Work work work

Image via Wikipedia

Telecommuting is more work than many office dwellers think. Not only are you doing the same workload you did before you left the office to work at home, but you are also doing the additional job of marketing yourself to the very company that hired you and continually promoting your capabilities to remind them why you should remain on the payroll.

Over the last three years there have been many times when work that would once have fallen to me by default has been passed on to a co-worker. Largely I think this is due to the "out of sight, out of mind" phenomenon that tends to affect telecommuters. Interesting enough a fellow telecommuter posted this article yesterday, and if you work remotely it has some great advice.

You also have to continually deal with what I call the mini mishaps. The computer trouble, internet going out, nuts knocking on the front door, the gold fish spitting rocks at you through the tank...all fun stories I'm sure will surface soon!

Crazy Days

Life as a telecommuter varies for me. Some days, when I don't have a super pressing deadline, I have to force myself to focus and work steadily on tasks that are more monotonous than fun. Fortunately there haven't been too many days like that lately.

What there has been are the typical snafus that accompany working from a home office (or a desk built into the kitchen like I do :)).

Yesterday there was a parade of repair men tromping through my house. The first one showed up right on time around 2, he was the cable guy, and being completely into what I was working on I showed him to my husband's wall mounted new plasma TV and left him to fix the broken input. It wasn't until 10 minutes later when a team of Best Buy repair men showed up that I realized the cable guy was there to fix my phones, not my husband's TV. There was a bit of embarrassment on my end and chuckles from the various testosterone infused experts in the house when I went up to shuffle them around. After all that neither party could fix what they came for and both rescheduled service calls for next week. So the saga continues!

Today I woke up sick as a dog, took the day off work and dosed myself with DayQuil. After sleeping for a few hours I woke up feeling better. Having already taken the day off I decided to get some personal business done and am now feeling quite accomplished for getting my Craigslist listings up, packages mailed, books sent off for www.paperbackswap.com, a few groceries (mostly OJ and Superfood juice by Odwalla) and a tiny bit of housecleaning done.

Realizing what all I accomplished from a day free of general work (sick or not I got a few things done that have been cluttering up my desk for sometime), I am now determined to take 1 day a month off to play "catch-up" for the house!