Confessions of a Quiet Home Office Worker

I do project work and consulting, and my office is one of the largest rooms in my home. Like a lot of home office workers (I prefer “home office professional”), I always have multiple projects at once. So working all the time is just part of the deal. If I’m not working on a client’s project, I’m working on one of my own. This is not a complaint – far from it.

Blast from the Past: Rule of Work #1: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work. It’s a good life. A life of constant meaning.

That said, it can be hard to convey the particular circumstances of it to people looking in from the outside. It might be explaining to someone why you aren’t treating e-mail like chat and responding instantly, or why you’re selective about volunteer work and need to get paid for your core competencies (you know that auto mechanic who is always getting hit up to help with friend’s cars?), or just that yes, as a home worker, you are entitled to sleep, go to the gym, and spend time with your family – you’re not giving that up and sitting there waiting patiently for any word to drop from your various contacts, clients, and colleagues. My wife and I recently had to establish for her business that yes, it’s OK, and absolutely necessary for a hairdresser to take a couple of days off per week and get enough rest and down time. But aside from the basics – what your work is (avoiding mission creep), and when you do it (avoiding the “on call” nightmare),  the simplest way to define your work environment and work process is to outline your approach to the atmosphere of constant communication. So here, in brief, is how one office works. These are the terms of my self-employment:

Hours Flexible: I might be working at 3am or in bed by 9pm. I might sleep until 4pm, which might be sleeping 5 hours or 15. I work off of appointments. I make them, keep them, and then the rest is up to me. Of course there are deadlines, but they’re flexible. We’ve all heard “under promise and over deliver”. That’s deadlines, too. If I say something usually takes two weeks, it’s because it usually does. But if a blizzard wipes out the internet or power, then it is what it is – we don’t swear by deadlines, and we don’t miss them. Also, with any kind of project work, your own deadlines have to account for client deliverables. If clients hear “usually two weeks, assuming all your deliverables in place to start” and they send their pieces 13 days in, you tell them “about two weeks from now”. If you get it earlier, well and good, but fixed deadlines are a source of ruin – our deadlines are like our work hours – they’re movable feasts. Hours flexible and by appointment means too that I avoid phone tag. I set phone appointments and I don’t miss them (I’ve missed only one in the history of my business, it was with a friend, and I’m still embarrassed by it). There’s nothing worse than burning time for everyone by getting together with clients “whenever”.

Not On-Call: Personally, I never answer the phone, unless it’s my wife. I know that’s radical, but it works in my line of work. For one thing, I’d never get anything done – I’m actually working on clients’ projects, after all. For another, I’m a consultant, so I charge for phone time, and so I call outbound only, by appointment. Other than that, voicemail messages are transcribed instantly and sent to e-mail, where I respond to them while multi-tasking, without interrupting scheduled projects. I set appointments by e-mail, so everything goes smoothly. When I picked up the phone and answered all my inbound calls, I got unplanned (so un-billed) calls 24/7 – picking my brain, asking for advice, seeking a “how to” that “shouldn’t take long” (“you’re a mechanic, can you just listen to my engine for a sec – I know it’s a weekend…”), and I lost tons of hours I’ll never get back to “I just prefer to work exclusively by phone” – even for the most trivial matters. So I stopped. I’m not a call center. I can always hire one, but then the price has got to see a 400% increase. Seriously – I save bookoo buck for my clients by NOT putting Suzie or Jim or Karesh on that phone 24/7. So now when someone calls my business line, I get it as e-mail, and that also weeds out the spam calls, which is a nice bonus. And it converts a synchronous medium (“I want you *right now*!”) into an asynchronous one (email response: “I got your msg. The answer is yes.” or “Thursday works better for me – how about 2pm or 4pm your time?”). Besides, frequently I can actually respond faster – instead of wasting everyone’s time playing phone tag, I often get an e-mail response out without missing a beat (but again, I don’t promise it).

