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coming out of the cave

Posted: April 16th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: work | 1 Comment »

Over on the Girlfriendology group on LinkedIn, Donna of Pajama Paycheque shared a link to her post “Combating Loneliness When You Work from Home.” My response is a bit too long for a comment, so I decided to write about it here.

I have worked at home full time for a total of seven years. It can be somewhat isolating, and I do have times when I don’t leave the house for days at a stretch (especially when the weather is nasty — that’s one of the perks of working at home, actually). LIke Donna, I look for opportunties to get out among people during the week and find that just being near other people is enough to counteract the isolation of working solo.

This past year has been my busiest ever for both of my businesses, and it’s looking to maintain that trajectory for the next year. Here’s how I stay sane.

    • I go to the rec center twice a week to do the weight machines and walk — a total of an hour each time. It’s not really a social thing for me, but it does get me out into the world, and because I usually go in the middle of the morning, I can reap the benefits of it being less crowded. I listen to This American Life podcasts or music on my iPod, and it’s a great time to let my mind quietly work on things in the background.

    • I also attend a yoga class once a week. I’ve been going to this same class for almost three years now, as have a few others in the class, and we look forward to seeing each other and catching up on Fridays.

    • In nice weather, I add a walk in the neighborhood on days I’m not going to the rec or to yoga, anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on how much I other stuff have going on. The weights/yoga/walking all help with keeping me in shape, too, since I work at a desk most of the time.

    • I make a point to head out to a local coffee shop for a couple of hours at least once every other week. Most of my work requires too much concentration to work there regularly — some people can focus well with lots of background noise, but I’m not one of them. If I have a bunch of rote work on my project shelves, I’ll gather it up and head out. The coffee shop is also a great place to spend brainstorming and planning time — it can help to be outside of your normal environment to do these things.

    • Probably the most important thing for avoiding isolation has been participating in e-mail discussion lists and forums. I have belonged to Copyediting-L, a discussion list for copyeditors and others in the publishing business, for seventeen years or so. My listmates are my colleagues, and the list is a fantastic resource for advice, reality checks, respectful discussion about points of grammar and style and just about every other topic under the sun, and even comic relief. I would be lost without this list; I learn something new from it every single day. I participate in several other lists and forums as well, across a variety of topics that interest me. As you can imagine, it can be quite easy sometimes to be drawn into a timesuck with such things, so I try to keep an eye on the time I spend on lists and forums and make sure it’s not getting in the way of getting things done.

    • Twitter. Hallelujah! When it first came out, I didn’t quite get the appeal of Twitter, but once I got it — wow. I love this low-key way of staying in touch with friends, family, colleagues, and random strangers throughout the day. (To a lesser degree, this applies to Facebook, too. But it seems like Twitter comes with less drama.) TweetDeck keeps it manageable for me, and I don’t sweat it if I don’t read everything.

    • I do my grocery shopping and other errands during the week when I need a break from work. This lets me take advantage of less busy times at the stores — it can take twice as long to shop on Saturday than on Tuesday — and also gets me out among people.

    • I try to schedule one or two weekday afternoons off each month to go do something fun — a museum, the zoo, exporing a new neighborhood, a long lunch with a friend, stuff like that.

I’m lucky in that I don’t have a set schedule; I tend to work in chunks of time spread throughout the day and week, rather than sitting at my desk from 8 to noon and then 1 to 5. This flexibility was one of the most important driving factors in my decision to work at home, and it’s one of the things that allows me to do what I do to stay connected to the outside world.

What about you? How do you battle isolation?