Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.
I found this little gem of a site whilst reading through back posts on Julie Doyles' blog and it reminded me of what I should be doing - as opposed to reading back through people's blog lists.
At the moment my office is in the smallest bedroom and is the desk bit of a cabin bed contraption that only just fits into the room. The bed part is currently filled with various items that were moved from the 'spare' room for visitors in December as well as a box of stuff I've been meaning to put on eBay for about a year. The 'spare' room is now full of 'things to pack' for our holiday - which I really, really should be doing RIGHT NOW. It also contains various large items from the loft (including a coffee table and TV unit) that were left there by our predecessors 30 months ago and which my OH retrieved 3 weeks before Christmas with a view to selling them on eBay BEFORE Christmas - unfortunately they wont fit into the eBay box. It also contains various bits of furniture that we haven't found a home for yet even though we've been living here for over 2 years.
My 'workspace' consists of a laptop and the coffee table - or for a really big project the dining table or even the living room floor. My OH recently bought his own laptop so he can join me of an evening rather than having to venture into the 'study' and resort to using a webcam to talk to me! We do venture in there on occasion - when we need to use the printer.
I'm afraid that I was no better when I was working in-house - it was a common belief that the office desk moves that happened at least once a year were purely to get me to chuck out half of the stuff hoarded on my desk. Though I've been gone for nearly 4 years and they are still desk hopping regularly!
My excuse is that what ever I am working on gets my full attention and nothing impinges on that - Facebook, household chores, organisation. That way I know I've done a good job AND my OH doesn't think that my being freelance means we don't need a cleaner (we haven't got one but I can dream).
So with a few days 'free' to do all those nagging things that are building up - this years accounts, reorganising the study so I can actually use it, listing that stuff on eBay, giving the house a good clean, packing for our trip - what am I doing? ... catching up on EastEnders and knitting a jumper!
5 comments:
Glad you found this site - there are some very apt ones. The one about the laundry basket is still the most pertinent in my life. I have never put this on my blog because it implies some degree of organised chaos, whereas my desk is generally disorganised chaos, with no dotted lines in between!
All those gorgeous 'writers' rooms' featured in the Observer give a very wrong impression of what the average homeworker's 'workspace' looks like. I used to work in a stable at the end of the garden (which wasn't quite as idyllic as it sounds) but now I am stuck in a room shared intermittently with other family members, too many pieces of furniture and computer-related equipment, several miles of tangled cables, plugs and extention leads, and boxes and boxes of *stuff* in transit (which is considerably less idyllic and I sometimes fear I'm going slowly mad in here).
For how it should be, visit www.shedworking.co.uk and dream . . . !
Sorry I missed the t from you name Juliet!
My excuse has always been organised chaos. I like the comment about the laundry - my OH excuse for not doing any is because he claims he doesn't know which pile is dirty and which clean (on the off chance it gets done it is then in piles to be 'sorted' and put away). But then my excuse for not doing the ironing is that in the early '90s he made a comment about a shirt not being done well and all ironing services were suspended indefinitely!
That's OK - what's the odd missing 't' between editors?!
It's the desk cartoon I've never posted. I feel like sticking the laundry one up on a daily basis, because it sums up my world. Ditto re ironing. The Aga I had at my previous house would 'iron' just about everything apart from shirts, and I paid someone to do those, so everything was sorted. Now the sheets etc don't just iron themselves by magic overnight and my ironing lady lives too far away, the mountains of 'to-be-ironed' stuff are even highter than the mountains of work on my desk!
And I'll bet you get envious remarks from office-bound friends who think that because you work at home you obviously have *masses* of time to keep on top of the housework. ('Yeah, right', as my daughter would say!)
I'm sitting in my back bedroom now and can't actually see the floor, apart from this being the fault of my very large chest, the room is in complete chaos. In the daytime I do go out and work at an office though!
I loved the cartoon and this blog, will link ASAP.
All the best to you.
Linda (Freelancewritingtips.com) Just putting that in case the link thingy doesn't work. Cheers.
My study was once lovely. But I couldn't work in it like that. It had to be messy. I am a person who sticks things on walls - I don't mean paintings or posters - I stick notes to myself all over the walls. There is a strange system to it and my sons know exactly how to wreck my day by moving my notes from top to bottom or right to left.
But actually I do at least half of my work on my laptop in bed - the hours between 5 and 7am are when I seem to be at my most productive and the house is nice and quiet. But not a good approach if you have an other half - perhaps it explains why I don't have one eh??!!!
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