By Next June, I'll Have Been Working From My Kitchen Table for Ten Years
advancedtechnology264 words
A decade of remote work, four jobs and one laptop fire later, a home worker realises the commute never disappeared. It just moved into her head.
Next June, I'll have been working from my kitchen table for exactly ten years, and I've started to suspect the table knows more about my career than I do.
It has seen me through four jobs, two promotions and one disastrous attempt to build an app for dog owners. It has survived coffee, soup and a laptop that once caught fire. By the time the anniversary arrives, I'll have spent roughly twenty thousand hours sitting at it, which is more time than I'll have spent with almost any human being.
Here's the thing nobody warned me about: remote work doesn't remove the commute; it relocates it inside your head. In an office, you leave. At home, at nine in the evening, you'll be clearing the plates, and suddenly you'll be answering one more email, standing up, with a fork in your other hand.
So I've made some changes. From Monday, I'll be working from the public library three days a week. Not because it's quieter, because it isn't, but because walking out of it at six will feel like a door closing behind me.
I'm not giving up the table, though. This time next year, I'll be eating dinner at it, and only dinner. If I've done this properly, I won't have opened a laptop on it for months, and I'll have stopped checking messages before breakfast.
Do you work from home? Then let me ask you something: where does your working day actually end? If you can't point to the moment, maybe it's time you built one. Mine, apparently, is a library door.