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Pilot Grove, Missouri | Paul, I've been working from home most (telecom industry) of the time for many years while I was still in the St. Louis area. In 2015 when I moved to the farm it became 100% of the time. Basically for me the only real company assets are my laptop, docking station, one monitor and my cell phone. If anything happens to them regardless of where I am my company will replace them so long as I didn't do anything like deliberately destroy them myself. I generally have left over office supplies from when we had big company downsizing so I don't have to buy much of anything else except maybe a paper calendar (my preference) once a year. My desk is a folding plastic table (Sam's club) but I do have a dedicated office in the basement when we built the new house at the farm (but also had a dedicated home office in last house). I do pay for my own internet. That was a issue some years back when the virtual office started but companies took the stance that you were going to have home internet anyway so they expected to get a "free ride" on it given you were saving so much on commuting. I don't have an issue with that approach. Here I'm very fortunate in that the local electric coop deployed 100% fiber to their entire serving area and I get 1 Gbps symmetrical service for only $80 month. Much faster that either my former St. Louis area office or home internet there at the time. I also generally eat leftovers for lunch so I don't have costs to eat lunch out to take a dedicated lunch to work.
I'm on conference calls multiple times per day so I get the interaction with other workers. There is a little "chit chat" at the start of calls but the virtual nature keeps it to a minimum and probably makes it more productive. Sometimes in a one-on-one call you end up doing more "water cooler" talking. I can tell you working from home 100% of the time is not for everyone. You have to be a self starter. If you are the type that needs someone to micro manage your work, you are not going to be successful working from home. Your job generally has to be IT/data/information based to full time virtual. As you mention with your wife, a hands on job doesn't generally lend itself to home office. My wife doesn't have an outside job that that was a decision we made not long after we got married on how we wanted to raise our family and have her dedicated to the kids.
I'm a very STO in farming but love that I now I can go out at 5pm till dark every day to work on farm tasks when I need to along with weekends. Before I had to drive 140 miles from St. Louis about one weekend a month out to my farm and trying to cram it all in on a weekend and hope the weather worked out. When I was in St. Louis, I did about 25% of the acres myself and did 50/50 crop share with a close friend on the other 75%. Now I do it all but still hire him to do my planting and have the local Coop do my spraying. Since the move my stress has went down and my general happiness has went up. | |
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I'd hate to own commercial office space now
