The disadvantages of working at home

There are a lot of good reasons to work from home and a lot of people want to do it. However you do have to keep in mind that there are also disadvantages. A lot of people jump into working from home without really thinking about the disadvantages.

The main disadvantage of working from home is that you will be doing your work alone. Admittedly for some people this would fall into the advantages category but most people consider it to be a negative. For a lot of people one of the best things about having a job is the chance for social interaction. Most people are friends with at least some of their co-workers. If you have a job working at home you are going to have to find your friends some place else, something that most adults find difficult to do. There are a lot of people who simply can't stand being alone all day, for them working from home is probably not a good idea.

The other big disadvantage of working at home is that there can be a lot of distractions. This is especially true if you have kids. It is important that you set time apart specifically for work but even doing this you are going to have to deal with the distractions. This can really hurt your productivity and will often require you to work extra time to get the job done. It is important to do as much as you can to reduce the distractions.

Another bid disadvantage of working at home is keeping yourself motivated to actually do the work. There will be no boss there to tell you to get to work so you will have to do that yourself. As much as we all hate having a boss tell us to get to work the reality is that most of us need it. It is very easy to put off your work and in a lot of cases not get it done if you are not careful. It is critical that if you are going to work from home that you can get yourself motivated to do your work.

One last disadvantage of working from home that is rarely talked about is that it does tend to limit your career prospects. This is more of an issue if you are working from home for a large company than if you are self employed. The problem is that by working from home you tend to take yourself out of the running for promotion. In part this falls into the out of sight out of mind category. However you will also find that in a lot of cases the job that you would be promoted into can't be done from home so you simply won't be considered for it. This is no big deal if you are content to stay in the job that you have but if you have ambitions of moving up in your career working from home could be a problem.