Thinking of starting your business by working at home? Here are 5 reasons why that is a bad idea:
- Productivity – You’re functioning at about 75 percent productivity in a coffee shop or at home. The distractions are everywhere. At the coffee shop it’s the annoying person on the phone; at home it’s the cat, the dog, the neighbor, the internet is down, the TV is on…
- Space to think – If you’re serious about building a company –a real company, not an app or a feature – than you’re going to need space. You’re going to need whiteboards and desks and printers and stable Internet service and phone booths and meeting space.
- Don’t lose that third space – Without space, your boundaries between work and play dissolve to the point that you don’t know how to work and how to play. When you live in coffee shops or work at home you tend to go at one speed, whether you’re crushed for time or not. When you have an office with a product deadline looming, you stay there until it’s done.
- World-class teams don’t work from home – For a little while you can get away with attracting people to your kitchen table, but very soon you’ll be competing with other start-ups/companies for talent – and your comfy couch is not going to get it done.
- Space is cheap – Office space is cheap and plentiful assuming you don’t need super nice digs. It’s also surprisingly cheaper than you think when you do a fully loaded cost analysis. When you’re not at the office, the chances of you bringing your lunch are probably lower and the coffee is definitely more expensive.
Adapted from VentureBeat‘s “5 reasons working from home (or Starbucks) is a bad idea“.
Come to think of it I still think it is a good idea. You save on expenses, fuel and food. You don’t need to keep up with never ending fashion trends, you have more time to spend with your family. Setting up a home office would be a good idea.
One more for the road, a disciplined work force can work from anywhere, meaning that productivity does not change, what better place to work than in the environment you are used to? i.e. your home. I beg to differ on world class teams working from home. you would be surprised to know that some of your readers do work in world class virtual teams and do primarily work from our humble abodes. In some cases it is cheaper for some rental costs in some commercial areas are mind boggling and staff are encouraged to work from home. Just to bring you up to scratch, there are ways to monitor employees efficiency wherever they may be located and that can be monitored down to every five minutes during the working day …