Silicon Insider: Working at Home

June 7, 2007 — -- OK, enough with the fantasies, let's talk turkey about what it's really like to work at home. I've done it now for a quarter of a century.

In 1981, I quit my job as a business reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News. I was young, cocky and frustrated with writing too many quarterly financial stories and not enough creative features. Oddly, the paper punished my temerity by giving me a promotion — and I spent the next glorious year as an investigative reporter, coming and going as I pleased, chasing down the really big stories.

Unfortunately, there are only so many big scandals floating under the surface of a place like Silicon Valley at any one time. And so, after a year, I found myself sitting in my 1969 VW bug in the Merc parking lot, holding a cardboard box filled with all of my office possessions.

I was 27 years old, I had $200 in the world, and zero job prospects. Both my friends and my professional peers thought I was completely out of my mind -- and I didn't necessarily disagree.

Yet, I somehow survived. Indeed, over the last 25 years, I've only had a real job -- as editor of Forbes ASAP magazine -- for a total of three years. For the rest of the time I have worked at home as a freelancer.

During those years my wife (she's a painter, so she hasn't had a steady job either) and I have lived in a converted chicken coop, bought gas with quarters, and I have driven as much as 75 miles just to pick up a check instead of waiting for it to get mailed.

But we've also been comparatively wealthy, bought houses and property, driven fancy new cars, and traveled the world. And though I've done some really humiliating scut writing jobs -- press releases, annual reports, brochure copy, ghostwriting, etc. -- I've also been free to do the kind of writing I've always dreamed of: books, newspaper columns, magazine essays, even a television miniseries.

I've given speeches around the world, been on the scene at the birth of some of the world's most famous companies, hosted three TV series, and won a number of writing awards.

Had I stayed a daily newspaper reporter at a mid-sized daily, I likely would have never known any of these experiences. On the contrary, I'm now at the age of those folks I saw in the newsroom when I was a cub reporter, the men and women who had once worked on the big stories but were now reduced to night police radio, obituaries and school district meetings.

But most important, despite all of those warnings I got from my peers (not to mention the little voice inside my head) saying that the life of a freelancer was too volatile, and too unpredictable, to make a permanent career, the truth is that I have managed to continuously earn a living during all of those intervening years. Meanwhile, the people who warned me about my fate have, to a person, been laid off from at least two jobs. And now many of them are fighting to survive in that ever-shrinking world of daily newspapers.

Rules You Need to Know

So what have I learned from all of those years working at home? Well, a lot of things you probably aren't going to read in any other article on the subject. Call it the real-life rules of working at home, whether you are a freelancer, contractor, or merely a corporate telecommuter.

Discipline matters more than technique -- I've known a lot of men and women who have opted out of the corporate world and chosen instead to live by their wits. I've known still more (especially in recent years) who have taken advantage of the opportunity to keep their jobs but work primarily at home. A lot of that first group were far more talented reporters than me, and a few were even better writers. But in the end, there was almost no correlation between their success and their talent. Most of the best gave up, while others, far less gifted, soldiered on to great success.

The bottom line is this: Go ahead and read all of those articles about how to set up your home office, what kind of copier you should buy, and how to organize your life with DayTimers and sticky notes. But all that counts is that you deliver the goods. And by that I mean: Figure out what your average monthly cost is to survive, then do whatever it takes -- crappy contract work, monthly retainers from jerks, selling blood -- to cover that nut. Only after that can you start living out your dream.

Poetry only comes after you've paid the bills. Fall short and yours is the fate of Mr. Micawber: bankruptcy, starvation and the poor house … or, realistically, taking the first rotten office job you can find.

If you can't do that, if you can't escape the romantic notion that somehow you can live entirely off your art, give up now. The rule is: stomach first, then immortality.

The same holds true for corporate jobs from home. It may sound like fun to sit in your garden and answer your office e-mail. But keep in mind, the mere act of working at home almost always puts a surcharge on your work of about 20 percent -- that is, you will have to earn your good fortune (and keep your legitimacy) by doing about one-fifth more work than you did at the office.

Sure, that sounds easy. But life at home is different than life at the office. There's the Fed Ex guy ringing the doorbell, and the leaf blower next door, and the kids coming home from school (and, since you're home, you get to run most of the errands, too). And don't forget all of that Internet surfing, and your favorite talk radio show, and the distraction of the 24 news channels you turn on one day and never again turn off.

The Distractions

Can you handle that and still do the work? There's a video of me, when my kids were young, sitting in a rented house in Oregon on vacation. Barney is on the television, my boys are having a pillow war all around me, my wife is vacuuming, and I am on the couch with my laptop writing a New York Times column, oblivious to the noise, flying objects and general chaos around me. Somehow, over the years, I learned how to focus -- despite almost having flunked out of college because I was incapable of studying while wearing music headphones. Can you do that?

