Working from Home
Working from home is the ‘new normal’ for many people - and they love it!
Bluepencil Designs Chartered Architects is a collaborative arrangement of people working from their own homes who work together on different projects at different times and have been doing so since 2013.
There have been occasions when potential clients saw this as a somehow ‘inferior set up’. There was a perception that working from home was not quite as good as renting an office space and travelling to it every day. Hopefully this old fashioned and out dated view will now change.
It is interesting and pleasing that so many friends and colleagues are discovering the many benefits of working from home and some are even planning to continue to do so well into the future.
We all know that in a traditional office environment so much time is spent attending long meetings which may or may not be necessary, ‘catching up’ with colleagues and doing all manner of non-productive office work - such as having to read emails that are sent to ‘all users’ in the organisation and may or may not be relevant (but you don’t know that until you have read them!) Then there is the time spent travelling to and from work, being held up in traffic and getting stressed out because you might be late.
Of course some work is better suited to working from home than others and ours certainly is. As architects specialising in residential design and masterplanning we always work with a team of consultants from other disciplines. It is very easy to keep in touch with them, and each other, by phone or video conferencing. We like the fact that these methods of communication are immediate and we love the apps that allow screen sharing.
We have found that working from home has made us:
More Productive
More Efficient
More Healthy
More Happy
More Creative
The majority of our working days are spent in blissful isolation. We love this because we can totally concentrate on the design process and the efficient PRODUCTION of INFORMATION. This is what our clients are paying for after all.
We have found that working from home is far MORE EFFICIENT than working in an office because there are no distractions and we can just get on with the work and keep on until it is finished. We can work at weekends too if we want to because we have everything we need at home. The more efficient we can be the faster we can produce work for our clients.
Working from home means we can make a HEALTHY lunch (rather than sandwiches) and take a short break to walk the dog/ go for a run/ do a 20 minute yoga class. Good food and exercise mean that working from home makes it easy to stay healthy.
If you are lucky to have a job you really enjoy and home you love being in WORKING FROM HOME WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY.
Being healthy and happy allows us to be far more creative. Working from home can be calm, quiet and peaceful which creates the SPACE FOR CREATIVITY - which for us, is what it is all about.
P.S. Some useful tips
Stick to a routine
Organise a work space away from the family
Only read emails twice a day
Tidy up the area behind you before video conferencing
