Paean to the Future: Notes of the Self-Employed

I am self-employed and work from home. These days, my name is Legion, for we are many. You read about our kind all the time on MSN, perhaps with longing. We’re always writing feature articles such as “So You Want to Work from Home? Seventeen Things to Keep in Mind” and “Endless Snacking in Your Underwear and other Tales of Telecommuting.” Of course, many of the people behind those pieces really aren’t getting much work done, too busy writing cautionary tales and misguided how-tos. But I think it helps them feel productive to write such articles. Some people need to feel productive even when they’re not.

It’s true, however, that such an arrangement is not for everyone. My brainy mate, Boots, tried it for several months a couple of years ago, and she never quite made the adjustment. She seemed to find it mostly unsatisfying and annoying, though her annoyance may have had more to do with gaining an insider’s look at how a true virtual business works—mine. But work patterns are as unique and varied as individuals, and you don’t have to read another 300-page business book to know that a happy worker is a productive worker. And productivity, much like happiness, is a matter of perspective. I’ve been training my entire life to be a self-employed work-at-home, or SEWAH, and finally the Digital Age, L’Age Digital, has caught up with my aspirations.

I rise between six-thirty and seven each morn, usually in a good mood and most often feeling well rested. No sleeping issues with me, no matter what the weather. The only thing that fouls my sleep is if I have a drink or two before bedtime, a nightcap I think it’s called, and while I used to do that frequently in the past when I would stay up late writing, I’ve lately put that habit aside and moved my drinking time up to much earlier in the day. And so, these days, I sleep like the proverbial baby. I hope I never run into the proverbial baby. I think it would be frustrating, because you’d never be able to understand any of its proverbs with all that baby talk.

Anyway, as I said, I awake fresh and usually happy. Why am I happy? Well, because on most days, I know that I don’t have to leave my compound, my estate, my virtual little world headquarters. This is important to note: in the nearly four years of being a SEWAH, I have not had a single bad dream or grumpy morning. Indeed, not only have bad dreams fled my unconscious world, but sweet dreams have flooded in to fill the available space. “You were laughing in your sleep again last night,” says Boots, sitting before the makeup mirror. It’s true, you can ask her.

Now up, I brush my teeth zestfully, set a pot of coffee to brew, and glance through an unread section of the Sunday Times (it usually takes me all week to get through the Sunday edition). Boots is already awake, preparing herself for another foray into the wide grim world. While the coffee brews, I half-watch half-kibbitz at the local morning news, check to see if the local traffic reporter is wearing a tight sweater that morning, and watch the short, smiley, squinty lady deliver the weather. I cannot emphasize enough: this is a very important part of the workday. For the SEWAH, the local traffic and weather reports are always, always, enjoyable and entertaining news segments. Sunny and 75 degrees? Delightful! Snowy and sub-zero? Sounds cozy! Traffic backed up halfway to Alpha Centauri? Whoops! Hope those gridlocked folks brought along something to pee in!

I stretch and yawn, bring Boots some coffee, then climb the steps to my attic office, the Tower of Whimsy, to check e-mail and see what foolishness was conveyed to me overnight. The family cat, Penelope Panther, ravenous from working all night in the basement on the Opposable Thumbs Project (a centuries-old feline initiative), usually needs to have her food and water replenished, and comes bolting upstairs after me and stands in the doorway meowing in a way whose meaning is unmistakable. Unless I’ve read something in my morning mail that makes me briefly cross (like some work assignment that I’ll have to deal with straightaway), I’ll gladly oblige her, head back downstairs to top off her chow, and get a bit more coffee.

Adequately caffiened, I make my daily list of tasks over which I will procrastinate. Sometimes I procrastinate over making the list of procrastinatable tasks by reading sports or news online, making the usual rounds. But eventually I begin jotting things down, sprinkling the list with things I’ve already completed just so I can cross them off immediately upon finishing the list. This makes me feel like I’ve already accomplished a great deal before I’ve even shaved and clipped my nose hair. It doesn’t matter that I really haven’t. Accomplished anything, that is. The feeling is what counts. This is a good strategy and you should try it.

Already I’ve begun to work, or at least have begun making the hand gestures and outraged splutterings that represent work. It’s more of a throat-clearing activity. Soon, very soon, I hear the brisk tattoo of Boots’s heels stomping around downstairs. The sound of hard-soled shoes means that her departure is imminent, an EDT of 10 minutes, tops. Time for me to spend those last ten minutes downstairs in the kitchen and hallway basically getting in her way, but mostly for my own satisfaction, a little reminder to myself of how, no matter what is on the list for the day and how inane or frustrating or mind-numbing some of the work turns out to be, I am nevertheless still comfortably at home, still in my bathrobe and Yummi Sushi pajamas, while she, poor girl, is girding herself for the drive and day in the actual, physical presence of the marginally sane, while I have the marginally sane right where I want them: elsewhere.

