Bloggers at Work

After six years working full time outside the home, I started working part time from home in the summer of 2008. I spent the other half the week developing marketing campaigns for a very small property management company downtown. When I went on maternity leave, they went out of business. Instead of looking for another part time job, I started working full time from home.

My setup:

I started out with a little bill-paying desk from Wal-Mart. It didn’t cut it for the amount of random shit I apparently need all around me in order to work and pay bills and keep the kid’s stuff organized in one space. When Ikea finally opened I got one of their long plain desks (they’re a great deal, but the laminate is super cheap) and a wire set of drawers. I also have a little shelf for my printer. I picked it up at a garage sale for two dollars.

I work on a MacBook Pro, circa 2006. I bought it used from an employer. His name (the MacBook, not my employer) is Enrique, and he was a tentacle monster in a former life. (In case you were curious.) He’s on his last legs and really wishes I’d never installed Snow Leopard. I also have an external monitor. It makes it easier to work in Photoshop and much easier to work on articles. (I leave my references open on one monitor while I type on the other.)

1. The cork board.  Mostly full of pictures, some jewelry, and my son’s school calender.
2. Water cup.  Stupidly near my laptop.  I need to stop doing that.
3. Enrique.
4. My external monitor and a necklace I love.
5. Quapus Quapus Space, the murderous dwarf frog.
6. The Out of Sync Child and You’re Not the Boss of Me and Healthy Child, Healthy World.
7. Why the hell do I have this stupid Scrabble box on my desk?  My son begged me to bring it home from my mom’s and then left it here and here it stays.  Apparently.
8. School paperwork, a headband I took off because it was hurting my head, UP on DVD, a dirty fork, Soulless by Gail Carriger, a pen, another necklace, my alarm system bill, my camera cable and a Mickey Mouse plate that formerly held bagels.
9. My phone and the keyboard tray I installed all by myself!  You can also kind of see my new wireless keyboard.  It is wee and sexy and wonderful.

I work in front of a window the faces our driveway and front stoop. My desk is in the “master bedroom,” but we use it as a den/office because it used to be the garage and we can watch TV or play Rockband or whatever without waking the kids up at night. It has a small room attached to it that George uses for an office. It’s his man cave.

The window is awesome. When I worked in Tampa, I could almost see out a window if I stood up and leaned over my monitor and looked into another employee’s office. We were on the eighth floor and I hated not being able to enjoy the view or know if it was raining or not. People were cutthroat about windows and views and privacy. The situation sucked. Here in my home office, I get the window seat. Two years later, I still don’t take it for granted. Especially when a storm approaches and I can sit back and breathe, just watching the dark clouds start to tower on the horizon.

My routine:

Now that school has started, I leave the house with both boys at 8:30. I drop Chipmunk off at preschool and then drive Moose over to my mom’s. She brings them both home at 2:00. Moose naps for about two hours and Chipmunk chills out with a snack and Discovery Kids while I wrap up my work day. The hardest part of this schedule is that I often hit my stride around 4 pm right when the baby wakes up and it’s time to figure out dinner. I have a hard time unplugging and often end up obsessively checking my email on my phone or running back into my office every five minutes until George gets home from work at either 6:30 or 7:45 depending on the day.

Having to head to school keeps me from wearing my pajamas all day. Bonus! Staying in my PJ’s is only liberating like 3% of the time. The rest of the time it makes me feel lazy and socially isolated.

My work:

My actual work routine varies day to day, but usually involves a mix of writing, some design work and a little blogging. Actually sometimes way too much blogging and time on Twitter. It’s easy for me to get distracted by socializing and I have a tendency to procrastinate real work by writing a blog post. Once in a while I have conference calls or consulting calls. I try to schedule these for times when the boys are definitely out of the house.

My scattered work routine can be overwhelming sometimes, but I love being able to change directions depending on my mood. I have trouble writing when I’m tired or I have a headache, but I can almost always jump into a design project. I get bored with tedious code and design stuff sometimes, but I can switch gears and work on a writing project. Almost all of my paid writing work is marketing and SEO related. Not fun. But right now I have a couple of ghostwriting projects and they’re actually really engaging.

This year, I’d like to become more organized as far as tracking my own productivity and ensuring that I spend more time on billable work and less time being a spider monkey on the Internet.

This may or may not be related:

1. this is why I don’t write every day