This happened today. My eldest daughter, Milena (11), is sick with chickenpox and she obviously had to stay at home. She’s downstairs as I’m working upstairs in my home office. Around 1 pm she gets bored and comes up to visit me and says this:
She wants to play, because her dad is at home writing random stuff…
- Daughter: “Dad, I want to play Roblox with you!”
- Me: “I’m sorry dear, but I’m working now!”
- Daughter: “No you’re not, you’re just writing some random stuff!”
My jaw dropped.
I started being defensive and shouted: “But thanks to me writing this random stuff we can afford this house, the cars and vacations…” but she seemed completely unaffected.
You don’t earn respect working from home
Yes, we, the rare breed of remote workers don’t earn respect from the society or our local community:
- Our children think we sit at home and are writing random stuff on the computer (or iPad in my case).
- Our spouses think that if our child is sick we naturally should take care of it, because we are at home anyway…
- Other members of our close family ask us to run errands for them in the middle of the day, because we’re “available”…
- Parents of other children from our children’s school think we’re unemployed because we always take the kids to school and pick them up and we’re always attending our kids’ recitals or parents’ association meetings
- Colleagues of our spouses at social events ask us weird questions, like: what is it that you do all day at home?…
- You get the idea… no respect whatsoever…
Respect or not, I wouldn’t change it for the world
I love working from home, because it gives me the freedom to work the way I like. It enables me to find focus and control my working environment. It helps me avoid distractions. It lets me live where I live. It saves me stress and time of commuting to an office…
All in all, it gives me freedom and lifestyle I take over respect every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
And I know people in my Nozbe team enjoy that kind of lifestyle, too.
After all:
“Work is not a place to go, it’s a thing that you do”
But yes, I do want to teach my daughter that “dad sitting at home writing random stuff” is as respectable a job as being a fireman or a doctor.
After all, more than half a million users of Nozbe are being cured of procrastination thanks to the software I founded which helps them get stuff done, right? Doesn’t that earn me at least some respect? 😜
P.S. Why is my iPad keyboard in such a bad shape?
As you can see on the photo, my iPad keyboard is pretty beaten up… especially weird that it’s only 1,5 years old. Well, I don’t know why that is - maybe because I write random stuff all day? Probably. Either way it works just fine and because I touch type, I don’t mind the keys not being visible.