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Health & Fitness

Home Office Still The Office

Working at home has pitfalls as well as pleasures.

Twenty five or so years ago, a friend of mine who was a big-time public relations pro, at the top of the business with posh offices on Manhattan's 42 Street, decided to quit the rat race and opt for the country life. "I'm taking some clients and moving to the Rhode Island shore on the other side of Newport," he told me. I distinctly remember him salivating over the chance to wear a "red-and-black checkered shirt" each day while at work, instead of a suit.

In hardly more than a year, he was back living in the suburbs and commuting to the Big Apple's bustling core. Perhaps he missed the big money. I know that he missed the action of the big city, despite its chaos and conflict . As beautiful as the hinterlands were, he had contracted cabin fever; he had gone stir crazy.

Loneliness and boredom can exact an unexpected toll on someone who decides to forgo the corporate office and work at home, especially if it is a full-time deal. Isolation is even more likely if the home is in a rural or even exurban area. Some people just can't take it but they don't know until they try it.

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I have been working out of a home office as a journalist and author since 1971, starting in Fairfield and moving within a year to the house in Killingworth where I still work and live. Back then, only accountants used the term "home office." I just called it "working on my own."  I have had assignments and clients that took me far afield, in this country and abroad. In between trips, there were long stretches at home -- I almost said "home at the typewriter" but since the late 1980s, it's been the computer -- during which I never had a face-to-face conversation with a colleague. Even freelance friends in New York City who regularly laid their eyes on fellow writers and editors, told me of feeling lonely when working solo. To succeed, one must fight the loneliness and also accept it as going with the territory.

And forget about working in a bathrobe or pajamas. Sooner or later, the product of your work will look as if you were half asleep when you generated it. A home office is at home, of course, but it is still your office. I knew an advertising executive who left his firm of employment to start his own out of a converted screened-in porch at the back of his home. He could have walked from the living room on to the porch through a sliding door. Instead, he donned a business suit, packed his briefcase, walked out the front door and went around back, entering his office from the outside. That might have been extreme but it kept his business edge.

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Not that you can't have fun working at home. One of my pleasures is looking over my computer through big windows overlooking my little backyard pond. I see everything from whitetail deer slipping through the brush at the pond's eastern margins to the roil of whirligig beetle clusters distributing the water's surface. Pleasure can be unduly seductive, however, and I must fight the urge to drop my work and begin exploring my pond up close. While a home office may not have a water cooler, there is much more opportunity for distraction while working at home. Much of it comes to you in the form of friends who never quite figure out that you are really on the job, feeling the pressure, and drop in to chat -- and chat and chat. Aside from friends, there is the family to consider. Mine was never a problem but in some families, house rules need to be published and observed.

There is another facet to working at home that often escapes people planning to do it. You never really get to leave work. Even if you stay out of the work space, it is always there. At least, that has been the case. Nowadays, with virtually all employees chained to their workplace by cell phones and other electronic slave collars, few people ever really get away from it all.

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