are in bed. Because my office-building-office is quiet with a good computer and phone system, as well as great coffee and knowledgeable colleagues, I find it as efficient to work there as from home. The spontaneous conversations I have with others there spark the best ideas for reports or solutions to problems.
The one thing that is more efficient to do at home is to envision or outline a large research report’s structure once much of the research is done, or a envision and prepare a (powerpoint) presentation. At these times I need no interruptions (except when I choose) fresh air, and natural light as well as the ability to pace around and talk to myself without worrying about what others will think.
May 5th, 2009 at 10:33 am
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May 5th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
[...] recent post at Richard Florida’s Creative Class focused on the virtual workplace. My clients are continually working to find ways to create, [...]
May 14th, 2009 at 1:31 am
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