The perils of working alone

Working for oneself is great – any stupid marketing decisions that affect you are your own fault; any forced deadlines came to being because you chose them yourself. If you’re careful, you can have your dream job and possibly even get paid for it.

However, even in a horrible, negative working environment where it is clearly a requirement of a manager not to have read Peopleware, you still get to interact with other human beings. Human interaction is important – not only do you need something to talk about to your spouse or significant other when she gets home other than what the cat did, but simply having someone to explain an idea to often makes that idea better.

Since I became concerned that I was going to end up like Jon Arbuckle I’ve tried a few things to help keep myself sane and investigated a few more:

• Meet people for lunch. Now that I can take a two hour lunch break and make up the time that I’m not walking to and from work (more about that below), I can meet people with less flexible schedules. Meeting family members is good; meeting former colleagues is even better because it reassures you what a good decision it was to leave.
• Get exercise. If you were lucky enough to live close enough to your former workplace to walk or cycle there, working at home means you will probably get fatter. Go out for a walk – exercise improves your mental health, and keeps you looking good for your partner for the periods of time where you aren’t taking home a paycheque. If you live in a city, it’s easy to manufacture reasons to walk places – order stuff from Amazon and walk to the post office to pick them up (assuming your post office doesn’t bother attempting delivery of parcels to residential addresses like mine does). Walk to the bank to do some of the things that you could do online. Walk to where you’re meeting someone for lunch.
• Listen to podcasts. You can listen to podcasts while you’re walking (be careful when you cross the road), but I find that they are less distracting as background noise than music. I have Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood on in the background at the moment.
• Co-work. Co-working is basically renting a desk in a shared office; it’s much cheaper than a serviced office because you don’t get secretarial services. There is a blog about co-working in Ireland; a Google search will turn up resources for wherever you are. A similar idea is a sponsored start-up programme; one of these I’ve been recommended is DIT’s Hothouse Programme. This will give you shared office space, but also limited secretarial services, training resources and possibly cash grants.
  

Comments

[Andy Brice]

>meeting former colleagues is even better because it reassures you what a good decision it was to leave.

...and provides excellent gloating opportunities. ;0)

[Steve Cholerton]

All good advice. Exercise and the lunch meetings are definitely a bonus and help give a little perspective. It's tough working alone constantly.