Get the Work Done -- The classic office job is 9 to 5. That's possible because you leave your normal life and enter into the hermetic world created by your employer. There, the boss attempts (often fruitlessly) to minimize any outside distractions to your work.

Working at home is 24/7/365, not because you actually work all of those hours -- on the contrary, it usually takes less actual work time to get a job done at home -- but because there are so many potential distractions that you literally have to be prepared to devote time -- day or night, workday, weekend or holiday -- to get the job done.I typically write this column around midnight Wednesday nights because I can focus better after the family has gone to bed. I co-authored the "Virtual Corporation," sharing the house with a 4-year-old and a newborn, by working between feedings and Gymboree.

I wrote the proposal for my first book while watching the Super Bowl, and finished the proposal for my most recent book, "Bill & Dave," on Thanksgiving Day night. I filed my African columns last summer from a hotel lobby in Windhoek, Namibia, and my U.K. columns from an Internet café in a coffee shop in Oxford.

At the office, you can always find excuses for missed deadlines by blaming all of those meetings you have to attend, or that other project the boss dumped on you at the last minute. At home, as far as the world is concerned, you have no excuses -- not when everyone else pictures you sleeping in late, sunning yourself on the veranda, and catching the opening day matinee of the latest blockbuster movie.

No, you've got to do the work, even if you have to stay up until 4 a.m., or work in the back of the car while leaving on vacation, or on the afternoon on Christmas Day, because no one else cares about your fate. And when you get that work done, you'd better get started on the next job, because, especially if you are a freelancer, no one is paying you to sit around loafing at the office.

Get Out of the 'Office'

Stay in Touch -- You don't appreciate how much the office structures your life until you leave it. You may think you are "a morning person" or that you have an inner clock, but in fact, like those test patients put in deep caves, left to your own devices your circadian rhythms will start going off track in about a week.

The worst writing experience of my life was authoring my Apple book, "Infinite Loop." It was not bad just because of the subject matter, but because all of the other demands on my life reduced me to writing the book from 11 p.m to about 4 a.m. every night for almost two years.

Let me tell you, at 4 a.m., even your cat abandons you. Raccoons and skunks stare at you as you wander out to get the morning paper. You become a stranger to the daylight world. I realized one day that I had become the crazy unshaven guy in the neighborhood who goes out to the mailbox in his bath robe at 3 in the afternoon as schoolkids are walking home.

How do you keep this from happening? Cultivate your network. If you're a code writer, schedule regular lunches or breakfasts with your peers. I was part of a local writers breakfast that met for 10 years in a San Jose greasy spoon. Maintain your membership in professional societies. The demands of home work will constantly untether you from normal life. Develop attachments that keep you engaged.

No matter what you think you are, you are an entrepreneur. Ignore what it says on your business card. The day you move home to work, you become the CEO of your own personal enterprise. That may sound impressive, but what it really means is that, like all entrepreneurs, you have do everything from billing to cleaning the toilets to marketing the product to making copies of your receipts.

This is especially true if you are a contractor or freelancer. I've known too many men and women who were more than capable of doing the work, but couldn't bring themselves to go out and pitch their services, or type up an invoice or schmooze a bookkeeper to get a check cut early. If you can't do that, then stay at your corporate job and let the infrastructure take care of all that.

And don't think that if you are merely working from home for a big employer that you are exempt from this other work. On the contrary, the only difference is that you have to do your selling inside the company. Otherwise, trust me, they will forget you at headquarters. And you know what that means when the next downturn comes …

Not exactly like it's portrayed in those happy "Work at Home!" articles, is it? In truth, real life working at home is to those glamour stories as real life home offices (empty coffee cups, magazines on the floor, overstuffed waste baskets) are to the photos that illustrate those articles.

So, given all of the reasons not to work at home, after 25 years, would I give it all up for a nice comfortable desk job in a climate-controlled office?

Not a chance. Good times and bad, it's been my career to make, not some boss's who cares nothing of my dreams. And in the end, it's the dreams that make work worthwhile.

Tad's Tab: The latest from the teen tech trenches, from Michael Malone's 15-year-old son, Tad Malone:

TAD'S TAB: One of the joys of the blogosphere is tripping over something that could only be possible with the Internet. For example, a man in Germany decided to attach a camera to the collar of his cat, Mr. Lee. It turns out that Mr. Lee's daily activities range from joining a gathering of cats under a car to a run-in with a snake. See all of his adventures at http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/index.htm

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone, once called the Boswell of Silicon Valley, is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is best-known as the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNEWS.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.