You see how this goes. My next big decision has to do with personal grooming. Do I want to shower now, or wait a bit? Sometimes I just shave to start the process and shower a couple hours later. (This is a good cold-weather strategy; the house can sometimes be chilly, and the hot shower provides both a nice break and way to bring up my core temperature.) Other days, I go through the whole 3-act bathroom play: a comfortable session on the time machine with the Sunday Book Review or latest New Yorker (7:30 is the magic hour; my insides are as reliable as a Swiss watch—a pleasant churning starts about 7:20), then shower, shave, pick out something sporty and comfortable to wear, refresh the coffee again, and head back to the Tower for some serious work. By now, Penelope Panther has eaten, drunk her fill, and has an urgent need to sit in my lap and repeatedly rub her cold, damp nose against my left hand as I try to type. (It’s endearing but annoying.) Eventually she just buries her face in the crook of my elbow and sits there—and if I had a nose as relentlessly cold and damp as hers, I’d be burying it in the crook of someone’s elbow, too.

Now the fun really starts. I read, and write, and read some more, and take phone calls. Dial in to conference calls. Consult the list. Respond to e-mails. I squint at the computer screen, type a bit, click the mouse, click click click. Open this program, close that program. Drag this around, drag that around. Click click click. Type type.

I do this intermittently, more or less, for about eight hours. Sometimes ten.

Of course, there are always slight variations. Sometimes the work is hard, the deadlines are looming, and I have to concentrate. Some days I have more conference calls and phone calls than other days, and I have to hit the mute button and say through clenched teeth Shut up shut up SHUT UP! Other days there are almost no calls (I really like those days!), and I don’t have to talk to anyone or, more importantly, listen to anyone. The listening is always more difficult than the talking. Nevertheless, I get paid to listen; I need only to remind myself of that and a calmness descends.

Sometimes I can coast, mixing work with some cultivated screwing around. Maybe I’ll take out my ukulele and practice the solo to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” that I’ve been working on. Frequently, a brief nap is just the ticket. And of course, it wouldn’t be L’Age Digital without digital cable: it’s always a mind-clearing break to see if there are any new offerings in the Starz OnDemand After Hours category.

Occasionally I do actually leave world headquarters, maybe to take a brisk walk, or perhaps visit Starbucks and drink their coffee rather than drink the Starbucks coffee I make in my own coffee pot. That’s always amusing. At other times, I may even go out, book or magazine in tow, and treat myself to lunch somewhere. This is an especially satisfying activity. When I worked in an office, which I did for many years, I often hated going out to lunch. While I always enjoyed getting out of the office, the necessity of going back to it always depressed me. Now, of course, I rarely mind coming back when I have to, and often I simply don’t have to. Maybe I’ll visit a bookstore. Maybe catch a matinee.

If I have a productive day, I’m usually happy about it, because it means that I’ve made other people happy, happy enough to want to continue paying me to do whatever it is I do for them, and sometimes even thinking that they’re lucky they have me doing it. If I have an unproductive day, I’m usually happy about that as well, because it means that I didn’t have to work very hard, and I’m not especially fond of working hard. Besides, having been in the professional business workforce for some time now, I know that working hard is an anomaly; that most often I can work half-hard and still turn out better stuff than people who are themselves pretending to work very, very hard but in reality have no bleeping idea what they’re doing or how to do it. So, you see, it’s a no-lose situation for me. If I’m productive, I’m happy. If I’m unproductive, I’m happy.

My office, of course, is not strictly home-based. When I first became a SEWAH, I had a workstation and a hard line for connectivity, and so most of the time I was restricted to the Tower of Whimsy to conduct business. But after a fruitful first year, I made some technology investments, and now my office is wherever there’s a good wireless connection and cell phone coverage. Feel like lingering at Borders or Starbucks in the afternoon? No problem. I’m open for business. Heck, as soon as Bare Elegance gets high-speed WiFi, I can edit documents and answer e-mail while sipping a Lime Rickey and watching Simone or Janna make nice with the pole.

This is not at all the future I anticipated growing up in the nineteen-sixties. Both the US Government and Disney had me mostly convinced that twenty-first century life would have a lot of hover crafts and anti-gravity pods and silver jumpsuits. Our cities would be filled with the soothing sound of our little space cars—that kind of cooing, dopplering flutter that George Jetson’s little one-seater made. Lapels and collars on shirts and jackets would finally, finally, go the way of the peruke and the ruff (I’m so grateful I didn’t live in the age of the peruke and the ruff). And outer space would be well colonized by now. I'd own a robot or two.  

Though a robot or two would be nice, especially for yardwork, I can’t say that I’m disappointed things turned out differently. Certainly not when afternoon nap time approaches. Funny, I think I hear it approaching right now. And that means the pre-cocktail-hour hour is not far off, either. I might not have a silver jumpsuit hanging in my wardrobe, but overall, this has been another good day. And some of it was even billable! Did I mention how I laugh in my sleep?