Remote Work ≠ Working From Home

Working from home is only a small subset of remote work. And it’s not necessarily the best form of remote work either. Let’s go through the types of remote work, shall we?

A small collection of my rants about various forms of remote work.

Working from home

In order to be serious about working from home, there are some essential criteria to be met.

Dedicated space

You won’t get very far by working from the sofa or kitchen table. Sure, it’s okay for one or two emails. But 8 hours of productivity? Please.

Understanding or no roommates

Is it a blessing to see your family more often! However, if you don’t set strict boundaries, both your personal and work relationship will suffer. What I mean is, people living with you should understand that you need your own space to actually work and perform okay. Set a strict timetable when you are “at work” and when you are “available”.

Coworking spaces

I have love and hate relationship with coworking spaces.

They are the perfect starting point when you move to a new location. However, over time, they can get distracting. To understand, it’s not the coworking space that is distracting.

It’s the people. Many people (lovely, heartwarming, and polite people) confuse coworking spaces with coliving spaces. This means they go there not to work, but to socialize. Usually, because they work from home or Airbnbs – and they want some human contact.

This can get problematic if you have 5 hours of work to do, and the deadline is in 5 hours and 30 minutes.

But yes, you can totally work from a coworking.

Coffee shops

The vibe of a tiny café with reliable wifi can be very inspiring. Not to mention that, unlike in coworking, you don’t have to pay for any membership. You simply order a coffee. And then another. And then another.

Airbnbs

This is more a Digital Nomad thing. Renting a whole villa with a private pool in a cheap country has its own beauty. The same goes for a distant cottage in the mountains. If you pick carefully, you save time by not having to explore local cafés and coworking options right away. This saves time. And money.

Hotels

Especially four and five-star hotels often have a very cool lobby area where you can, as a guest, hang around all day long. Often this is accompanied by a pool and pretty hotel restaurant with not so great but still somehow okay food. Last but not least, there is your four or five-star hotel room. Maybe with a city skyline sunset view?

On the road

With mobile networks, coverage improvements and data packages get cheaper, more and more people are starting to live “on the road”. Sometimes even off the grid. And this trend is going very popular too. People doing this are not considered edgy or crazy how they could be a decade ago.

In the next article, we will focus on: I’m not really sure yet.

What is your favorite mode of work? Do you still commute, or you went fully remote? Which remote variant, or their combination, are you practicing? Let us know in the comments!