Much is made about the home office; my good friend Grant Griffiths extols the virtues of a home office and waves the banner high.  For that, I applaud him.

Alas, I do not have a home office.  Nor, I suspect, will I ever have one.

Make no mistake, I do work from home.  I also work from the courthouse, the local coffee shop (what a cliché), my parent’s house in sunny Florida, and the laundry room in the basement of my apartment building.  That begs the question - can I reasonably say that I have a “home office”?  I think not.

My office is located where I am at any given time.  Whether I have my laptop, my cell phone, or just a notepad and a pen (I don’t use pencils; the feel of the lead on paper has always freaked me out) I can transact business and do the work for which clients hire me.

So I suppose I have a mobile office.  But that’s like saying I’m a mobile person.  Still doesn’t fit.

Do I have a virtual office?  No, because I am not virtual.  I exist.  Flesh and blood, real me.  If I were virtual there is a good chance I wouldn’t leave my socks on the floor or dirty dishes in the sink.

I don’t think there’s a word for what I have, nor a term with which I feel comfortable.  My office - to the extent that I have one - goes where I go.  It resides online and in my head.  It sits in the car with me, on the train and on an airplane.  My office sleeps when I do, wakes with me as well.

We choose to have an office so that we may have a work-life balance.  But self-employed professionals and knowledge workers do not have a work-life balance; their work is their life, and their life is a part of their work.  It’s like saying you have an “eating-digesting balance;” sometimes you eat, sometimes you digest.  but it’s all part of the same organic whole, the yin-yang that makes up who you are.

I get that we all like a place to keep our stuff; it gives us a means of identifying ourselves to others.  We gain a sense of place, of grounding, by doing so.  But true mobility does not come from having a home office; all that does it tether us to a place, just like having an office in a downtown high-rise tethers us to a place.  Sit in a corner office, sit in your spare bedroom, sit at your kitchen table . . . it’s all the same save the rent.

So once again - I do not have a home office.  I am my office, and it goes where I go.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Home Office. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.