The hallmark of any office – goer is waking up at the sound of an alarm clock. If you are working from home, you can easily get rid of that blaring sound early in the morning. Since you are not going to commute to your workplace, you save precious time that you would have otherwise spent stuck in traffic, being jammed in a crowded metro or bus or simply standing for an hour to cover the distance from your home to workplace. Major disruptions at the workplace are your colleagues. While you may enjoy having someone come over to your desk every once in a while, to give you a break from incessant typing, sometimes you may have urgent matters to work on. In such cases, a colleague, walking in for a chat, is less than desirable. You can also forget about a proper eating schedule; you will skip meals occasionally because of meetings or end up going out with colleagues for lunch and munching on junk food. Instead, you can sit back at home, and enjoy a well-cooked home-made lunch. Perhaps the best part about working from home is the absolute freedom and flexibility to work at whatever hour you desire. This means you can fit in all other personal and social commitments into your calendar at any time of the day. No more missing your kid’s dance performance at school, no more rushing home from work to catch the match on time and being able to watch your favourite flick, first day, first show in the theatre.

All this makes working from home sound rather tempting. However, this may turn out to be less than an ideal setting in real life. Since you are no more interacting with people at work, chances are your social skills will degrade over time. You will no more be a team player, a friend to your cubicle buddy and no more jokes about your boos at the water cooler for you. Working from home is likely to have a lot of distractions. You may end up playing games on your desktop when you should be working or you might end up watching TV when you really have an assignment to research for. Since no more supervision is in place, chance are you will grow lax and thus waste time. Since you are now employed from home, your personal relationships might also be affected. There is no more personal space for you or your partner and you keep seeing the same face, listening to the same voice over and over again. Also, your entire regime, of working like an employee goes for a toss. So you end up working at eleven in the morning as well as at eleven in the night.

The choice between choosing the pros and cons rely solely on an individual’s preferences. For freelancers it makes sense to work from home. But for a full-time employee, it is more productive and efficient to work in a formal business setting.