Working From Home and the Changes It Brings
/Hi guys.....so due to Covid most of us were forced to work from home. I've been working from home for 2 years now and I love it but most people aren't used to this so it took some time to handle the transition. I too had to make some changes and one of them was to close my office. I've had an office for the past 15 years and although I work from home my husband didn't so he used the office the most. I like going to my clients versus having them come to me.
With Covid, it took us a while but as we got busier with our coaching sessions, and as more and more clients wanted and to some extent needed to keep their appointments so that they could vent or talk to someone or to just get help handling the transition of working at home, we knew deep down that things were changing and how we ran our business was changing. With that an office is not an expense that is necessary or even required because we can now do all of our sessions online from home, especially as our programs are already digital and our clients, who were once a bit tentative about doing online coaching, now had no choice.
Digital programs and learning was now the norm and clients were more comfortable with digital learning and although this was easy for me, working from home was a short transition for my husband. We were now thinking of giving up our office and so the journey begins. When you're making a change and part of you wants to and part doesn't then that battle can make you sad. You're making a change that changes your future. I took a while to start organsing to close the office but then I posted all of the office items on 2-3 Whatsapp groups that I'm on and I got such quick responses on the sale of the furniture, it was, surprising.
What I realised is that others now had to work from home so they also had to set up an office space in their homes, they were quick to grasp the opportunity to buy the items for those new work from home spaces. The sales are going through and it seems so final and to a point it is. I'm sad but also excited about the future. Every change brings a level of trepidation, uncertainty and excitement. I went through all of those emotions from this simple change, so I know others are going through even more or worse, but we know that nothing lasts forever and change is constant.
By the end of the month the office will be no more. We've organised our perspective office corners in the different rooms and we've basically settled down without much difficulty. With the social distancing it makes more sense to do all of our interviews and sessions remotely. Thank God, technology has all that we need to run our businesses remotely and we are also looking to go paperless as well. That will mean doing my note taking digitally.
I'm also setting up apps to be able to write my notes using a stylus, as I like to write versus typing, plus I don't type fast enough and I want to ensure I have notes for each client without having paper cluttering up my space. Having to set up notebooks for each client and store those took up a majority of our office space and as we will now be working from home, we don't have the space to archive anything, but I will no longer have to if everything is saved digitally. The only thing we will have to do is get larger cloud space for all the new digital notes.
I hope we can all accept change and develop a new way of thinking and working. The pandemic has certainly opened up our creativity and way of thinking and doing our work.
Regards,
Gail (Gafra)
