When I first started my business and in the early days, I bought into the heedy advantages of working from home that those that work in regular jobs idolize and dream about. Doing client work in your slippers while sipping a cup of coffee — even working from your own bed. No boss, no one to tell you what to do — as long as you do your work that’s all that matters.
After all, who likes to get up at 6:30am or whatever time to get ready, put on a suit and head into their job. All that effort is mostly a wasted expense, and especially if you spend your entire time sitting behind a desk and not interacting with customers face to face (phone doesn’t count) — there really is no point to it. Surely when you become self employed you can start setting your own time, your own hours and things would actually make sense.
At first, this is what I thought and I did this for a while. I would get up out of bed when I felt like it, have breakfast and then open my laptop. On some days, I didn’t even get out of bed — doing a bunch of urgent work without ever leaving my room. The idea was that this was way better than a job, and I liked the feeling of superiority I got from thinking about all those other “suckers” having to wade through rush hour traffic.
But the reality soon hit home.
For me personally and I think people in general are going to go the extreme of laziness. There were times when I would spend the entire day in my room. I would become a hermit and not interact with people, and eventually I realised there is a reason why businesses have people come in at a certain time, and that (gosh) it might actually benefit me.
At a certain point I decided that I simply couldn’t stay at home all day and work on my business. It just wasn’t fun anymore. Not only that, but I was becoming undisciplined and so I made the decision to venture out to find somewhere to work. Here are the tips I’ve learned.
Co-Working Spaces – Why They’re Not All They’re Cracked Up to Be
The first thing you may think of when working outside your home is a coworking space. While this may seem like a good idea, there are some things you should note. The first one being noise. Now, it is true that if you go to work at a coffee shop or other place, you’ll have noise as well, but you would be surprised at just how much nosier some coworking spaces are to coffee shops, etc.
Depending on how you work and what you like, for me personally a loud coworking space was not ideal. What’s worse is while idle chatter in a coffee shop never seems to bother me, when people around are discussing business, it tends to pique my curiousity, which is a distraction in itself.
Then of course there is the cost. A coworking space isn’t expensive, but it is an expense.
Coffee Shops, Websites and the Sugar Rush
Now, some people like to work in coffee shops. This is known as the most popular ‘person that doesn’t have an office go-to’. However I personally only use use coffee shops as a last resort. For example, if I was to go to a coffee shop every day to work, I would feel obligated to buy something. Now taking a place like Starbucks, for example, an average frappucino is $6.50. This might not seem like much, but over a month that comes to over $200.
Not only that but being in a coffee shop naturally means I drink more sugar. It’s just there. In my everyday life, I tend to try to go slow on sugar and things of this nature, and working from a coffee shop tempts me.
The Best Coworking Space – Your Local City Library!
The best place by far to work that I have found is your local library, preferably in a big city.
For example, I live in Brisbane and there is a coworking space for startups. I went to check it out and it was literally four walls with artificial lighting and two pot plants hanging on for dear life. The place gave me a headache just being there for 15 minutes.
The Queensland State Library is a whole different story though. There are 2-story high windows looking over Brisbane river with natural lighting coming through, a quiet atmosphere with no distractions and exhibits downstairs and an unlimited amount of books if I just want to take a break (vs. taking a break by drinking sugar).
The library is one of the best places to work from. However, no one gives it credit.
One of the things I’ve aimed to do was to get in the library as early as possible to maximize the amount of time I spend there — since it closes at 8pm. If I feel like there is too much work to get done, I may look at getting a coworking space, but for now it’s a great option.
