Flying with eagles or feeding pigeons? – Bad habits of a home worker

“I feed the pigeons, I also feed the sparrows too, it gives me a sense of enormous well-being.
Then I’m happy, safe in the knowledge that there will always be a bit of my heart devoted to it.” Blur 1994

Little unimportant jobs have a nasty habit of cropping up and ruining what could be a productive day to the self-employed home worker. We put off starting that next urgent project because we get tempted by tasks that stack up around the house. Filling the washing machine, hanging out the last load, hoovering, emptying the dishwasher, sweeping the kitchen floor, we’ll chuck some food in the slow cooker hoping it will emerge as something edible at 6pm.

We convince ourselves daily that life would be that much better if we got that next chore out of the way. THEN FINALLY we’d be able to get cracking with the ‘proper work’. Suddenly it’s 3pm, the house has no discernible improvements, no billable work has been done and the school run beckons. Sound familiar?

I have many times started worrying about the school run at least 2 hours before the school run actually begins. Why? Because I needed at least 2 hours to properly make a dent in my new project. What’s the point in starting it now? I decide instead I could make a massive dent in washing up the pots and pans that seem to have built up! By 8pm, the kids are out of the way and asleep, finally I can begin that two hour stint of work. Eventually it’s 10pm and I can pat myself on the back for being a hard working freelancer, someone who doesn’t work for ‘the Man’. Of course, I’m fooling myself, most of that mess that surrounds me is the detritus of living that my very being there has caused!

Working from home is a rare treat when you are predominantly based in an office, no commute, all that freedom, what’s not to like? However, after it’s long since become your daily routine, it can become lonely. Being a mediator for squabbling kids after school and shouting at them to find their shoes is no social life. Our brains are supposed to be stimulated by other people, it’s what makes us human. Throughout prehistory, we spoke, we listened, we sang, we worked together. We learnt from others, we made our own mistakes but we also remembered solutions we’d been told by others. Without society and language we’d still be sat in the trees in Africa. Being sat in a kitchen in front of a laptop procrastinating is not something we’ve evolved to be able to cope with. I confess, this is somewhat of a ‘First World Problem’, but it’s still a problem.

MyWorkSpot is Maidenhead’s answer to try to combat these self-employment loneliness issues. It’s a way to create a community of like-minded people who want to get out of the house and come to an environment where work can actually happen, where people can surround themselves with a friendly group of ‘work mates’ who could even provide a network of suppliers or customers depending on if your needs and skills match.

Sometimes having someone working opposite you can be contagious, pushing you to finish off what you were doing, before you share a cup of tea and get back to it. I sometimes wonder to myself what the perfect Coworking space would be, but I keep on coming back to the same thing, I start considering instead what the perfect Coworking GROUP would be. I need people, people who are keen, people who want to be there. I want to share information, I want to hear your ideas, I want to share the mistakes I’ve made before and learn from yours too.

Working from home and interested in trying coworking in Maidenhead? Register your interest and tell us what you want from your coworking space

p.s. As if to prove a point, Dave asked me to write this well over a week ago. I’ve been meaning to sit down and get it done a million times. Finally I’m sat down in a café away from the house and I’ve finally got around to it!