I've been working at least part time from home starting in 93 and went full time in 96. I'm in the process of going back to school and while I'll eventually be able to do the work at home, I'll have to prove myself in an office first. I am freaking DREADING it :(

Comparing almost 9 years in the corporate world to working at home I can say I'm at least 30% more productive at home.

Thankfully where I'll be working I won't have to wear suits and pantyhose, lol :) After doing that for so long, I had 56 suits to give to the Welfare to Work program.

Sometimes I miss it, the people the socializing. As with working from home, your always working. When I had a office job, when I went home it was over or when the weekend came it was over. Now the work never stops, there is just breaks basically. Also I couldnt imagine doing this single, making friends sitting at home is very hard.

It just depends on your own personal situation.........

I've made MANY friends in this biz over the last 10 years. Some I've still never even met. Others I would, and have, literally trusted with my life.

Working at home or an office has nothing to do with making friends.

It's actually been beneficial because a lot of my old HS friends are stay at home moms. I've been able to spend more time with them over the years, even the one who left us and moved to Chicago, BECAUSE I work at home and pick my own hours :)

I have always missed the office. Most of my life it was my own office, so I suppose that makes a difference, but I also miss the people, their ideas as well as the social side of things. Since I have always been a workaholic, most of my "friends" were really acquaintances from work.

What I miss most though is contact with the customers: I always learned a great deal from watching their reactions to things and listening to them. Much faster than waiting around and then (mostly) guessing at what statistics mean.

I work from home and i like it...

Grass is greener. Just do your work. :)

Good luck with that. Not sure after so much freedom if I could handle being in an environment for 8+ hours a day where if I pop out someone asks "where are you going?":mad:

Mostly heaven.

I have been working from home for around 4 years now and i have to say there is nothing like it.

It takes a certain type of person to be able to stay sane and still work from home, but i have alot of friends in this city that constantly are there to annoy me if i need someone around.

Sometimes i miss meeting new people in the office place but then i remember 99% of people in this world are complete losers in the first place.

Oh, I know. It is NOT something I'm looking forward to, but it's a means to an end. It IS a job that can be done from home - I'll just have to serve some time first :(

I've been working from home over 6 years now. I'd say that it's 85% heaven.

I commute in my underwear (if that) 10 ft. to my office, sit down and fire up the computers. The maid comes in and asks about breakfast, then brings cut fruit, a smoothie and whatever. I start cranking and she comes in about lunch 3 or 4 hours later. I take an hour break to watch TV while I eat lunch and then back at it until whenever.

It does suck not to get as much exercise as I'd like. But then again, I've got a gym downstairs and the sunshine is outside. So I get as much of both as I'd like and we can work whenever.

The lack of social interaction's a bitch. But my girlfriend works from home too, so I get some nookie whenever during the day and I get out and about pretty regularly, so even that is not too bad.

Ya...I stick with 85% heaven, 10% cool and 5% the hell of just not being in synch with most of the world.

I do love working from home, the only downside is the distractions and temptations to put work off... I really do work better when working with others. (jan this is your job, keep pushing me woman!!).

Living here in Tokyo I can only dream of working from home. Sadly, I still early in the goings so I have a day job which sees me hauling my butt to and from on the hell trains in Tokyo every day.

I aspire to one day be able to leave the day job and focus 100% to building an online business! Dreams can come true I say. :thumbsup

heaven for me so far, but i also need to go out and exercise more...

Commuting in Tokyo? My heart goes out to you...

Yeah, mornings on the Denentoshi Line can be quite horrendous. It is referred to as the "hell train" here in Japan and known for being the most crowded of all lines. You know those pics you see online of train station workers cramming people into trains...that's the line you are most likely seeing.

Not so bad when you have a sweet hotty pressed up against you though.
"No, that's not a chopstick...I am very happy to see you." :thumbsup

Thanks for dispelling any doubts I was having about working from home! :thumbsup

I hear ya there. I think I have a touch of that society anxiety. I get it when I go to new places sometimes. Very odd. But I am just getting out more, and figure eventually it will go away.

