Foreign Perspectives

Not so long ago the talk was all about how we’d all be working from home by now and it all seemed terribly practical if you listened to the sales pitches but then I’m sure the flying cars did when that idea was pitched in the 1960s as transportation for the 1990s.

Realistically, the majority of people will always need to be “at work” in some way. Certainly, it doesn’t seem likely that there’ll be portable steel mills around anytime soon that would be suitable for home use and I can’t really see car manufacturing getting going as a cottage industry on any kind of large scale.

However, there are an increasing number of jobs where it doesn’t really matter where you are when you’re doing them. Whilst, blogging isn’t my main job (yet) it obviously doesn’t matter where I do it from so long as I have a half-decent Internet connection to write the stuff with and there are a lot of jobs in that category such as telesales and the like. Service and software industries in effect rather than manufacturing. Clearly we will always need a great deal of manufacturing capability around but for many service industries it doesn’t matter where you are in the world these days as ADSL is available right out in the sticks in many countries.

Naturally, for those of us working from home it’s cheaper in many ways for us. No more commuting to work for a start although that can be counteracted by having to heat your home of course (unless you’ve set yourself up on some idyllic beach).

Is it for you though? If it’s just you at home it could easily get very lonely and naturally there isn’t the office banter that you may have gotten used to.