Image Courtesy of roland
Ah, telecommuting. That dream within a dream for the working professional. While most of us are stuck in traffic or trapped behind a cube wall while the person next to us listens to “Come On, Eileen!” for the tenth time the telecommuter is sitting at home, sipping home brewed coffee in their pajamas and basking in the serenity that is home life.
Well, that is how we envision it is, anyway. The truth of the matter is that working from home, while it has many advantages, is not quite the golden apple that those of us in the cube farms picture it to be. While the telecommuter may not have to deal with Lundberg face-to-face, he or she has to deal with a whole variety of productivity hurdles that someone in an office is safely isolated from; Kids, pets, door-to-door salesmen, distracting spouses, telephone solicitors, and the perception that the fact that working from home is not really “working” and as a result you should somehow be expected to drop whatever you are doing at a moments notice to deal with the latest non-work related situation that has cropped up in your life.
There is one other major challenge that the health conscious telecommuter has to deal with. Staying in shape. Having just finished a period of over four years in which I was telecommuting about 80% of the time I can assure you that while it is easier to avoid the weekly doughnut trap in the break room there are a whole series of roadblocks to being healthy that appear when you start working from home. If you find yourself fortunate enough to end up with a telecommuting opportunity there’s a few things you can do to help minimize the negative impact on your physical AND mental well-being.