As with everything, there are good points and bad points to working from home. Except for the fact that working from home has many more good points than bad! It allows for a certain amount of flexibility, although that’s not to say you spend your day watching movies and pretending to work. You could, but you’d never get anything done, never get any repeat business and certainly never make any money. You do have to work as hard as you would when employed by a business (often harder, in fact!), but you get to do this all from the comfort of your own home.
As soon as I started working with The Cuillin Collective, I realised the benefits of working from home: not having to commute, being in your own house and endless cups of tea and coffee being just a few. I can listen to whatever music I want, and I’ve never been so up on current affairs as I sit with the news on in the background all day. Of course, none of this comes easy, it has to be worked for and I have nothing but complete respect for Marc and Ailsa and just how hard they have worked to build and maintain The Cuillin Collective – I’ve seen that first-hand for myself.
It’s really funny the attitudes people have when you say you work from home – I’ve had all sorts of comments – ‘I know you’re supposed to be working, but we can go for lunch, right?’ err…wrong! I’m working just as hard as you do when you are ‘supposed to’ when you are at work, so I can’t just ‘go for lunch’! Another was ‘You must be really motivated to work from home!’ Well yes, you have to be but you really don’t have the choice when you have clients expecting work from you. My response is always ‘Can you just leave your job behind for a couple of hours because you feel like it?’ probably not. The difference is that I really care about The Cuillin Collective, about what we do each day and about what the future holds, which will only be successful if we all play our part.
It wasn’t until August of this year that I really appreciated the full benefits of being able to work from home, when we found out we were expecting a baby. Working part-time from home and part-time in the retail business really showed me just how beneficial being able to work from home is – especially for the first few months when all I felt like doing was being sick and sleeping! Ailsa (having just been through a pregnancy) was fantastic – a constant source of information and comfort and she used to say to me ‘I don’t know how you can leave the house to go to work!’
In those early days, you feel like porcelain and it’s so hard to hide the fact you feel sick and exhausted 24/7 when you don’t want the whole world to know yet, working from home allows for this – working in retail doesn’t. I won’t even get started on the many other downsides of working in retail. When working from home, you can just crawl straight from your bed to your desk if you really need to and you are ready to work.
The other side of this is that once my baby is born, then I won’t have to leave him at home and trudge off to work, tears in my eyes, feeling like the worst mother in the world. (Although I’ve been told I might welcome the break some days!) I’ll be able to work from home, while my other half looks after our child on those days.
I’ll be working, but I’ll be in the same house as them both. I’ll be a stay at home mum, working and caring for my child in perfect balance – or at least that’s the plan – I’ll let you know how I’m getting on in 6 months time!
I’ve read some really inspiring stories in the past few months of mothers who has set up successful start-up businesses while they have been at home on maternity leave. I love that – people taking matters into their own hands and starting a business that allows them to be in charge of what they do, do what they love, care for their child and do it all from the comfort of their own home. There’s a lot to be said for running your own business and working from home, and I’m so happy to be able to say I love working from home!