It was lovely to wake up to a completely quiet house this morning. Most of the time, Mr. Ladd works from home, and can be heard on a conference call or plinking away on the keyboard, but there is now an office space in Phoenix that he can work from whenever he wants. So 2-3 times a week he conducts business from there.
While I generally love the time spent together and flexibility of him working from home, it's nice to have our own domains a few times a week too. And, at the risk of sounding like a 50's housewife once again, I have missed the whole "Honey, I'm home!" aspect of him working from an office. Even when I was teaching back in Wisconsin, and he was commuting to and from Chicago he was always home after me, and it's nice to have a definitive end to the workday and sit down for some dinner together. Since we weren't both in the same house all day, we tended to have more to talk about. It's kind of weird asking someone how their day was when you saw them all day and heard half of their work conversations by proxy.
With both of us now working from home, the separation between work and home can be hard. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely more pros than cons to working from home in my opinion, but sometimes it's hard to be "done working" for the day when you never "left work."
I think our culture in general has a hard time being done working, especially with the rise in mobile technologies that keep us connected to our work at all times. While many of us do it, I don't know anyone that feels particularly good about staying late every night or working through the weekend. So much of our self-worth seems tied up in our careers. Feeling guilty about relaxing and time spent with friends and family really shouldn't be the norm in my opinion, but it's hard with financial pressures and demands on our time constantly increasing. There has been a lot in the media lately about this whole work/home balancing act, but I'm wondering what you are thinking. How do you draw the line between work and home? What do you do to "turn it off" at the end of the day?
