If I was at work today I’d go home sick but since I work from home I’ll just carry on working. If I was at home sick I’d probablt be bored out of my mind by now, so I’m glad of the computer and communication to distract me from my aches and pains. This would be good practice for everybody when the swine flu pandemic re-emerges in the autumn and we all have to stay at home for a month or so.
A monthly blog? Whatever. In October the marketing niche continued to reap sporadic but quite reasonable rewards, so most effort went into more of the same, really and starting to think about developing a permanent site. Also messing about with adsense and other small beer activities. Having one blog post slashdotted turned a slipping technorati rank into the opposite.
Looking forward, I’ve suddenly landed a couple of months contracting work so the marketing niche will be more of a spare time activity, but with the security of being well funded into 2008, by which time the little trickles of income will have stood a good chance of having grown into enough to cover the necessary expenses. So that’s a healthy situation to be in really. Pyjamanating is working out OK for me, but of course never in the way that was expected.
I wonder what’s next.
I knew it would be a challenge adapting to a new routine and of course like everything else, events never turn out as expected.
I’ve kind of just slipped into this work from home lifestyle without consciously sitting down and working out exactly what I need to do first and prioritising anything yet. That’s not worrying me too much, I know that anything pressing will find a way to gain my attention, but there is a lot that I could do to improve my personal efficiency and writing this blog is probably going to be a key activity towards that end.
Yet my rate of blogging has decreased in an eratic way, on both this and other blogs. One positive reason for that is the absence of morning train journeys on which there is nothing else to do except think. I don’t listen to personal audio, so this was a time for quiet contemplation, albeit in a desperately uncomfortable and crowded situation often!
The trips out to meetings and suchlike seem to be a stimulus, so I’l continue to plan for around two a week.
One thing I’m aware of but haven’t sorted out yet is the physical state of my workstation. The adjustable height swivel chair is just not right, and I can’t maintain a good posture. That’s interfering with my work.
So where can you buy a chair with four legs thes days?
Hi, this is my first post on this blog so I thought I’d introduce myself. I’m Linda and I’m not employed by anyone and that’s OK – I think! Maybe…. (feel like I’m at an AA meeting!)
I’d been looking for a ‘real’ job for months now, whilst all the time saying that I wanted to work from home for myself someday. Well, if someday, why not today? It’s a bit scary and I do feel a slight panic but it’s exciting too. I’m going to blog here about my journey and the changes I have to make to move from this being a dream to reality. I hope people will follow along and perhaps together we can make this interesting transition.
I made a start yesterday by brainstorming all the things I can do to earn money without being in a job. Today I took the first section of the brainstorm and made a list of actions I can take to move each one of those ideas on. I’ve put them on a to do list on pbwiki and set myself some SMART targets to get them done. As the first section was Blogging getting started on this blog is one of those actions and I can cross it off now 
Well, I have to admit yesterday was hard going for various reasons. The online application went in before the deadline, a little brief perhaps, but better than missing out. I am reminded that the human resources people have seriously broken the whole process of recruitment. CVs are not accepted and the trend these days is to require a whole bunch of evidence which matches the candidate against a person specification. The only trouble is that the person spec is drawn up by a committee of stakeholders, who each have to add their own slant into the proceedings in order to exert their influence. The result is a long list of essential skills and experience, across a broad range of fields, in depth and with proven knowledge of both the discipline and the sector. In other words they end up insisting on looking for somebody who is already doing the same kind of job for the same type of organisation, who is capable of being all things to all people. Then they offer a short term contract on the lowest terms and conditions in the market. Anybody who is a suitable applicant on their terms wouldn’t dream of applying, and anybody who does apply is inherently unsuitable for the job as described, and thus likely to be filling in the application with a whole load of answers which bear little or no resemblence to the truth.
Enough of that for a while.
Today I need to get started on designing a course outline for some part time adult education in the local boroughs. It needn’t be too detailed, in fact it needs to be quite adaptable so I’ll use a wiki for the draft and invite my partner to collaborate. This will be creative and fun!
If it doesn’t rain all day like yesterday I’ll spend some time in the garden too.
The countdown ends tomorrow, without me having made too much of a fuss about it. The occasion will go unmarked and largely unnoticed until September. Just one more payslip.
I won’t miss the journeying, the hustling crowds, nor many of the people.� I may miss the new air conditioning system if the weather continues to return to what it should be.
Yesterday was busy. In one area I hope to have secured some paid work for at least 5 days a month homeworking, and I applied to a neighbouring borough to teach a couple of short courses. These are likely to be just 2 hours a week each, probably at weekends or evenings. Another one I was hoping to land has yielded nothing but silence so far.
On the whole I’m feeling quite pleased with the way my ‘portfolio career’ might be shaping up. Of course it’s very insecure, and there will be times when I despair but at the moment I’ve never been more sure that this is the right time to cast myself fully adrift into the freelance world.
P minus Four and counting…
Yesterday my journey to work was abandoned. I travelled all the way to� an interconnecting Underground station� before being informed that the service was suspended for the rest of the day. So I hummed and haahhd for a little while, jumped on and off another train then decided to give up and go home.
Then I had to negotiate a refund of the automatic penalty fare taken off my Oyster card credit for having an “uncompleted Journey” !!
I won’t miss being a commuter one little bit!
I applied for a part time, home-based content editing job today. It’s on a topic which I’m passionate about, has a lot of relevence to this pyjamanating project, and requires skills that are right up my street. So this could suit me down to the ground.
There’s just one tiny little snaggette….
But hopefully the potential employer will be broad minded enough to see it as an opportunity to take the site beyond any perceived restrictions. There could be some interesting business to be made between us.
21/7/07 is now the official date on which I begin working from home. It seems to have come around very quickly, but couldn�t be a day too soon.
This phase is going to be a bit like being thrown in at the deep end, without any really firm engagments or safety net but it�s also kind of transitional, in that I�ll be applying for some kinds of work that would still be based in physical locations in and around London, UK. Just as long as they are either (1) helping me to survive and (2) moving me in the right direction.
Oh yes, and everything I do towards the goals is going to be recorded, diarised and published though the use of 43things and the Pyjamanating blog
See more progress on: work from home