Most of us would long to be able to work from home. There are plenty of benefits in telecommuting beyond being able to attend to your daily rounds of email tennis whilst still wearing your pyjamas. A recent survey from carinsurance.org showed that in the US:
- The reduction in greenhouse gasses because of the amount of telecommuters in the US was equivalent to the reduction that would be made if the whole population of New York state suddenly deciding to start working from home
- 80 percent of employees who work from home feel they have a better work-life balance than they did when they worked in an office, and 75 percent say they eat healthier
- There’s a ten to twenty percent increase in productivity when employees telecommute
- On average, an employee saves nearly 109 hours per year in commute time if they work remotely
Despite these benefits, the culture of telecommuting is still not being embraced. One of the many reasons against allowing remote working stated by companies who are reluctant to allow their employees to work from home is that they are fearful that their workers will simply spend all their time on the internet, texting or phoning friends or using social media. The actual truth is that people who work in the office spend a lot of their time doing just that! The small detail that they are ‘in the office’ gives the impression that they are working when, for a decent percentage of their time, they are most definitely not.
There are others ways of cracking the working from home opportunity, and two people who have done just that are Kristen Bicknell and Marc Kennedy, who are both professional online poker players, and both of whom were profiled recently at Full Tilt Poker’s blog.
Both have dedicated set ups in their own lounges. Kristen has a 27-inch iMac, and Marc has a PC that’s built purely for poker. They both manage to grind out 200,000-400,000 hands of poker a month, which takes dedication, to say the least. For both of them, messing around on the internet or texting their pals is not an option – if they don’t play, they don’t get paid. In the interview Kristen states that she sometimes ends up playing on 24 different poker tables all at the same time!
Both Kristen and Mark prove that you can make a living working from home, but both have been forced to quit their day jobs in order to do so. One day perhaps, companies and bosses will listen to the truths then understand that working from home does not equate to job-shirking. Until then, If you’re determined to work from home, grinding out poker hand after poker hand is definitely one option!
About Carson Derrow
