Home Working – Co Working with Friends
I’ve been working from home (WFH) for the last few years and I love it! No more commuting no more dealing with trains not working and delays. Each day I get up and go to my designated working space in my home. It suits me and I’m rather used to it. I do know many other people who WFH who are not near an office or want to go into the office environment but miss catching up with people in real life. You do tend to lose out on those social chats over the cup of tea in the morning. The long drawn out discussions over lunch and the post work drink.
My solution has been this: Over the past few months I’ve invited others who wfh to my home and we work from my kitchen. It’s close to the kettle for the endless supplies of tea and coffee. We work away during the day having the odd chat and breaks, if I have to take a longer call I move to my office or another room and we tend to not make too much of a disturbance and it’s worked out well.
It’s the one day during the week I do tend to take the full lunch break as I end up cooking a lunch, this gives us an opportunity to have a longer chat and share ideas or things that have come up. I mentioned to someone else recently this was working for me as they were struggling working at home on their own and also the commute to work was becoming more of a struggle.
I think many of us nowadays know people who wfh in our circle or in the groups we’re involved with, posting to the group offering to host a co working home day is a great way to share knowledge and also have a social working day. You could be the person that hosts the home working and suggest people to bring lunch and have pot luck, suggest that each person shares some knowledge of the project they’re working on that they may not know about and have a discussion about it. Brings a new life to wfh with a twist 🙂 Enjoy!
Eventually, some neighborhoods could setup a cafe-style office environment, where everyone would have their own workspace, but a common area where they can see other workers. The workers would not have to work for the same company, but as they are neighbors they would have some camaraderie and the change of pace can make for happy workers and neighbors.
Just a thought!