Working from home requires a tremendous amount of discipline. Not only are you working, but you have to work to avoid distraction and procrastination; it’s a second job in its own right. A backyard office is the answer to creating that line of demarcation required to let you excel.
Ask any freelancer or consultant – even if you have a dedicated office room in your home, there’s always laundry or dishes you think you can catch up on, or the constant interruptions of well-intentioned family or roommates to deal with.
That’s how the commuter can gain an edge over the remote worker. There’s a mindset change that happens when you move from home to office that increases productivity and capacity. It’s a change that’s hard to replicate when you can stumble from bedroom to desk in your pyjamas.
However, more and more companies are moving toward distributed teams, remote workers, and hiring freelancers to make up for local, in-office workers. For a variety of reasons – lowering costs, more flexible employment arrangements, and the transition from a local economy to a global, internet-based one – for some businesses it makes more and more sense to have employees work from home.
In fact, in 2012 the Gillard government announced that they would like to see 12% of public service employees working from home at least one day a week by 2020. Jeff Wald writing on the Forbes website estimated that in the US freelancers will outnumber full-time employees by then.
So how does an office-less worker keep up with their professional demands, while balancing their family and career?
Enter, the backyard office
Michael Pollan took two and a half years to build his backyard office to use as a writing retreat – and then wrote a bestseller about the process. But unless you’re planning on using the experience for future book fodder, pouring your precious time and energy into drawing up blueprints and hammering nails probably isn’t practical.
Perhaps that’s why we’ve witnessed the surge in prefab backyard studio spaces and kits. The modern entrepreneur just doesn’t have the bandwidth to DIY a functional workspace along with, well, working.
At Harwyn, we saw and understood the need for a practical, affordable, just-works kind of backyard office and we wanted to create a space that was elegant and functional, somewhere professionals would feel comfortable spending the day working. After all, who wants work in a shed?
Being on the edge of transitioning to a distributed team or anticipating the move from traditional employment to independently employed, it makes sense to begin setting up systems for your own success. And a large part of that is the office space you create for yourself.
If a backyard office is in your future, Harwyn can take care of that piece of the puzzle for you, so you can focus your time and energy on how your expertise can flourish in this new economy. Contact us today.