What Everyone is Saying: Pros & Cons of Working from Home

Once a distant dream, working from home is a reality for many of us, including the person writing this article. With the advent of IT roles that can be done from anywhere, as long as there’s a PC and an internet connection, working from home has become increasingly popular.

Here are some of the pros and cons of working remotely for those looking to get into this lifestyle.

Pro – No Commute

Once I started working remotely, the thing I appreciated the most by far is that my morning commute consisted of going from my bed to the table with my laptop. On average, workers from around the world lose from 30 to 60 minutes every day in commuting. Once you work from home, you’ll save quite a lot of time, as well as money spent on commuting. What’s more, you’ll be doing mother nature a favor by not burning any fossil fuels.

Pro – Every Day is Casual Friday

Once upon a time, I used to work as an English teacher in a primary school. This meant dealing with a lot of kids screaming, as well as showing up to work in decent looking clothes. Once you start working from home, the most you’ll have to do is put on your pajamas so that you’re not cold. In other words, unless you have a lot of video calls, your work attire can be virtually anything. Seriously though, don’t work in pajamas.

Pro – You Get to Work for a Wider Pool of Employers

Coming from a country such as Serbia, if you want to work in an IT company as a writer/marketer, your choice is quite limited. Besides a few agencies, you don’t have a lot to choose from. Once you start working from home, you can choose from hundreds of thousands of employers worldwide.

Not only can you gain more experience as a remote worker, you’ll be able to earn more as well.

Pro – You Get to Work When You Want To

This is highly dependent on the company you’re working for, but for the most part, people who work from home have flexible working hours. Especially if you’re a freelancer, you get to set your own deadlines and work when you’re the most productive. If you’re responsible and can handle your own workload, this is a blessing. If you’re not great at time management, flexible hours can turn into a race against the clock to meet deadlines. In any case, it’s beneficial to have a choice.

Pro – Better Work Environment

Have you ever dreamed of working from a beach or staring out of a coffee shop as snow falls out the window? Maybe you want to work from a trailer and travel around the country or continent with your laptop and a sleeping bag. Whatever the case, you get to pick where you work from, instead of settling for a cubicle or an office at a company headquarters.

Con – Difficult Communication

If you’re the type who’s used to chatting with your coworkers between work sessions, we have some bad news. Most remote workers communicate by chat, voice and video apps and for the most part, there’s very little human interaction. For highly extroverted people, working remotely can be quite a toil.

Con – the Work Environment

Remember the blessing of working from your own home? Sometimes, it’s anything but a blessing. One of the biggest challenges for myself as a remote worker is exactly the people around me. Your friends and family won’t take your job so seriously, and they may ask you to take care of the kids, run some errands, buy the groceries, wait for the delivery man… On the other hand, there are issues as watching out for your kids, the neighbors’ noisy dog, the construction workers on the street – there are far too many factors which you cannot influence.

Con – You May Overwork Yourself

Contrary to the popular belief, remote workers don’t sit around all day eating Cheetos and watching Futurama reruns. Well, maybe a little bit, sometimes. For the most part, the issues that remote workers have with productivity are far from the truth. If anything, remote workers are even more productive than their office counterparts since they can choose their best time and place to work.

In fact, they’re so productive that they can put themselves in a situation where they do too much work. Since your home is your workplace, it’s often hard to separate the two. Before you know it, you can catch yourself answering emails and handling requests at 11PM, even though you clocked out at 4PM. Overworking is real when working from home and it requires great time management skills to keep at bay.

Con – Health Problems

To be fair, working from home gives you quite a lot of advantages in terms of health. There’s more time for workouts and you can even get a decent cardio session in your work breaks.

At the same time, remote working makes you prone to leading a sedentary lifestyle. Some of the colleagues I worked with would sometimes stay in their homes for days before venturing out to take a walk and get some groceries. Since you don’t really have to go anywhere to get your job done, it’s easy to stay indoors for days on end.

Moreover, a lot of people who work from home are used to working from their beds or sofas, without proper ergonomic chairs. In the long run, you can end up with serious health related issues if you don’t balance out working from home with proper exercise.

Conclusion

So, are there more pros or cons to working from home? Seeing how the majority of remote workers don’t intend to work from an office any time in their future, working from home definitely beats an office environment. Besides no commute, working for a larger selection of employers, having a better work/life balance, you also get to binge watch Futurama and eat Cheetos – sometimes.