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Some benefits of working from home are: 1) living very close to your work, 2) flexible hours, 3) low operating costs (if you are a business/freelancer), and 4) having a quiet place to work. However, there are challenges.

Living very close to your work

Your office/workspace is across the hallway or, if your office is set up in the bungalow or shed, just across the yard. It takes less than a minute to travel to and from work every day. The only travel time or expenses you incur are when you need to travel to other locations; for example, go to the post office, collect documents from clients’ homes or consult with clients in their workplaces.
Time is money. That time that you save every day by not having to travel to or from work can be spent either working or, better still, using that half an hour before and after work as extra rest and relaxation.

Flexible hours

Because you live so very close to your office, your hours are extremely flexible, which allows you to take on far more work than you could if you worked in an office located somewhere else. If you must meet a tight deadline, you can work as late as you need to. You can work weekends if you need to. If your child is of school age you can work mainly during those school hours, although if you’re running a small business you will probably find that you’ll also need to work most evenings and some weekends as well. If you have childcare, you can treat all those childcare hours as ‘work hours’. If your child is sick and you can’t work during the day, you can work all night if needs be to get the job done. If you don’t have any children you can work as many hours per week as you want.

When I first started operating my small business from home, I worked 50 to 60 hours per week because I loved my work, loved making money, and working from home gave me flexibility; I could work day and night if I wanted to. I worked very long hours for years. Then I had a child. Because I had childcare support and worked every evening, I was still able to work quite long hours but had to be far more flexible in regard to when I worked, and since having a child I’ve averaged 40 hours per week, not 60.

Low operating costs

For many small business operators, working from home is far more cost-effective than working in a separate rented workspace.

The operating costs of working in a home-based office are far lower than in a stand-alone office in town. Electricity, heating and cooling costs less when your office is based within your own home. If you don’t own your own home, the office portion of your house costs far less in rent than if you were to rent a stand-alone office in town.

If you’re working at home you don’t have the cost of petrol or public transport that you would have if you were to travel to an office every day, and you can eat lunch at home every day instead of eating out, and make your own coffee instead of going to a café, so your meal expenses are very low.

Also, when you are working from home you can, of course, claim expenses such as stationery, office equipment, computer software, lighting and heating, and any other business expenses incurred.

A quiet place to work

If your home is located in a quiet area and the other people living in your home are not noisy, one of the main benefits of working from home is your home-based workspace will be quiet. Compare a home-based office where the main source of noise is the tapping of computer keys, with an occasional telephone ring, message-beep or printer-hum. Sitting in my office, now, I also hear from outside the window the wattle birds chattering, a chook clucking because she has just laid an egg, and a distant neighbour’s lawnmower or whipper-snipper or something. That’s all. It is quiet and I like it.

There are also no other people working in your office, or building, and so none of the distractions of larger workplaces: no gossip, no interruptions, no sudden requests to get your head out of your current task and do something else. If you turn your phone off whilst working on an intensive task there are no telephone interruptions either. This lack of interruption or distraction means you can just get on with the job at hand and do it until it’s finished, or until it’s break-time.

The challenges of working from home

Working from a home-based office/workspace can be very challenging and not everyone is able to deal with the flexibility, responsibilities and isolation of operating a home-based business. Many of the benefits of working from home are double-edged swords.

For more articles about working from home, and work-life balance, go to:

• Nobody’s perfect (when working from home)
• How many hours do you need to work (when working for  yourself)?
• The pros and cons of freelancing

Proofread by James Austin.

Image: Copyright SW Kane.