The Boss of You

I love it when my professional-geek life and my author life inter­sect. I was check­ing out the new issue of the esteemed web design e-zine A List Apart today, and came across Natalie Jost’s excel­lent arti­cle on work­ing from home, “Walk­ing the Line When You Work From Home,” and the lessons therein def­i­nitely apply to free­lancers and home work­ers across indus­tries — not just web designers.

Emira and I worked out of a cor­ner of my bed­room when we started Raised Eye­brow, grad­u­ated to the liv­ing room a lit­tle later (when space allowed), and only took on a full-time office sched­ule after two or three years in busi­ness. I have occa­sional pangs for the com­fort & quiet of work­ing from home, but now that we have a larger team, it’s much more effi­cient to have every­one work­ing in the same loca­tion. That being said, we’ve been forced into work­ing from home the last cou­ple of days, due to a mas­sive power out­age in down­town Van­cou­ver that took down our office build­ing, and what Jost says about hav­ing a devoted office space is def­i­nitely true: Now that I no longer have my home com­puter set up for pro­fes­sional use, I’m nowhere near as efficient…