Blackberry Not Included: I don’t use mobile devices. Again, if I did, I’d never sleep, eat, or anything else. I’m not part of the Blackberry culture, and not because I’m somehow technologically challenged or old-fashioned. It’s because I don’t want to be stalked by every little concern, wish, or personal observation everyone in my “network”  might have. You’ve seen those commercials where someone introduces the crowd behind them: “this is my network”? Really, that’s exactly what it’s like for a lot of people. I can’t get work done that way. If you were in an office, would you hire the person who is always on their phone to work on your team? Neither would I. How about this: do you take your “device” into the john with you? That’s what I had to do when I answered my phone all the time – if I took e-mail along too, I’d literally have to shower with it. E-mail is in one room and waits until I see it. When I leave that room, it’s family time only. I don’t promise clients always-on response time, I don’t send out a general announcement just to take a day off to myself or with my family, and I don’t apologize “for just now getting back to you” after 8hrs because a lot of people treat e-mail like chat, spend all day in Facebook, and keep their earpiece on and Mobile e-mail vibrating in a holster. I treat myself as the busy president of my company, not the Blockbuster cashier of my company. The results are, I communicate effectively, selectively, and I accomplish things my clients need, generally by the time they have to ask. And above all, I get peace in my work.

Rule of Work: It is always, always the goal to work on, by, and according to your own terms. You’ll compromise, but if there’s no end to that, it’s not work, it’s servitude.

Terms of Self-Employment: So, when I hired myself full time, those were the terms I accepted and I have insisted on abiding by them. It’s different than how a lot of self-employed people work, I know. I don’t begrudge them their e-mail holsters, as long as they’re not doing it while driving – and then of course I think they’ve got a screw loose (look at how they’re weaving over the line). We’ve each got to define our own office rules – the terms of our own self-employment – how free we are, how harried, how much of our lives belong to who and what. How effective we’re going to be vs. how thinly spread. My wife finally deciding on two days off to reset, means she’s stellar all the time, not stellar for 10 hrs and tired for 2. Maybe, though, by drawing a circle and defining some time as exclusively ours and our families’, some part of our lives as immune to the interests of others – by not defining self-employment as a modified form of wage slavery, where anyone with a communication device can wind it up and make you jump as surely as a foreman in a yard – where you’ve traded one boss for hundreds – maybe we’ll all encourage one another to hold the line for the dignity of our professions in the face of all the incessant yacking. If you don’t think about communications, you’ll spend so much time on the phone and in e-mail that may have stopped doing what you love. And what good is that?

Rule of Work: How you handle communications will determine whether you do what you love or merely talk about doing it.

Freelancing vs. Mom’s Couch

CBS was talking this evening about the growth of freelance work – projecting significant growth over the next couple of years. What was striking was how negative the reporting seemed. One of the two people interviewed was saying “the important thing is not to be idle” and the reporter presented freelancing as being just one rung above collecting unemployment – with employment clearly being preferable to freelance work, the moment the former is available. The entire piece presented freelance work as a regrettable sentence, a misfortune, and implied that somehow it means less money. What are these people smoking?

What we’re seeing is a lull in the parental relationship between employer and employee, and I think that’s a good thing. But it’s like listening to 30-year old men complain that they can’t live in Mom’s basement forever. The idea that employee status is superior, is the goal, is in fact the pinnacle of success in our culture is assumed, as an unaccountable absolute. Didn’t we just learn the opposite? Apparently not. This is my biggest gripe with those who keep saying, “it’ll turn around soon” – like Napoleon – “this’ll all be over by Spring”. Besides the fact that they’ve been saying that for the last two years, a tiptoe through the tulips faith-in-magic kind of optimism that has no basis in how economics really works, there’s no real learning – no real sense of cultural repentance – it’s as if there were nothing wrong with the system as it was, and this is something that just happened to us. It’s like listening to a culture of perpetual adolescents who ruined their credit, present it as if they just had some bad luck – the universe didn’t smile on them, and are clearly going to be shopping like mad as soon as they can be, applying for that credit card the moment they’ve got a chance.

There are three lessons of this economic event for adults. By adults, I mean those of us who aren’t looking for yet more dependency on the cultural parents that failed us so spectacularly. The first is that you obviously can’t dump trillions into a global policy of invasion and not break the empire’s bank. This is not primarily a political blog, so we’ll just say that and set it aside, but if we don’t believe things just magically ‘happen’ to us, we’ve got to say the cost of hubris is a factor. The second lesson is that it’s your fault, all this, and my fault, and we all share in this fault in some way. It’s silly to explain it as just a few rogue bankers, or the entire lending industry, or an irresponsible bunch of poor people (if you’re that type). You did this too, and I helped, so adulthood means not blaming everyone *except* ourselves for “getting us into this”. The third lesson we’ve mentioned before – all the BS that gets parroted from previous generations about job security, education being the ticket to vocational wellbeing, economic stability being the same as having a job, etc – it’s hoodoo – and we can’t go on believing in the face of empirical evidence.