Working from home was one of the best things i ever did.

I cant stand office's they make me feel sick lol.

100% home-based for going on 9 years here, have loved every minute of it. I get up when I'm done sleeping, not when someone else tells me I have to be up. No hour-long fight through heavy traffic just for the privilege of making someone else rich, no one telling me when I can grab a meal and when it's okay to take a breather outside, I make the rules in my workplace, not some pseudo-nazi taskmaster from hell who thinks he or she is... well you get the idea.

I interact directly with people as much or as little as I want. By phone, in person, whatever. What I don't have are any annoying idiots in my workplace to drive me crazy day in and day out, and after nearly 20 years of working various jobs, side-jobs, and many years as a health care worker at a large hospital I can say with the utmost certainty that every workplace out there with more than 3 or 4 people has at least one annoying idiot.

At my workplace *I* am the only annoying idiot, and I like it that way. :D

heaven for me.

Wow.. I totally forgot about that. I got that so bad several years ago. I started having panic attacks in the grocery store. I had to start having my groceries delivered.

They will probably give that an official name for telecommuters phobias.

Exercise and natural light totally helps.:thumbsup

it has upsides and one downside for me: its pretty much social isolation.
I really started to value my weekends of going out since it's pretty much the only time u can meet new chicks... i live for the weekends, it's like a weekly fix!
And let this be the weekend that eveyone i know has other shit to do... i think this must be the first time in years i aint going anywhere on a sat. night... I need prozac.

I think its a little bit of both. I work from home and as long as I don't have family and/or friends poppin by while I'm trying to get my shit done, I love working from home.

But its also a lot easier to get distracted from what you are doing when working at home.

Working from home rocks wouldn't change that for anything, when I want to commute I call my girlfriend up ask her to lunch, she works 45 minutes away, then I sit in LA traffic get road rage all the way up there almost say fuck it turn around halfway through but continue forward and realize that that shits for the birds and am gald that I work from home when a lunch date takes 3-4 hours due to traffic ( thats including the lunch hour)

LOL, I'm with you on everything but this - I have a "4 pug alarm clock". I am not allowed to sleep past 8AM. But I CAN feed them, try and prevent the "I'm finished with my food, now it's time for me to eat yours" fights, let them out, back in, then curl up and go BACK to sleep. :thumbsup

Though with the puppy, I usually wake up to him tearing apart SOMETHING I've managed to not keep out of his way. This AM, it was a stack of Postits. Oy.

I rather work from my office then from home...

nice thread...

I mostly work from home and have learned a couple things..

First I had to get a nice house with a enclosed room for the office..

Second I have to go out into a social environment at least every other day.

This seems to keep things on the up and up.. Definably the downside is not being around peers throughout the day.

I also love that I can take the laptop and go sit outside in my jammies and work. Corporations tend to frown on that :(

Heaven for the most part.. I love the fact I can wake up anytime I want and work at anytime I feel like.

I miss the some of the perks I had from corporate life (i.e. the season tickets) but I can't go back to my cubicle, it was beside the senior accountants :(

Golden words. Only breaks...

Working from home (rented appt) for a couple of years now, should be getting my own place by June, but I will probably keep this one as an office and get one or two employees for grunt work. The way see it - ideal thing for our type of a job would be to open up something downtown (cafe/bar, carwash, whatever, that brings in a small steady income and keeps you busy a bit everyday so you don't go nuts..)
btw as I was reading this thread I see that a good part of us could fit in that Tom Hanks' part (can't remember the title of the movie) when he's stuck alone on an island with his volleyball buddy Wilson lol

No turning back!:thumbsup

I have noticed that hardly any vacation rentals in Europe include wifi as part of the mix.

My hunch is that many of us homeworkers would sometimes like to work somewhere else for a change.

To this end, here's a little side project aimed at us web-workers:pimp

LUXURY VILLA WITH WIRELESS INTERNET FOR RENT
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