Home Is Where the Office Is

There's a bus to the elementary school, but not to the middle school. This had been my most terrifying realization over the course of the summer. I was in desperate need of finding a carpool. It was the only way to survive, as far as I could tell. However, all of the carpools I knew of in our neighborhood were already full, or schedules were different, or neighbors had forgone the 3rd row seat when they bought the new car. In any case, desperate times call for desperate measures, so after hauling the middle-schooler the 40-minute, 1.5 miles to and fro for the first week, I got creative. And brave.  I remembered my daughter's classmate from last year who had rode the elementary-bound bus, searched piles of not-yet-filed/purged paperwork, and cold-texted the boy's mom with this slightly stalker-ish text message: "Hi K---. This is Jen, E--'s mom. She was in M--'s class last year and they took the bus together. Would you be interested in carpooling to the m...

“I really see this as an opportunity to have better work-life balance.” I’ve heard this more times than I can count from newly initiated home officers. My usual response is to smile and nod. No need to rain on anyone’s parade. But it’s a topic that unfailingly pops up within a few months – sometimes within a few weeks. “Why does it feel like I’m working even more ?” Here’s the thing.   While many companies claim to value the importance of work-life balance for their employees, the reality is that no one seems to have a solid definition of what that means. That’s one of the most difficult things for a working parent – especially a work-from-home parent – to discover: the fallacy of work-life balance. Small Business Trends put out a nifty infographic that breaks it all down, and one little nugget that stood out to me like a neon sign was that out of the 38 countries studied, the U.S. ranked 30 th in work-life balance. [1] (The Netherlands ranked #1, by the way.)...

I've known this week's guest blogger for more than 15 years when we met on a college exchange program in France. He was our own private comedian and an artist in his own right, even then. It is no surprise that he has pursued and perfected an art and made it his own business. Working at home as your own boss can have even greater pressures than working at home and having a remote boss. As I told him, Joe 's depiction of his work-at-home experience is worthy of a publication such as The New Yorker. I won the lottery in guest bloggers! Enjoy!  Entrpreneurial Home Officer/SINK Years ago, I used to dream of working for myself at home. And I imagined that if I ever had the opportunity, my schedule would be like this: 6:00AM Cartoon bluebirds, singing softly, fly in the bedroom window, pick up edges of duvet with their tiny little beaks and gently pull it back. Stretch dreamily. Sigh and open eyes. Pat dog on head. 6:15AM Enjoy freshly-brewed Turkish coffee and...