What this economic shift offers us, actually, then, is a chance to grow up – a chance to get ourselves a little cleaner – an opportunity to live soberly. It’s interesting to watch even those who pride themselves in the rhetoric of self-reliance wail about “jobs”, as though that’s all that matters – someone coming to bail us out as individuals, all the while lamenting the “bail out” of the banks (which we all generally agree is a looting). Jobs. What’s wrong with going freelance? The CBS piece linked it with the notion of a lowered wage standard in most jobs. Well, that’s likely true, wage standards are likely going to be lowered for some time to come. Partly because we used an unprecedented portion of our economic potency to take over a number of pipeline routes and petroleum deposits in the Middle East. But are we really saying that the big disaster is we might end up working for ourselves? Or freelance?

And the notion that freelance work necessarily pays less, I find dubious. At first, some of it will. After all, there’s the silly notion in some corporate circles that freelancers are less valuable, more transient, and somehow ‘deserve’ less than employees. Sensibly, the opposite is true. We pay our own benefits, our own taxes, our own expenses, and there’s cost involved just being freelance. On top of that, you survive by being superior. Someone wants to pay me employee’s wages, and the discussion is over – it’s got to be a lot more. Desperation is going to make some people foolish in what they’ll accept, and they’ll price sell. OK, for a while. But it won’t last. A lot of us are going to get strong, while they just get robbed.

First, think about it – shouldn’t you, if you were a freelancer, be entitled to what they’d pay a staffing agency for a temp? I don’t mean what they’d pay the temp – I mean what they’d pay the agency itself. You incur the same costs, so damned straight that’s what you should be paid. Probably more. The staffing agency won’t pay for your doctor bills – you’ve got insurance costs to cover.

Second, the shoe is going to shift feet. As the number of freelancers doubles, we’re going to find new ways to organize, connect, and consolidate resources. The Freelancers Union is seeing a nice influx about now. The growth of social media indicates that a coming trend is for any set of disconnected people fending and fighting for themselves to, as they grow, utilize the attitudes and techniques of social media, which in turn will further that growth, and in turn further consolidate their ability to support one another, act in concert – in mental, emotional, and physical unison. In other words, what’s coming is an initial feeling of desperation followed by a transferrance of clout – a shift of power – from the employer to the contractor and to the freelancer.

What’s beautiful, from a freelancer’s perspective, is that they don’t see it yet. Opportunity is glowing in the dark, and they don’t see it. And this will help further the future of freelancing. The other thing that’s going to happen is an intellectual and emotional campaign to retain employer-like control in the context of contractor and freelance relationships. Be ready for it. Yes, it’s already there. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. But not to worry. The social media trends would seem to indicate an incredible likelihood of taking this out of their hands.

So, I’m not ready to lament about being out on my own, or wax nostalgic about mom’s sofa. I’m not sitting around and mourning the growth of freelancing and looking at it as a social problem. For one thing, some of us are thinking about how to make it a source of prosperity. For another, the freelancing trend offers genuine hope for a more mature, more self-aware, more ethical set of relationships – a more equitable exchange of value between service providers and service buyers.

Instead of standing out there shouting “jobs, jobs” with the obfuscators, the anti-benefits crowds, or the people who are just going along, why not ask for reduced taxes on the self-employed, and opportunities for access to the same kinds of benefits (especially group health care) that employees have long relied upon? The Freelancers Union, Free Agent Source, and congressional legislation allowing the self-employed to act as groups for purchasing healthcare all seem like positive directions for this.

I’ve only one thing to say to the CBS group about their report: I hope to remain *unemployed*. I’ve no problem with employment per se, but it’s not the holy grail – doing what you love for a fair exchange – that’s the target. I like being freelance, or self-employed, or an entrepreneur. I have no desire to trade freedom and prosperity for the illusion of security – if employment is an end in itself, rather than meaningful work, great pay, good benefits, and diversified sources of income, then why? Just because Mom has a nice couch? Relying on a single, canned income source wasn’t a good bargain at the start of this thing (just look what happened). It’s not a good bargain dealing with the fallout. You CBS guys should look on the bright side, or at least acknowledge that there is one, even if the cost was, in the estimation of many of us, unacceptable.