The Dangers Of Working From Home Lessons For All Of Us

Everyone talks about how wonderful it is working from home but they rarely mention a plan for alerting you to the things that apart from not being productive, can bring you to your knees. We are forever telling people how great their life is working from home but lets look at the dangers and from there you can work out how to avoid them.

Ahh To Be Working From Home

And after people begin to realize you’re at home and “available” any time they get used to the idea. This translates into frequent pop-ins. How you doing? Working. Oh that’s nice, did you see what’s happening in the park? No, I’m working. Right. I don’t think they should do that, those trees have been there since I moved here in 1953. Um, excuse me, but would you mind leaving? I need to work. Oh “work,” ha, ha, that’s right. Mind if I put the TV on?

So here are the ten most dangerous situations you can encounter in your career at home if you don’t establish a plan to avoid them.

1. You get lazy – If you don’t believe me, get a pedometer and measure the number of steps you take from the time you wake up to when you go to bed. You’ll find on average 156 steps a day is nothing more than bathroom and fridge trips. This is probably the single most dangerous habit to fall victim to.  You need to get out more. Know what I mean?
2. You become unwittingly uncouth - After you’ve spent some time alone working from home, you start to lose your normal social inhibitions. You no longer remember to suppress certain crude (and sometimes noisy) behaviors, and you may sometimes pick or scratch various areas not normally picked or scratched in polite company. And then the neighbors start to talk about the verbal abuse coming from within your walls.  Not realizing of course that your just yelling at your computer for refusing to respond at a most crucial time.  If these behaviors spill out while you’re trying to give a product demonstration at your next group meeting you’re in big trouble.
3. Your cats wreak havoc - Cats invariably want to sit directly in front of wherever your attention is directed, which for most of us means on the keyboard or in front of the monitor. Sooner or later, you’ll get up to fetch a cup of coffee or do a set of squats (yeah right) and the cat will stretch… and you’ll be left explaining exactly how you managed to delete that table from the database or why you sent that particular picture to your Mother.
4. Your neighbors don’t get it – Neighbors: “Oh, you work from home, how nice for you.” In their mind that means you spend the entire day goofing off because
5. Your friends don’t recognize you – It’s so long since you last saw your friends, they forget what you look like. You go to pick up that pizza you ordered (because you forgot to eat) and there’s someone smiling at you. You hadn’t noticed because you’re wondering if that last file uploaded okay. Whoa — Steve? Hey Steve, I didn’t recognize you. Wow you got fat! Which takes us to…
6. You forget the unwritten rules of polite interaction – Having had no one to talk to except the cats, dog, and occasional neighbor (who by now has felt your wrath for not leaving when you asked them politely), you haven’t talked to anyone since you left your job and find you’ve unlearned all the normal rules. Out come the crude words and mindless comments. You know — all the stuff you’re used to sharing with the cat.
7. You give in to work avoidance – On those odd days we all have, when you don’t feel like working, there is no one to make you do it. So instead of taking a vacation day, or even pretending to be sick, you waste the entire day staring at the computer, getting distracted by what the cat just hacked up in the corner, staring at the computer some more, staring into space, and then spending the entire evening feeling guilty for a wasted day.
8. Sick days are a thing of the past -  Because you been sucking down medicated syrup all day you still manage to read your mail, upload some files and make some phone calls and thinking you got it beat.  For you to put off your workload you would have to be unconscious or in hospital, right?  Well that may be exactly where you do end up if you don’t heed the warnings your body is giving you when your sick so learn to tell the danger signs.
9. There are no communal lunches – Oh wait, that’s a good thing.
10. You’re imprisoned in your workplace – And the number one worst thing about working from home is that you never, ever leave the office. That report you meant to write wakes you up at 2:34 AM. Normal people make a mental note to take care of it as soon as they get to the office, after a cup of coffee of course. Not you. You sigh, set a reminder on your IPhone, and try to sleep. But your computer is right there, just across the room. You didn’t even bother to turn it off. Oh well, might as well write the report now. Can’t sleep anyway. Next thing you know, your stomach is making odd gurgling noises and you have the beginning of a caffeine withdrawal headache. It’s 1:35 in the afternoon and you have yet to leave your seat.

How Do You Feel About Working From Home Now

While I acknowledge much of what I say is a little stretched it is only to point out that hidden within our glorious comments on how wonderful working from home can be we need to acknowledge the dangers.  By making others aware of the pitfalls we can help them stay on top. and what better way to do it than to demonstrate good practices ourselves.  So if you have a recommended daily schedule that you hand out please include a section on the dangers of working from home