Working from home

alan — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 01:19:56 +0000

my blog_Working from home

28.09.2009

I've been working from home for close to a year now and it's interesting to see how my attitude to it has changed. After 10 years of working in various different types of office, from the small-startup-in-condemned-warehouse variety to the cctv-system-recording-your-cubicle-time evil corporation type, and after years of school, I had developed a deeply ingrained attitude that work is not fun. Fun is something you have outside of work, and therefore during your working life you fantasize constantly about getting away from it. Weekends of stress release, holidays of escape, early retirement through sensible financial planning, writing a bestseller.

See, I slipped that last one in there because that was always my personal fantasy. I would write a bestselling novel when I was young and bypass the boring, awful world of adult work completely. It's not like I didn't work towards that goal, either, but four novels later, I still didn't feel like I had something publishable. Interesting, quirky, sometimes funny, something my children and grandchildren might one day discover with amazement maybe, but not something that was going to magically turn itself into big fat royalty payments, fame and respect.

In the meantime, while I was busy fantasizing about my ideal life as a writer, I spent more and more of my time on computers. I've always been totally addicted to computer games, but I was one of those kids who didn't just like to play them - at the age of 8 I was learning how to write simple games in BASIC on a Commodore Vic20. I was very proud when I managed to follow the instructions for building a program that would have a conversation with you. I filled the database with phrases to do with self awareness, existence and meaning, then talked to it for hours pretending that was really conscious and yearning to be free of its hardware shell. So, just your average 8-year-old thing to do, really.

I discovered when I got my first job that computer knowledge was indispensable, and a lot of basic programming principles from when I was young came back to me as I wrestled with making Excel and Access do what I wanted. Around that time I saw The Matrix, and some kind of Tunguska-scale lightbulb blew in my head: I wanted to be a programmer. Through a combination of hard work, shameless blagging, fast learning and what was then a shortage of developers, I talked myself into a job for which I was utterly unqualified, as a VB6 programmer (I didn't even know how to debug).

For the years that I worked as a corporate software developer, building websites was just a hobby of mine. Actually, I only really thought of it as something I was teaching myself in order to have somewhere online to display my writing. As the online store of writing grew, so did the website, until I needed a content management system, and David Angier recommended Drupal, so I learned first how to use, then how to customize it. When I started making websites for friends, or friends of friends, I still only thought of it as a hobby. It didn't occur to me to try to make money from it until about 2005, and when I tried, I didn't take it too seriously at first, because I was still in a weird frame of mind regarding work. I still thought that I was only doing nasty horrible adult work until I managed to start writing for a living. So when a contracting job came up in Dublin, then in Cork, I took them and the world went back to normal (working in an office and moaning about it, waiting for the weekends all week).

It was the birth of my son that changed my attitude about what I do for a living. At the time I was living and working in the centre of Dublin. I was earning more than I'd ever made in my life, but fully half of what I made was going on the rent for our lovely big sky-high 2-bedroom apartment. We were talking about buying a house, and I realized that in order to do it, we'd have to move miles out of the city centre, and I'd have to commute to work for an hour or more every day. What's the big deal, right? It's just that it's something I said I would never do. I promised myself that when I was young. I could dabble in the world of work as long as I was free to walk away from it at any moment, but I couldn't trap myself.

So my son was born, and two months later we made a very big leap of faith. I gave up my cushy contractor job (with what has turned out to be perfect timing, just before the collapse of the Irish economy) and we moved into the depths of the Yorkshire countryside, and I started building websites for a living, and taking it seriously this time.

All this started out with my observing how my attitude towards working from home has changed. I talked about how work was not fun, by definition, and that I clung to my escape fantasies of writing and other activities (yeah, at one point I wanted to be a professional poker player too). At first, when I started working from home, it was bizarre. Decide what to do with my own days? Manage my own time? Yeah, right...surely I would just play games all day? At first, that's what did happen: because work is not fun, I would play loads of online chess and poker and then rush to meet deadlines for websites, forcing myself to do the work because it was not fun. But gradually, without my even noticing, this began to change. The thing I had missed, the obvious point, was that I actually really enjoyed my work now. I love building websites. It's endlessly challenging and different and satisfies both the problem-solving and artistic parts of me. I found myself spending less time playing games and more time working. Being in business for myself has made me realize with great clarity that if I don't make it happen, it will never happen, and there will be no excuse, and far from stressing me, this has released a great deal of energy.

I was at the dentist the other day and explained what I do, and he commented that it must be hard to motivate myself to work every day without the spur of an office and a boss and all that. He said that he didn't think he could do it. I found this completely bizarre, that this highly skilled and intelligent person thought he wouldn't be able to motivate himself to work, and I explained that it was really no effort, because I enjoyed the work; he didn't say anything, and the obvious thought occurred to me: he doesn't enjoy his. He doesn't know what it would be like to enjoy his work. Work is not fun. Then he started drilling my teeth, and that wasn't fun for me either, so I hope he at least got some satisfaction from that.

So here I am: I've been quite lucky. I took a risk that seems to be paying off. The website jobs are coming in, and I have the indefatigable Marc De'Ath to thank for much of that. I get to work from home; which means that if I want to I can play around with my son for half the day, take country walks, and then catch up in the evening and at night. It means I get to watch films while I work, and have as much coffee and chocolate as I want without being laughed at (except by Jo). It means I can live in the countryside and not have to commute anywhere for my job. Most of all, I've discovered that I love my job, after doing it for several months, which means that if I have to work hard, I don't feel hard done by. I'm not missing out on anything. I'm not looking forward to the weekend. I'm not waiting for retirement. My job is fun. I'll be very happy to do this for as long as I can.

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