Telecommuting as everything in life has its pros and cons.
For employees, the most important pros are:
- You do save your commute time –
two hours a day that you save (depending on how long your commute is and how long it takes you to put make-up on every morning) can take you a long way. This adds up to three months saved over a year — that is a whole year saved over four years! Just think what you could do if you had a whole year to use up.
- You save your grief over getting out in a cold morning, shuffling snow, warming your car up (if you live in cold enough areas) and having three mugs of coffee at work just to get yourself together after your early morning experience, and that is day after day, after day.
- You save your nerves and do not have to waste your life on “that idiot” on the road (he/she, by the way, may be thinking the same about you).
- You can use the time you saved to:
- get more work done
- give more time to your loved ones
- give more time to yourself
- start doing something you have always been dreaming about and never had time to do
- volunteer and make the world a better place.
For now, let’s say it varies whether you save money or not. Theoretically you do — less gas, less $5 coffee in your life, less ‘casual clothing’ from Nordstrom. But then, often you start making less money, and often your utility expenses go up significantly — to heat up your “home office” in the winter in New England (that is where I am) with ever rising oil prices is not a joke. You can not always deduct your increased “work related” expenses. We will talk about different cases on whether “your dog can be a tax deductible expense” in the next posts.
[...] On Telecommuting Lessons Learned, Questions Answered and yet to be Answered, What’s next? « Pros for employees: Why you would want to telecommute [...]