I've been working remotely for more than 4 years, and switching to a remote position was the best decision ever. In this article, I came up with a short list of reasons why you should consider to stop going to the office every day.
Note, all of the things I am describing here may be different for you at your company or country. However, these are pretty common as far as I know.
I started thinking about working from home 3 weeks before my son was born. Here is a tweet from back then:
https://twitter.com/AlexeyBalchunas/status/397833666346246144
Why? Very simple, I wanted to spend time with my family as much as possible. Right now, I have 2 children and I have seen almost every single important moment of their lives (that happened so far) by myself: first poops, first steps, first everything. Basically, I see how they grow, and I can be involved in their lives in the way I could have never been when sitting in an office. I'm almost always available for any help my wife or children need.
A month after I started working from home full time, my wife and I thought:
What the heck is holding us from going to a tropical place for this winter?
And, that's what we did. This opened the whole new chapter in our lives. The first trip took 6 months. The second one was 9 months. Now, we actually do not live in Russia, we mostly stay in Thailand, enjoying the climate and beaches.
During these 4 years, we traveled mostly around Asia: Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, China, Malasia. We stayed for 1-6 months mostly in each country. Also, we did a small month long trip around Europe. Which office job could allow all of that?
Therefore, I actually do not use my paid leave days for the usual vacation trips: there is just no need for that. In turn, I can spend these days off much more efficiently by taking several occasional 1-5 days long chill outs during the year.
When I worked in Moscow, I spent about 1.5 hours commuting to the office and back. Some of my colleagues spent crazy 3 hours every day going to work and back!
Currently, my commuting time to work takes about 1 minute (or 5 minutes if I forgot where I put my laptop last night). These extra 7.5 hours per week that I got by not going to the office is a huge load of time I am using for good (e.g. for writing this article)!
To be honest, I had never thought about this one before I actually started working remotely. You can get A LOT more income by optimizing your taxes.
Now, I'm talking about Russia here, not sure about other countries, but I think this is applicable to many.
When you work at a company in Russia, you usually pay 47% taxes. In turn, when you work remotely, it's very common to work as a contractor. To do so, you may be an entrepreneur (Индивидуальный Предприниматель), which very easily can shrink your taxes to 6%-7%. With minor trick and tweaks, you can optimize it to be 1% or even less! Personally, I paid $270 for the whole 2018 year (see this if you're from Russia).
Also, if you do not spend more than 6 months in a country during the year, you might not even pay any taxes at all. I don't bother to use this hack, because my taxes are very low anyway, so it's not worth the time to perform such optimizations.
With all of that, you can generally expect same or better income working remotely than doing so at an office (if we compare jobs of the same type).
Frankly, I've never worked in the cubicles, and my office at Yandex in Moscow was just amazing, one of the best ones.
However, remote work gives you so much freedom in this area, you just cannot underestimate that.
Well, most of the time I do my job from home, but I do go to other places sometimes because it helps me to boost my performance. It also happens so, that I just have to work from some other place because of some conditions that do not depend on me. At least I have a choice, whereas at an office job I'd just skip several hours since I was not at the office.
Here is a short set of places where I worked (that I remember): home, car, lots of cafes, parks, queue lines (for example, while waiting for a doctor at a hospital), outside of my home on a bench, etc. Basically, any place with access to the Internet. For example, I've discovered an amazing cafe with cats, I might work there once next week (YES, just because I can):
Also, take 2 minutes to look at this awesome guy who built the office of his dream.
Important note: working with a laptop on a beach is a bad idea.
In this article, I've described the advantages of working remotely as an employee. However, it's worth writing an article explaining why you as a business owner should definitely consider making your company fully remote. This is what I might mention in the near future.
Comments, likes, and shares are highly appreciated. Cheers! ❤️